You know this game? You have to create loops of one colour or the other to win? Well, never mind. It passed the time during the usual Sunday afternoon in the pub.
Incidentally, a numerological curiosity. Day 444 of this blog falls on 11/11, and as of today I have 111 followers. This doesn’t mean anything, it just appeals to a certain sense of neatness.
Is there a word for the one before the one before the last one? Pen-penultimate maybe? If so, today was the pen-penultimate walk I needed to complete the 214 Wainwrights. Numbers 208 (Eagle Crag, a great little climb) and 209 (Sergeant’s Crag) were completed in a day that once again started off OK but got much worse, weather-wise, as time went on. These were about the last shafts of sunlight until near the end of the walk three and a half hours later, illuminating the glacial Greenup valley, as viewed from the lower slopes of Eagle Crag.
Screw technical or aesthetic quality, if there was ever a photo which encapsulated a day this is it – I was supposed to be on this 13.35 flight to Copenhagen but as you can see it was cancelled, and seven hours later – eight-and-a-half hours after I arrived – I’m still here in Bergen airport. What a jævla drittsekk of a day. (Translate it if you want.)
Any day in Bergen on which it isn’t chucking it down with rain is worth recording. After the end of my workshop today I walked out to the tip of the Nordnes peninsula, which splits the city harbour into two, and took this shot. I like it because of the odd configuration of his hands (he barely seems to be holding the rod), the hood, and the fact that for once, despite being taken right into the sun, there is no flare in the lens.
I haven’t always spent this much time travelling, you know. It really started to take off (ha ha) around the middle of 2010, the first time I came to Bergen (and Scandinavia) in fact; since then I have averaged a trip a month, and in 2012 more than that. That’s just the way my job works now, I have little commutes (to Manchester) and big commutes (usually to Bergen or Moscow) and beyond the time they take they all feel rather much the same now. It ain’t glamorous. It’s just work.
Early in the day, more importantly, early in the year. Even if they are pretty… too early 😦
This photo was taken right at the point where a slip road – that’s it behind the fence – curves off the busy A34 road and heads up to the even busier Mancunian Way (the city centre relief road). I’m stood right by a flyover that still bears the commemorative plaque awarded in 1968 by the ‘Concrete Society’ (no kidding) and in the background is one of the locality’s grimmer 1960s housing blocks.
All the same, it’s rather pretty at the moment isn’t it?
I suppose at one level this repeats the ‘fire’ theme which has characterised the other two photos of the weekend, but not in quite the same way. Here we are, the sun starts to set behind the valley walls at 3.40pm now: it is truly winter. Although by mid-December the sunset will have reached as far east as the mobile phone mast to the left.
Remember, remember, the 5th of November. Or, the nearest available Saturday.
Pictured in the Hole in the Wall pub, at the stub end of another week. Is it the end of term yet?
Being 42 