Hebden Bridge’s annual festival of creativity, the Handmade Parade, has featured on this blog every June since I started, and probably will continue to do so. It’s impossible to capture the whole experience in one shot, but I feel the need to show some happiness in the world this weekend, so here’s my choice.
This weekend, Hebden Bridge marks six months since the floods of 26th December. There are various festivals and events taking place over today and tomorrow (Sunday). In Calder Holmes Park today was a ‘Fair for Youth’ which seemed to involve a lot of people sitting on the grass watching a stage on which not much was happening; but this climbing tower seemed popular.
This was Clare’s night out as though I knew of this band I didn’t really care one way or the other about them. However, having seen them, they were bloody good. And Sarah Cracknell (right) is completely gorgeous. It was 1996 all over again I’m telling you. Taking photos of gigs is like football matches though — I take lots, but very few ever work out. I don’t have the equipment and I’m usually stuck in the same vantage point. Still, it’ll do.
Perhaps there is some irony in seeing a band named after a French football team the evening after the announcement of the disastrous referendum result. I apologise to the rest of the planet for the 17 million people I happen to share an island with who seem to think that isolationism is a valid response to the world’s problems. I wasn’t the only one in the room tonight weeping for the future.
Maybe this is all some big Establishment charade but at least for once today, I can say that I voted in favour of something I strongly believe in.
For ten days now I, and am I sure most other photographers in Britain, have been praying for one thing – light — there really hasn’t been any. So once again I try to fall back on colour, and form, and composition and all those other things.
After over a week of it raining every day, today — the summer solstice — while not exactly sunny, was at least dry. I had a book needing reading for work, I took it on the trains and went for a short but rewarding walk around the head of Great Langdale. Bowfell, in the background, is 2,960 feet high, and not on the itinerary today, but I did get to the sugarloaf summit of Pike o’Stickle about half an hour after this picture was taken. Note the walkers on the top at this point.
Another Manchester pic, making six out of the last eight. A new role at work means it’s likely I’ll be spending more time there than has been the case over the last few years, so expect more of this kind of thing… if you’re still following this visual diary of mine, anyway.
Definitely the season for this flower, as I pictured it almost exactly two years ago to the day — 21/6/14 — only then initially misidentified it as violet. In fact it is wood cranesbill, Geranium sylvaticum, and very cute it is too, as the bees agree.
Although it’s the weekend today’s pic still comes from Manchester, where I took Joe to visit the Museum of Science and Industry (and also to indulge his Warhammer compulsions). I hadn’t been to the museum for a while, though it’s featured on the blog a couple of times before, both in 2012 — I don’t think it’s evolved very much recently, I must admit. Anyway, I liked this old industrial machinery, and could impress on Joe that if he’d been alive a hundred years before he’d probably have been working under machines like this by the time he was 10.
I don’t watch TV so I don’t know who the woman on the left is, but she’s clearly something to do with TV presenting because the gaggle of lighting technicians and cameramen seen here are just a portion of the posse of hangers-on, outside broadcast vans, police outriders and so on, that surrounded her in front of the National Football Museum this morning. Anyone care to provide the ID?
UPDATE: Apparently this is Michelle Ackerley — they were filming a piece for BBC’s Crimewatch (hence all the coppers, which I did think were otherwise a bit excessive)
Being 42 