I started this blog on August 26th, which means today is the end of my third month. Thus, I am a quarter of the way through the planned whole year, 12 months, 366 days (it’s a leap year next year, remember). I guess I’ve done quite well so far, but today I really lacked inspiration. Only this little, 3-month-old pup in the pub this evening really stood out. It was him, or another picture of Hebden Bridge, anyway.
I know this pic is out-of-focus but it gave me the biggest laugh of the day, which is enough reason to put it on here. Joe is really hiding here, this is not just a random shot that happened to catch him in this position. Fellow fans of Arrested Development may share my humor if I cite the line – “you can always tell a Milford man”. But then again, they may not.
This (on the right) is Boris, one of my colleagues from Moscow (see October 23-27), visiting Manchester for a couple of days. He is well into his 60s but has a 6-year-old daughter, which I find kinda sweet. A nice guy, if you don’t enquire too deeply into what he did in the Soviet era.
I also quite like Manchester’s German-inspired Christmas markets, which achieve the (for me) astonishing combination of being both highly Christmassy and yet not twee nor over-commercial. I like this shot because of the stallholder’s pleasant look of satisfaction as Boris decides whether to get a gift for his daughter.
I like ducks: handsome creatures, in my opinion. Tasty, too 🙂 I wonder exactly what is going on to the left of this shot, it’s clearly something of interest in the duck world.
By the way, this is the third shot in a row taken at almost exactly the same time of day.
Although my work location varies, as you can tell from this blog, Monday is most commonly a Manchester day, spent among the dreaming spires…
Dreaming spires? Well, not really. The University of Manchester campus is split in half by one of the country’s principal A roads (this is the A34 which starts here and ends in Southampton, having passed through the centre of England on the way – including Oxford, hence the name Oxford Road). It makes it the noisiest and most crowded campus I have ever visited, and believe me I’ve been to a few. My bosses are spending millions on new buildings but if you ask me a better investment would be simply to pay for a ‘university bypass’ and then grass this over to create a long garden. Who knows, one day we might realise that cars subtract from life more than they add to it and it might even happen.
Not easy to encapsulate a day which was the third in a row spent at home trying to entertain Joe (I’ve been single-parenting this weekend) and where the only real distinctiveness was having to do some minor DIY to fix an electrical problem in the house. It’s hard to take photos of the Boy these days without him sticking his tongue out (see October 8th, for example)… so here’s an abstract for you. It might not be exciting, but then again, neither was 20/11/11.
Glorious day today. Even the Boy wanted to take a walk. No other comment necessary.
Took a few reasonable photos today but if you want one to really encapsulate the day then here it is. Beer. In front of a real fire. This is how I want to spend my Friday evenings after work, and today, I did.
I spent a good portion of the middle part of my life avoiding London, but recently I have been visiting more often. It was nice today to be able to walk out of a hotel on quite a pleasant late autumn morning and be exploring Covent Garden before everywhere was open and while it was still fairly quiet. I think it’s too early to have Christmas decorations up anywhere – but I suppose these ones are quite attractive.
Yesterday we had the mysterious purchase of the mask, today I was engaged as official photographer in the wife’s latest shoot. She’s definitely up to something.
By the way, I took a lot of photos today, some of which might even be classed as ‘good’, but I did say that this blog would feature no staged shots. This was the one candid shot I took today, however. Just as well it was a nice one, otherwise you’d have ended up with a picture of a train or something (I’m currently on my way down to London for the evening & work there tomorrow morning); but C is just so much more aesthetically pleasing, don’t you think?
Being 42 