After a week in northern Finland, where it was rather damp and chilly throughout, at least there was sunshine when I had to go into Manchester today and, well, spend most of the day inside teaching. But never mind. This is a rather mundane shot in the end, with a green splotch of flare on it, but I like the shadows and light.
Time for a change of scene. Finland was the first country other than the UK to appear on this blog, back in September 2011, but it’s been a while (August 2012 to be precise) since I was last here properly. But Oulu is the venue for this year’s ECIL conference, which starts tomorrow, so here I am. This is the second most northerly city I have ever been, after Tromsø. I had only a short time here this evening to wander around, but this hydropower dam, built across the mouth of the main river, was an eye-catching sight. I’m here until Thursday.
Another grim day of weather, describable, at one level, as ‘sunshine and showers’, but the sunshine was brief and brought no succour, while the showers were prolonged and heavy. Here, they coincide, but I was still getting very wet.
A foul day of weather today, definitely the worst since early April. A reasonably pleasant morning tricked us all into going out without the right gear, a mistake very apparent later on when we had to return home in foul and heavy rain, and with plenty of time to remind ourselves about just how poor is the drainage on Manchester’s streets.
Another early morning in Manchester, where there’s still just about sunlight at 7.15am, but not for much longer in the year. Light, and time, enough to ponder why this establishment can’t seem to decide whether there’s one L or two (or indeed, three) in its name. It wasn’t open at this time, in case you were wondering.
Day one of Welcome Week — and so there came a time in the day when we all needed to have a break. Picture taken through my office window, making it the third in the last five days to be taken through glass. It also adds to the increasing lead of the 3.00 – 3.55pm time slot when it comes to the overall pattern of shot timing (see the stats), a statistical blip I attribute mainly to football matches kicking off at 3pm. But that is just personal trivia.
Not an eventful day at all. I am hiding at home doing my best to get ready for things opening at uni in a couple of weeks’ time. Like these guys, but just on a bigger scale. The Nightjar bar sits below the Picture House and is one of those places that serves a dozen beers, all of them over-hopped and fruity, which is why these guys have beards.
I’m tired of the endless destruction and re-capitalisation being wreaked on Manchester city centre. The yellow hoardings on the right surround what is to become a boutique hotel, called “Brooklyn” — or actually “BKLYN”, clearly this was exactly the configuration of letters which wasn’t already a hashtag — scheduled to open some time in 2019 it seems.
However, an objective assessment of the local building stock leads me to conclude that Manchester is already well-supplied with hotels, boutique or otherwise. What it seems to lack are beds for a growing population of rough sleepers, that anyone who walks through the city centre on a regular morning basis will agree has increased substantially in the last year or so.
Welcome to your neo-liberal marketised future.
Felt obliged to put in an appearance in the big city for the first time (photographically) since signing off for my holiday on 3rd August. The weather brought melancholy in the morning, a feeling of autumn, though it did brighten up. The monochrome adds to the mood though really I only changed it to address a blob of anomalous colour (on the traffic sign in the background: near invisible here, a bright blue splodge in the original).
After a few weeks of getting out and about, my 49th birthday was spent at home in Hebden Bridge, and this is the weather that greeted it. I’m sure it’s not a metaphor for my advancing years…. but it was rather a wet blanket (OK, that’s a metaphor). Onward, anyway, onward with my fiftieth year on the planet (good grief). But the travelling is over for a little while.
Being 42 