We are all starting to lose it. Why is he photographing this puddle? More to the point, why am I photographing him photographing this puddle? Which one of us is losing it more?
The sign is the added touch that will roughly date this scene for ever more.
This being a British summer, the balmy heat of Wednesday and Thursday has gone, and it’s raining again. It will do this until it feels like being different.
Old Town sits on the hills to the north of Hebden Bridge. In Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579, the first atlas of England and Wales ever published, it’s called The Old towne…. so it’s been around for a while.
What’s been lacking over the last three months is not just variety of scene, but variety of event. There’s nothing happening, no parties, no shows, no sports, no conviviality. We just plod on.
At least there is still variety of light. The morning, indeed the whole day, was a beautiful one. This becomes the first pre-8am shot since I was still commuting to Manchester at the beginning of February. But this one is taken within yards of my house, and despite the glorious weather was one of only two photos I felt moved to take today.
I accept that we are not strictly trapped, whether at home or in the Calder valley itself: but with nothing open out there except a few shops (and by no means all), it’s still house arrest in all but name. I agree there are worse places to be stuck but this afternoon and evening I felt like my head was going to pop unless this ends soon. But there are too many people who like this situation — profit from it, even. These are the ones who will drag us all down.
This is very Hebden Bridge. Strictly a one-person only library, however — which I guess at the present time is seen as healthy.
Sunday. Nominally a day of rest. Time to take in a bit of nature and contemplate the meaning of life, or whatever else takes one’s fancy. Time to bag my first urban county top, hence why I dragged the family to Derby today, making this the city’s third appearance on the blog. But a good day was had. If only the pubs would open.
The cobbles that surface Sackville Street in Hebden Bridge are classic, but whether they are practical, ask the people that live there. I was just passing. Having reached the ‘bored stupid’ stage of lockdown myself, I wonder whether the painting in evidence here is recent, done by a local householder who has been on furlough for the last three months. But I guess the work looks older than that.
‘Paul’s Fresh Fish (from Fleetwood. Lancashire)’ has been present at Hebden Bridge’s Thursday market every week for years: the van appeared on the blog way back in December 2012 (a picture I always quite liked due to its sense of late December desolation and some decent lighting). He missed a couple of weeks in April, but clearly there is too much tuna in the Irish Sea off Fleetwood to sell on, so he’s back now.
There continues to just about be enough visual interest around my locality to keep this all going. Who knows how long it will be before Authority deigns to say that we can not just travel to other places, but stay there, and explore. Until then, let’s fake it. The thing I like about this shot is that there’s little sense of scale. This could be a substantial island just off the coast, with cliffs behind that are hundreds of feet high. Or, just a little rock in a stream, well lit. You decide.
As we wait for the various right-wing journalists, lobbyists for the tobacco industry and corporate executives who now hold positions of power in this country to do something, anything, to help get us out of this state of incarceration — I go on a walk, look at the meadows, and don’t hold my breath.
Being 42 