As of tomorrow I’m working, but today still had time to do the tourist stuff. Alcatraz was definitely worth a visit, if only because I’ve never seen the inside of a prison before (honest) and one realises now how accurate all those movie sets can be. It was only a federal prison for just over 30 years, though — it’s been a tourist attraction longer than that.
Definitely don’t think I did San Francisco justice with yesterday’s shot — must have been the jet lag. This is much better. I apologise to the good people of the East Bay — Oakland and Berkeley — where I spent most of the day, but I have to go with this shot today. Could they have posed any better if they’d meant it? And love the cable cars too, one of those beautiful anachronisms that civic activism has preserved, and the world’s a better place for it.
So here I am for a week in San Francisco, surely one of the world’s best and most recognisable cities. This is one of its more neglected corners, a crumbling pier that stretches out into the Bay to the north of the city centre, with the Golden Gate Bridge behind it — one of its piers is visible in the background. As you can see, today I avoided the fog and chill for which the city is notorious. Plenty more to see yet, I hope.
This was just my transit airport, not my final destination. Bearing in mind where I have travelled to, going via Germany seemed rather bizarre, but ask my travel agent. Twenty years ago I once spent one of the worst and longest nights of my life trying to sleep in Munich airport (again, for reasons I can’t remember now), and I don’t like the city’s principal football team either (with apologies to their rivals 1860); so it’s not one of my favourite places. But today’s transfer was problem-free.
Another photo back at the alma mater, that is, Leeds University. I have a week away coming up though — not a new country, but a new part of it, and somewhere I find pretty cool, too. You’ll find out over the weekend — I have a 21.5 hour journey (door to door) tomorrow though.
Every year around this time there will be some new shoots on one south-facing window sill or other, getting ready for the moment when, like good parents, we decide they can be let out into the outside world. Usually, they survive.
Harry is the companion of my friend Claire with whom I lodged last night. She lives in the City of London itself (for non-initiates — the very centre, and certainly the financial centre, of this vast metropolis) and so her cat is a defiantly urban creature, as I hope this shot reflects.
Another work trip to London, and as on the last occasion I did this (Feb 27th), the changeover at Leeds station proves far more photographically fruitful than the capital itself. I’m very happy with this picture — one of those occasions where not only did the shot turn out pretty much exactly as hoped, but I got it first go, too.
A pleasant evening, though the barometer is falling steeply. This view of the town is taken from Keighley Road. Somehow the angle on the hill at the back looks wrong, but you can tell the camera is being held straight from the perpendiculars on the housing, so it must just be weird geography.
I’d just like to say a big thank you to the duck at this point.
