It’s been raining again. Perhaps it’s not a blip, maybe that’s the end of the whole hot weather thing. Still, we’ve all got to get out of the house when we can. You didn’t want a photo of my laptop now, did you.
If I’m to keep this blog going, and non-repetitive, I will have to keep finding new slants on the familiar territory of my home town. Particularly at the moment, where I am spending days on end just sat in my office at home, writing the first draft of the book. So here we go, one of the town’s stranger buildings I think. For some reason this shot looks like it might be taken in the USA, the architecture just has that look to it, I can almost see old trams running down the street too (as they used to, a century ago). Here, for once, I don’t think the phone wires detract from the shot.
I have been trying to prevent repetition on this blog but today cannot avoid it. After a fairly ordinary day, a terrific rainstorm makes yesterday’s picture seem like a portent. Showing how well they have learned the lessons since last year’s flooding, blocked drains and manic car drivers turn a heavy, but otherwise manageable thunderstorm into a near-flooding. Poor drainage has hit the cellar of the Railway again and yet it’s all so bloody avoidable.
Back from the red brick of Crowborough, built on its clay soils, to the light brown stone of Hebden Bridge, built on its millstone grit. But the weather was more or less the same – unsettled, rumbly, turbulent. Not a bad shot but shame about the telephone wire. And the time on the clock is fiction — this is a notoriously inaccurate timepiece.
And so, after one more morning of definite, but rather vague and low-level, looking back — it’s probably some mid-life crisis or something — we all left my old stamping ground for points more northern and, to tell the honest truth, far more interesting. It’s been nice to go back, confirm the continuing existence of places remembered, but there’s no need to come back again.
Once in a while you will get a photo on here that is posted not for artistic merit (though I don’t mind this shot in that regard, I think it captures the small and prosaic nature of this establishment), but just because it means something to me. This trip to Sussex has been undertaken partly because I wanted to go and have a nose around the places where I lived when I was a child, until 1988 when I left aged about 19, these being the town of Crowborough in Sussex and the nearby village of Rotherfield. I could bore you with how it all felt but there’s not a lot of point, you’ve never been there and it’s not, to tell the truth, the most exciting part of the world although it is a very pretty one.
The reason this photo is here is because of all the places I expected to have disappeared, this was the most unexpected survivor; my old neighbourhood store. Seeing this place and going in to buy sweets (and I did, well, a Bounty Bar anyway) really did make me feel like I was 10 years old again. It’s not called ‘Mace’ any more but long may it last.
A good subject to mark this numerical milestone — day 700 of the blog, and in all those 700 pictures, Joe is the person who has appeared the most times. But I have no problem adding him again today; when I saw him looking out of our hotel room window in Brighton this morning, I had to take it.
Because it’s a round number, I’ll update the Best of the Rest page later and the Stats too, if I get around to it…
Ah, the English seaside on a hot summer’s day. Sand? That’s for those continentals, of suspicious morality and lacking in backbone.
Officially I’m still on sabbatical. So you didn’t see me. I wasn’t here today. Nor, really, is anybody else. This is of course the time of year we like the most.
Too unusual not to use as today’s picture. I believe this contraption was put to use repairing the canal bank here in Hebden Bridge today.
By the way, am I the only one having ‘issues’ with WordPress – I mean, logging on, even making some blogs appear at all?
Being 42 