Reyner Street is a back alley if ever there was one. But it looked good today. I doubt the establishment pictured has seen much business lately, and I managed to obscure its phone number, too. Apologies to them.
Joe and I were supposed to be going to see The Who tonight — live in Leeds no less — first postponed from just under a year ago, but now cancelled altogether. Another little pleasure denied us. So in the absence of anything actually happening, here’s some abandoned furniture, on a slope. UPDATE; Clare informs me that this is not a lost object; in fact a number of them have been set up in various places in the Calder Valley, as another place for book-swapping. Lift up the top of the seat, and the books are inside, it seems.
Going into Manchester gives my step count a boost and makes me feel like I’m doing something for the students, many of whom have travelled a very long way to be there and still been imprisoned for months on end in halls like the George Kenyon Building (a row of its windows forming the top of this image). But it’s depressing, all the same. In places, the rot has firmly set in. “How will you change the world?” this billboard asks. The question is an ever more pertinent one.
Another day working at home, of such excitement that I feel moved to document only this event: possibly the first time our exterior back windows have been cleaned in recorded history. But then again they are a long way up in the air, and we didn’t have a 40 feet-long pole (that can squirt water) just lying around. But you never know what you will find if you look long enough.
I put up this photo because I love the backdrop of the houses on Calder Holmes Park. A proper football landscape if ever there was one. I put this up also because of how it wound up certain people when I posted it on a Facebook group earlier. One of the most iniquitous things about the year that we have lived through is how it has wiped out the idea that any ‘ordinary people’ might be able to make their own judgments about what is healthy and safe, and what is not. Well, lockdown lovers everywhere — yes, there are certain people who are back out there, living their lives.
Whomever made an effort to build this small square of concrete and stick a basketball hoop at one end of it obviously had lofty ambitions for the health of the youth of Dodd Naze estate. Now it stands forlorn and forgotten: no more than a third of a mile from my house as the crow flies yet until today I had no idea it was there. But that also means it hasn’t featured on here before, and as the second half of the blog’s tenth year opens with us still in (nominal) lockdown; new scenes are precious.
This little graveyard perches on the hillside, across the valley from my house. With a powerful enough pair of binoculars, it might even be possible to see this diorama from our bedroom window. But until today, it had gone unseen. There’s nothing else to do but explore these nearby hidden corners.
In fact, this is so dismembered I’m not even sure it is, or used to be, an umbrella. But never mind. It makes a difference from depicting the dead city of Manchester more generally. And does reflect what was a quite windy day.
I had candidates for today that were better pictures, maybe, but I really wanted to see people’s faces today. And no, I don’t mean masked ones.
