With a determination not to repeat myself on this blog, if one had extended the timeline long enough into the future then I guess it was inevitable urinals would appear on here at some point. But with these being rather pretty ones, hey, here they are today. These are installed at a garden centre, if you’re wondering what the point is.
Joe’s great-grandmother — Clare’s gran, Alma Draper — is 90 today; happy birthday to her. That’s a lot of life. We attended the celebrations in Morecambe today. This picture shows them both standing up, incidentally — Joe is getting much taller, and Gran, well, she’s never been particularly tall.
I don’t often do shots of working life, usually because it’s neither very interesting, nor very appropriate to stick cameras in the face of people I’m working with. But today should be a work shot, to mark the end of a bloody busy week. And I get away with it today and I like it because though both these people, Liz and Doug, have played a relatively significant role in my life over the last whatever years they have never met before today. Doug’s second appearance on the blog (after this one), Liz’s first.
Despite an early chill today was a very pleasant day in Manchester, as they’ve all been this week. I’m calling it spring — feels like it’s here to me. This is another street scene, I know I do a lot of them but hey, I do work for a living, and being sat in an office all day is not going to give the same opportunities as my morning walk through the city. Who knows, maybe soon I will be able to picture it without roadworks. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Another pleasant, sunny afternoon, although a chilly one. I know this shot would be better without the signs, but hey, that’s the clutter of modern life for you.
It’s been a VERY uneventful few days. At least this guy gave me something unusual to depict; the Boxing Day floods have provoked some vague dredging of the Hebden Water. Dredging is fine, but it just pushes the flooding downstream; what one really needs is attention to how fast the rainwater falls off the watershed, prompting (ideally) the planting of trees and the development of other facilities that keep the water uphill rather than pushing it down the valleys, only that doesn’t meet the needs of rich landowners.
Well aware that this ain’t gonna win any astrophotography contests — its technical defects epitomised by the fact that the moon is (you can easily check) still nine days from full, but the crescent hasn’t come out here. But having spent the whole day indoors this really was a slow day for material, and with Orion striding over the town tonight in defiance of the usual light pollution I thought I would give it a go at making it the first recognisable constellation to appear on the blog.
Anybody who lives anywhere near me will know that we enjoyed a perfect spring day today — the sort where all of nature comes out to frolic. Look at the glint in this robin’s eye.
The Co-operative supermarket in Hebden Bridge has been closed since the morning of 26th December when, like the rest of the town centre, it was submerged under six feet of water. You still can’t go in but I took this shot through the door. The rebuilding continues and apparently it will be fully open again by next weekend.
Thought I’d better do a photo of Glasgow today even though I saw nothing of it except the hotel, the room where we did the viva examination, and a restaurant for lunch. Still, the view from the second of these, being up on the 11th floor of a building at the University of Strathclyde, was a damn fine one and included this monumental structure (in both senses of the word). Celtic Park (aka Parkhead), home of Celtic FC, one of the best-supported football clubs in the world, towers above its surroundings and seems colossal even from two miles away. The ‘mist’ is, rather, steam from chimneys between it and where I stood.
Being 42 