Looks like something’s going down in Starbucks. What is more interesting is the guy on the right striding off in the direction of ‘The Wonderful World of Waxing’. Did he have an appointment? Inquiring minds want to know.
Tomorrow (Weds 20th) is day 300 of this blog, so I’ve added some more pictures to the ‘Best of the Rest’ page to mark the occasion.
A couple of years ago the BBC moved a substantial portion of their operations up to the new Media City complex in Salford Quays. Apart from the wounded pride of a chunk of the London media set, fearful of having to deal with Northerners on a regular basis, the other casualty was the old building on Oxford Road, pictured here. Now completely empty, it is fenced off and – according to this sign – awaiting demolition.
In its place will be built an eco-friendly, natural piece of parkland, along with some discreet business premises and workshops that will ask for a peppercorn rent and be reserved for local enterprises who otherwise could not afford to be based in Manchester city centre.
Or possibly I imagined all that and it will just be turned into another supermarket.
We were on Keighley station a couple of weekends ago, but hey, here we are again. We had a free ticket and it was something to do. I choose this picture today partly because of the colour and shapes, but mainly because the sign above makes it look like these are the rudimentary toilet facilities. I mean, I know this heritage railway is preserving how things were a hundred years ago or whatever, but this seems to be taking it a bit far.
Nutclough Pickle. Ingredients: 1 cauliflower, 1 cucumber, a few small onions, 2 pints of vinegar, mustard powder, turmeric, 2 cloves garlic, some salt, 300g sugar, nutmeg, allspice and a few tablespoons of flour. Cook up together and bung in a jar for a few weeks, then give to relatives and keep some for yourself.
Today in Donetsk the Ukraine v France game started, but was then suspended for an hour because of heavy rain.
This June in Hebden Bridge spring started, but has since been suspended for a couple of weeks because of general crappiness, of which today saw more; including this attempt to emulate the weather in the Ukraine, except it’s nowhere near warm enough for a decent thunderstorm. It’s just rain.
Full-on day of work today, both in Manchester during the first part of the day and in Hebden Bridge on into the evening. Very few chances to snatch photos of anything, and they were all snatched in transit from one meeting to the next. These guys were taking life rather easier than me today, but I still like the juxtaposition of their gathering with the sign in the windows of the Town Hall behind them.
Urbis has already appeared on this blog more than once; but seeing as it’s right outside Manchester Victoria station, I walk past it an awful lot, so it has plenty of chances. And I think it’s a relatively handsome building. This shot came about because just as I walked up the ramp, on another drizzly day, a truck drove off and left this perfectly rectangular dry patch. My in-camera shot had the wrong white balance setting on it and was a bit fuzzy, but a fiddle in iPhoto and here we have this abstract. Not bad.
Got bored today and shaved my head, well, a #1 clip anyway. I do this kind of spontaneous thing now and again. Ask my wife one day how I proposed to her.
What little stories there are all around us sometimes. Who abandoned this pair of grubby, but otherwise serviceable-looking shoes by the side of this crossing over Oxford Road today – and why? Or have they struck out on their own, striking a blow for the freedom of brogues everywhere?
Clare’s alter ego – whose identity, of course, I could not possibly reveal – was doing a burlesque show in Chester tonight, and I got to go along for a change. Here is another of the lovely performers (5 female, 1 male). I like taking pictures of people candidly – it helps you see what they really look like. I get the impression Ginger looks rather like this most of the time, in fact. (Even if her right leg does appear to be stood in a big glass. Perhaps I should have cropped that, but what the hell.)
