In fact, this is so dismembered I’m not even sure it is, or used to be, an umbrella. But never mind. It makes a difference from depicting the dead city of Manchester more generally. And does reflect what was a quite windy day.
The sun was definitely out this afternoon. Spring feels like it’s in the post, and once it does break out in full I doubt many people will be staying at home, whatever the powers say. I think it is a birch tree at the bottom of the garden that’s broken out this rash of catkins since I was last up there.
“Whaddya mean, in nine and a half years you’ve never had a pig on this blog thing of yours?”
“Nope, never.”
“I wanna be FIRST. (Oink.)”
I had candidates for today that were better pictures, maybe, but I really wanted to see people’s faces today. And no, I don’t mean masked ones.
This is the exterior of the Alliance Manchester Business School, built for a vast amount of money and now going completely to waste, along with the rest of the campus; monuments to a time past, now standing in a city of the dead. If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have you been to Manchester lately? Nothing has happened there since October. A sense of rot is setting in, and if you (like the publicly cheery city council) think that ‘recovery’ is all just a matter of a wave of the legislative wand, I say that’s optimistic, at best.
These are little light bulbs, surely; strung up by Whomever to anticipate of the coming of spring. Will this be one of those years where it arrives and stays, or one where we don’t see it until May? The fun thing is, in Britain, you never can be sure.
Life plods on, with little to do for entertainment except watch the local birdlife. The gulls (you can’t really call them seagulls: here, we’re about as far as you can get from the sea in northern England) seemed this afternoon to be making an intervention, for one side or the other, in the ongoing pigeon-duck war. This one uses a street light as a vantage point, moments before swooping down to pick up some spoils.
Ten full days have passed without a single human appearing on this blog, in any form. Here are two — one frozen in time, idealised, commercialised. The other mobile, but faceless, distant, dehumanised. I can interact with neither. And the trouble is, I’m not evern sure what is better, any more.
It was about 12ºC today, compared with -2ºC on Saturday. The sun shone for a couple of hours in the afternoon and, just for a moment, there were intimations of spring. This lady appears to be enjoying it, albeit from behind glass.
I wouldn’t call this winter harsh, but it has been cold, at least by local standards. Yes, I’m sure those of you who live in places like Montana or Trondheim would laugh at our definition of real winter, but hey, that’s a maritime, Gulf Stream climate for you.
And the creature? Well, a face perhaps. It’s certainly got two eyes, and a pendulous, possibly melting face.
