I don’t mind the aesthetics of this photo but it is here more for its significance, trivial though it probably seems to anyone else. Each year, because of the valley wall to the east, our house loses all morning sunlight from about mid-November. The annual game is how early it can be spotted returning to this side of the building. February 21st wins the sweepstake this year (the all-time record being February 18th). Told you it was trivial.
Another campus scene. I am reminded of that Terry Gilliam short film at the beginning of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, when a Victorian office building swathed in scaffolding like this sets sail as the covers billow out in the wind. Does the hole spoil it? Maybe, but I left it in anyway.
Now I said back in December that I thought I had seen very, very early blossom on the University of Manchester campus, but it turned out to be a winter flowering cherry. However, this, definitively, is traditional, spring cherry blossom in flower on 19th February; they are in the courtyard within my office building on the campus. Well, I said it’d been a very mild winter — unlike in North America where the Great Lakes are almost fully frozen, and very unlike last year here.
A day spent almost entirely working at home, not unpleasant weather but flat light, so a dearth of subjects. This sundial (despite having no sunlight to activate it) caught my eye while briefly in town in the morning, however. It can be seen on the main road through the valley, with the date of 1835 meaning this must be one of the town’s oldest buildings (there was very little here before that time, and the arrival of canal and railway). I like the ready reckoner so you can work out how inaccurate it is today — and also the Latin inscription at the top. Want to know what it means? Translation above.
I took my students around the library today, hoping to look at it with active and fresh eyes, at least, that was the plan. I’m trying to do the same with this photograph. Not one of them admitted to having used microfilm before as an information medium — and it’s a good 10 years since I did, and then only once or twice.
Incidentally it’s a year to the day since I arrived in New Zealand.
Beautiful day today, one of those February days in which spring can be felt in the air for the first time. Oh, I know it won’t last. But it was good to be outside today, even if this path was damned muddy.
As seen in the National Media Museum, Bradford, today, A concave mirror and some easy-enough positioning for the cameraman. I like the playing-card effect on this one. Technically it is also a self-portrait.
Had to do my 10 minutes in this place today, to get processed through the system in a certain way. But it needs doing, and it’s something to photograph. I remain around home, Hebden Bridge, for a considerably stable period, relative to my usual movements.
How on earth we get a ladybird in our house in February, I have no idea. Despite the mildness of the winter (and it has been very mild, with barely a frost yet), the only logical explanation is it’s been inside with us all winter. It was a bit sluggish, but alive.
I will only add that tonight is a foul night, a real stinker. I hope this guy, and the thousands like him, end up somewhere warm, safe and dry.
Being 42 