At least the sun came out this afternoon, its last rays of the day illuminating the skyscrapers that have grown up recently in the Deansgate area of the city. Old timers would not recognise some parts of Manchester now the years-long construction boom is starting to top out.
The weather’s been fairly disgusting for several days now, and today was no exception. One of those days when the term “Sun”day is simply incorrect. I dislike this time of year: it always seems grey and cruddy, and it’s still getting darker. Roll on the Solstice.
The last morning of November, and I pull duty again on the 6:32 service to Manchester. The castle battlements at the bottom of Keighley Road look suitably dramatic in the moonlight (and streetlight).
This is not my car. But I do sympathise with the owner, as this is taken near my house and they must live nearby (going on how often I see this car). Under such circumstances I too might have a mushroom cloud coming out of my head. Then again that’s one reason I don’t own a car.
This burst of wan and vapid sunlight is about as much as we got today. Not long after this, foul grey rain set in and did not let up all day. Winter is coming… we are in the late November doldrums of the year and as usual, I just hope to get to the end of the semester (mid-December) without any major grief.
I claim that this blog is apolitical but it is hard to avoid touching on certain subjects sometimes. Why does this kind of thing still happen in a world where there are enough resources to lift everyone — and certainly, at least, everyone in a very rich country like Germany, and a very rich part of it, like Bavaria — out of poverty? We become inured to it, it becomes normalised, until we don’t even see it any more. Maybe that’s all I can say with this photo: here it is, still.
It’s becoming harder to crank myself up in the mornings to get the 06:32 — best train it might be, when I need to pull an early start at work, but it’s now still dark even when it deposits me in Manchester city centre, a state of affairs which will last until into February. Some places have the lights on at that time, but by no means all. This should be the last of a run of a couple of months spent only in England, but I’m off somewhere else for a few days tomorrow.
Yesterday’s sunset presaged a bright, sunny day, but I was inside for most of it. A brief foray out this morning did at least offer the opportunity to get my tribute in for the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War 1. Four days late, but the poppies are still in formation.
The immediate vicinity… being that region around my house (not quite visible on this shot)… which I did not leave today, at least not in any meaningful photographic way. The red lighting is explainable by being under the traffic lights at this point: one could get a green-tinted version of the same shot if one so desired.
Not actually a third monochrome shot in a row, although it might as well be on a dull, grey November day. Nearly three years after Mytholmroyd (along with much of the rest of the Calder Valley) was sunk beneath more than two metres of water on 26th December 2015, the stable door is finally being bolted — so we have been told — thanks to massive flood defence works. These pile drivers and giant screwdrivers currently occupy half the carriageway of the main road in the village, and at the moment their main effect is to have created a year-long traffic jam along the A646.
