It’s early yet, but the world turns, and we have to start getting things ready to put into the soil. These potatoes will then sit in there for 10 months or so and, usually, we just dig up about the same number as we put in, of about the same size. So maybe we should just eat them now. But who knows, maybe this is the year they will run riot.
I haven’t had three days in a row of Manchester pictures since February 2020 — what happened after that, I wonder. But today’s the latest burst of two-in-a-row, and with good light to boot. Manchester’s Chinatown is, in no way comparable to, say, San Francisco’s in scale (not to mention anywhere in China) but in European terms it’s sizeable enough. At this point it is possible to imagine one is far away.
The students are back — fortunately — and campus was busy today. All the same I want to epitomise the day with this unpeopled shot. If even recycling bins, and yellow warning signs, can look pretty, then you know the light is something special.
There have been a few of these down the years. If the owner — or the parent of the owner — wants to retrieve it, it’s up in Nutclough Woods, near the water race. Though it’s always puzzled me how someone can just lose one boot or shoe, at least, when one is out and about.
Asserting the “Right to Repair” electronic items is in the news (at least, the sort of news that I read); but largely it’s still cheaper to buy another one. We call places like this “recycling centres” these days but one has to wonder just how many of these items do, in the end, get reused.
Is it too early to be in the pub on a Saturday afternoon? When the weather outside is as grim as it was today, then no. The welcome inside was much warmer.
The endless building and rebuilding of Manchester does not seem to have particularly slowed down as a result of the last two years of bollocks, although seeing as no one has any money any more except Mark Zuckerberg it seems, I don’t know who’s going to inhabit all these new buildings. This scaffold tunnel rises over my walking route to work and I’ve been passing through it in both directions for some months, thinking it would make a decent picture; this evening it gets its chance.
The guys give it the “mean and moody, but still cute” look, as if they are modelling for the blackbird version of a Hugo Boss ad. A shame this one is a little out of focus, but I couldn’t persuade them to repeat the pose, sorry.
It’s 2/2/22, and also Lunar New Year (or Chinese New Year, Tet, whatever other term you want to use). It seemed appropriate to depict this today even if I suspect I am a day late. Manchester has a large Chinese population (students or otherwise) and the city centre is decorated accordingly. I believe I should say at this point: xīn nián kuài lè .
Serious combat in the Railway this evening. Somehow black and white photography seems appropriate for this subject matter.
Being 42 