A day working at home. The turf roof that has been promised for the Nutclough Mill extension has moved a step closer, it seems, with the delivery of a whole bunch of stones (in bags here) that presumably will form the ‘bedrock’.
I have been doing this blog for 30 months today — that is, exactly two-and-a-half years.
Monday is a regular Manchester day in term-time. Some more random campus architecture then. The Sackville building was part of UMIST until that institution was eaten up by the University of Manchester in 2004. Not for much longer though — I believe the basic plan is to sell it off fairly soon (it’s been gradually emptied over the last few years) and in the near future will probably become luxury apartments with a bar on the ground floor that prices its drinks at a level designed to ensure the plebs don’t get in.
Had to go into Manchester today. Once the errand was done, Joe and I passed some time in the Manchester Museum, which is on the university campus but which I have managed never to properly explore in the 8 years I have worked there. It’s a good natural history and anthropological museum, in fact. These frogs are native to Madagascar and critically endangered in the wild. They’re toxic, though not extremely so.
Joe and I went to York today, which is certainly the most interesting place easily reachable from my house (we have a direct train), and ranks up with Edinburgh and Oxford as one of Britain’s best and most attractive (but also busiest) cities. Today there was some kind of medievalist festival on, and these guys were going through their paces for the cameraman and director to the right. I would like there to be better light on this shot but I think it captures their movement pretty well.
I don’t mind the aesthetics of this photo but it is here more for its significance, trivial though it probably seems to anyone else. Each year, because of the valley wall to the east, our house loses all morning sunlight from about mid-November. The annual game is how early it can be spotted returning to this side of the building. February 21st wins the sweepstake this year (the all-time record being February 18th). Told you it was trivial.
Another campus scene. I am reminded of that Terry Gilliam short film at the beginning of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, when a Victorian office building swathed in scaffolding like this sets sail as the covers billow out in the wind. Does the hole spoil it? Maybe, but I left it in anyway.
Now I said back in December that I thought I had seen very, very early blossom on the University of Manchester campus, but it turned out to be a winter flowering cherry. However, this, definitively, is traditional, spring cherry blossom in flower on 19th February; they are in the courtyard within my office building on the campus. Well, I said it’d been a very mild winter — unlike in North America where the Great Lakes are almost fully frozen, and very unlike last year here.
A day spent almost entirely working at home, not unpleasant weather but flat light, so a dearth of subjects. This sundial (despite having no sunlight to activate it) caught my eye while briefly in town in the morning, however. It can be seen on the main road through the valley, with the date of 1835 meaning this must be one of the town’s oldest buildings (there was very little here before that time, and the arrival of canal and railway). I like the ready reckoner so you can work out how inaccurate it is today — and also the Latin inscription at the top. Want to know what it means? Translation above.
I took my students around the library today, hoping to look at it with active and fresh eyes, at least, that was the plan. I’m trying to do the same with this photograph. Not one of them admitted to having used microfilm before as an information medium — and it’s a good 10 years since I did, and then only once or twice.
Incidentally it’s a year to the day since I arrived in New Zealand.
Beautiful day today, one of those February days in which spring can be felt in the air for the first time. Oh, I know it won’t last. But it was good to be outside today, even if this path was damned muddy.
Being 42 