I went to two football matches today. In the evening, one at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, a vast construction of steel and glass and with all these escalators that make it look like an airport. In the morning, here — Hackney Marshes, with none of those things. I have to say, I preferred the morning.
This trip started in London on 6th January and ends here too. But it’s time to go home.
Landed at 5am at Heathrow. Just over two hours later I was here, looking for a cup of tea, which was surprisingly difficult to find in Leicester Square at this early time in the day. But one could still enter the casino, which two guys in the middle distance are seriously considering. And so ends the monstrously long month that has been January 2025: did it really only have 31 days this year? I don’t believe it.
You thought you were leaving Hebden Bridge today? Naaah. Ain’t gonna happen, not at 9.45am, not at any other point either (though there were unsubstantiated rumours that the 13:48 may have run, probably to get some people home — that was it, though). Just as well I gave myself three days to get to Heathrow, huh. Let’s try again tomorrow.
This was never going to be the busiest or most retail-friendly Friday market day of the year, but even so, it was particularly absent of life today. Anyone who wants to pick up a yellow and blue plastic crane, though — here it is. Or was.
Clear skies are not always a feature of the time of year, so let’s take the chance to photograph this impending conjunction tonight, although surely the Moon is going to move even closer (apparently, anyway) to Venus before the weekend. A fleeting contrail decides to butt its oar in, too.
Until about 2.30pm on Christmas Day I had not anticipated spending December 26th in Sheffield, but at that point an acquaintance told me of a spare ticket for a coach trip to go there and see the football (Sheffield United 0-2 Burnley, in case you were interested), and so it came to pass. In fact there were quite a few games in the area postponed or abandoned because of fog, which was certainly the main weather feature of the day. This is one of those shots that looks as if I’ve post-processed it and turned it monochrome, but that’s not the case: this is really what Sheffield city centre looked like at about 1.30pm.
Attempts to create a new tradition by running a bunch of tractors and trucks, decorated in lights, through the centre of Hebden Bridge on 24th December were greeted by this photographer as an opportunity to depict something different on the 14th Christmas Eve to grace these virtual pages. Did he (I) really see the point, though? Well, not really. But it did draw a reasonably sized crowd.
Some pictures get on here because they are exactly the shot I wanted to capture when pressing the shutter. This is not one of those pictures. Until I uploaded it later and had a look I was assuming it hadn’t worked out; I was just trying to take a shot of these two mannequins in a shop window with mirrors instead of faces. Why anyone would design a mannequin in such a way I don’t know, as I thought it looked kinda creepy; hence my taking the photo.
But then the trees over the road crowd in, reflected in the glass of the shop window, plus, is that a self-potrait of the photographer captured in the lower part of the parallel dimension that seems to have opened up where that face should have been? Ghostly….. Or, possibly, just a bad photo, but here it is anyway.
The chemical plant which spreads for many acres around Low Moor railway station is one of my favourite places, at least for photography. Particularly at night, it looks magnificent: like the setting for Brazil or Blade Runner or some other sci-fi dystopia. (It looks interesting from a distance too, as suggested the last time it appeared on here, on September 1st.) And there are never any people seen there. In a few decades’ time perhaps the whole planet will be run from such places. Perhaps it already is.
When Clare first looked at this photo as I uploaded and worked on it last night, she thought at first the backdrop was one of stormy skies; but it’s not, it’s the woodland up the side of the valley. The reason that is not catching the sun, and the houses are, is that at this time of year around 2.20pm is the point in the day where the sun is already starting to go down behind the valley wall. Here, you get what you can in the winter.
Being 42 