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.
I’m examining a doctoral thesis in Glasgow tomorrow and it’s too far to do as a day trip so I came up tonight. This shot was snapped during a spell of good light on the train, somewhere around Carlisle. The Mac shows that I’m still just about working at this point but it wasn’t to last much longer — then again, you try assimilating Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge past 5pm on a Thursday. But then again I did have wine (as seen bottom left).
For a street with a pretty grand name in the centre of one of the larger cities in Britain, St. James’ Street is a rather pokey back alley. I like here the gang of urban pigeons to bottom left — the random chair — and the “Lewis Bet” sign, if that’s not a seedy backroom bookie’s I don’t know what might be.
After the beauty and interest and light of yesterday, today was a very dull day in all respects. Lucky this bush has bloomed in the garden to give the otherwise drab day some colour. If I was gardener enough, I would say I planted it deliberately in order to play this role every March, but nothing in the garden has been done with that much forethought, I can assure you.
Some weather forecasts just sit there demanding to be used. The thin veneer of vapour on the horizon is the nearest I got to clouds all day. The summit is Dale Head, between Newlands and Honister in the Lake District — a genuinely impressive cairn, and a damn fine view. This is why I worked yesterday instead.
Windsor Road, Hebden Bridge. This is fairly typical for round here. I like the way the colours of the window frames change from house to house, and also from the top floors to the bottom — for these will all be two separate houses, one on top and one underneath.
Of all the genres of photography that I get the chance to try on this blog I think sports photography is the hardest. In part this is because I a) just don’t have the right equipment and b) when I am watching an event, at least one like this football match, I’m usually stuck in the same seat. This shot is OK, thanks mainly to the light, but it’s still not that great really because it has been cropped hugely, so has come out grainy. Brighton & Hove Albion hit this free kick towards the goal of their hosts, Preston North End, but nothing came of it — which was the story of the match as a whole, it finished 0-0.
Today was Joe’s bithrday. Amazingly, I seem to as of today be the parent of a teenager. Yet it was a win-win situation for him, because almost the first thing that happened today was that we got the phone call telling us it was a snow day, thus a day off school. But he didn’t lie around doing nothing — I took him into Manchester instead, where it was just as revoltingly snowy.
Perhaps it’s a political statement. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for someone’s life: perhaps my own. Perhaps it’s just a picture of a car park barrier. Your call.
Being 42 