The insect was after the nectar. The flower wants its pollen moving on. I wanted the blackberries, the seeds of which will in turn be distributed. We all get something out of the transaction.
Walking through Manchester city centre tonight it was impossible to not notice the activity around the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street, with everything cordoned off by police tape and some major sweeping up under way. Turns out at lunchtime a bus took out a central reservation, for some reason (which I can quite believe involved swerving to save the life of some idiotic cyclopath of the kind who thinks his Deliveroo bag gives him the right to ignore red lights), a few people hurt but nothing serious. And the picture? Well, the pink scaffolding is impressive. Some might say there’s not been enough pink on the blog recently.
I am occasionally still known to consult that nowadays esoteric and slightly old-fashioned source of information, the ‘book from the library’. This whole date-stamping and cancelling thing seems quite archaic now, doesn’t it? But in 2006 it was still all the rage.
One to add to the ‘superlatives’ at the bottom of the stats page, the next time I update it. Hallam FC have been around, as the stand says, since 1860, and have always played here, at Sandygate, in the west of Sheffield. According to the Guinness Book of Records, this makes this place the oldest football ground in the world. Hallam are the second-oldest club, after Sheffield FC: I guess it made sense to start no. 2 fairly near to no. 1, after all, they needed someone to play. (What the third-oldest club — Cray Wanderers, from Kent — did at first with their playing time is not as yet recorded.)
Back on November 4th 2020 I stood under the south end of the Humber Bridge — the right-hand end as this picture shows it — and took this shot. It was a day of considerably nicer weather than today, despite this being August. Anyway, this gigantic construction can join the Forth Bridge and Tay Bridge as great bridges to have appeared twice. I believe that this one is so long that the two stanchions are slightly out of parallel with each other, to allow for the curvature of the Earth, and I wonder whether you might even be able to see that on this shot, though probably that’s my imagination.
There seems some kind of irresistible compulsion to construct more and more tall buildings in Manchester city centre, pretty much regardless of other considerations. There were a number of blocks built around one end of Canal Street and finished just before all that lockdown rubbish kicked off in 2020, which still appear to be mostly empty; certainly none of the commercial spaces on the ground floor has ever been occupied. And yet the city has plenty of homeless people and families who I’m sure would be able to make good use of such accommodation. In the meantime, let’s just build some more: it keeps certain political interests happy, doesn’t it.
A bit more sunlight today — hardly high summer though. Heatwaves are just something other people are having. The buddleia seem happy, however, and there were plenty of butterflies around in the garden this afternoon.
Campus is hardly the most exciting, nor populated, place at this time of year — somehow this object symbolises this. Or maybe it’s begun its summer migration, and got beached on the shingle. A boring shot I know, but this was a day in which all the photos I took seemed to be crap. If the sun would shine, it might help.
Hebden Bridge has its share of risky parking spaces — there’s the ‘Wing Mirror Two Inches From That 40-Tonne Truck Descending At Speed’ variety and more than a few ‘Garage Perched Precariously On Thin Pile Of Bricks (Above Terrifying Drop)’. But this is a new variety. I assume Storplan have good insurance.
Almost every one of my trips to London ends here. Now and again I might leave in a different direction, but mostly it’s on one of the half-hourly Leeds services: we all watch the departures board over there, to see if this will be one of those times where LNER give us all more than about eight minutes’ notice. (Today, they did.)
Being 42 