In case you hadn’t noticed I am becoming rather tired of schlepping into Manchester on a regular basis — not work particularly, but the city, its endless building sites and general crowdedness. But that’s one reason I’m taking a sabbatical from January. So this will change, at least for the first part of 2019. For now, there are still some early mornings to be done. Note the ‘Queen Bee’ scuplture inside this, the Queens Arcade.
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.
A full two-day weekend and somehow I still feel like this little girl. Unfortunately I’m too big to be carried around in a rucksack these days.
This wall has been around for a while, separating the beer garden of the White Lion (the oldest building in Hebden Bridge) from the river. When this wall was built, or last rebuilt anyway, the supply of stones must have been a tad short that day. Whomever this headstone was ‘Sacred to the Memory of…’, let’s hope their spirits aren’t still hanging around to get pissed off.
Manchester’s a big city and I only tend to walk through a narrowly-defined part of it when following the usual beat. Got off this track today however, and here I am on the banks of the Bridgewater Canal, built in 1761 and generally reckoned to be Britain’s first canal in the modern sense. A roaring success economically. And still operational — not long after I took this shot of the reflections under the bridge (not dating since 1761…) a barge chugged past. It’s a peaceful spot.
You want plums? Trust me, we have some. But seeing as we don’t have a transglobal shipping service to hand, our ability to export this year’s handsome plum crop is limited to putting them in plastic bags and giving them away for free down at the pub, or cooking them up into what preserves we can. Hence, plum ketchup. If you want the recipe it’s towards the end of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course and I followed it religiously, as one should always do with Delia’s guidance.
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).
Hebden Bridge, and my life, have their local personalities, some of whom have appeared multiple times on the blog. Mathilda, who is generally in charge of the territory around the junction of Valley Road and Victoria Road, is definitely one of them, and this is her fourth appearance on the blog in total. And a very attractive creature she is too.
Even after seven years, I do try not to repeat myself on here, and so a steady drip-feed of new places has become the means by which this is facilitated. Brighouse lies south of Halifax, not far away from my home but until today, undepicted on here. I was just passing through today however, and this factory caught my eye — it now functions, I believe, as an indoor climbing gym, perhaps for obvious reasons.
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 