Sunday 5th August 2018, 3.40pm (day 2,537)
First weekend of my summer break. I have no idea who this is, the picture is chosen for no other reason than I just think it makes him look good. Which is as much as we can ask from a portrait I think.
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Tag Archives: 48
The winning goal
Saturday 4th August 2018, 3.35pm (day 2,536)
Saturday afternoon, 3pm, there are football matches going on all round this country, and the chances are at the moment I will be present at one or other of them. But I don’t always get lucky and capture the winning, and only, goal scored on the day. The blue-clad number 4, Brett Doogan (and there’s a name of the sort only possessed by non-league defensive midfielders) gets the header in for Nelson FC in their match at Chadderton.
Last Manchester shot (for a little while)
Friday 3rd August 2018, 9.40am (day 2,535)
A nice, but generic, Manchester shot. But it suffices to make the point that it is the 29th August before I have to go back into the city again for work purposes.
O yes.
Womanual labour
Thursday 2nd August 2018, 4.45pm (day 2,534)
Clare proves she is the person around the house to ask when anything resembling manual labour is required. Cooking? That’s usually me.
Quite like the focus and depth of field on this shot, better than usual but achieved by doing nothing more than having a camera with a better lens, as of Tuesday morning. This is the first shot where there is a noticeable difference.
Mars
Wednesday 1st August 2018, 11.35pm (day 2,533)
In some ways, of course, this may be the dullest picture I have ever posted on here. But I still think it’s a fine thing that my new camera [*] makes its debut by crossing interplanetary space. And without a tripod, too; to prove the steadiness of my hand and that the Red Planet isn’t just an out-of-focus star, note Psi Capricornus (apparently) just to the left.
[*] A Canon Power Shot SX60.
Can I stop going to work yet?
Tuesday 31st July 2018, 9.55am (day 2,532)
My summer holiday has been a long time coming this year and there’s the rest of this week to get through yet. Despite the later start to the day, I still feel like this guy.
This will probably turn out to be the last shot taken by my Canon Power Shot SX710 camera which since its debut on 27th June 2015 has put in sterling service every day since, including getting up to the top of Kilimanjaro and back. But the lens cover has been requiring the intervention of fingers to retract successfully for some time now and it’s been randomly freezing up, to be recovered only by removing the battery. I took the plunge and invested in another model this morning. Farewell then to the old one, it still does work so I’ll keep it as a backup.
Not China
Monday 30th July 2018, 9.25am (day 2,531)
Usually by this date in the year I am somewhere else. 2015, for example — halfway up Kilimanjaro. Last year — Whitehaven. (OK, not so exotic, but still, on holiday.) There are other examples. This year, I’m still working, at least for another few days. But walking through Chinatown on my way to work each day at least allows for some globetrotting by proxy.
Dice master
Sunday 29th July 2018, 7.35pm (day 2,530)
On the wettest day for months, and trapped in the house, Joe initiates his parents into bizarre Dice Man-style games of chance, in which the family fortune teeters on the edge of a d20. The wine is Clare’s.
Start of the season
Saturday 28th July 2018, 3.00pm (day 2,529)
It’s that 3pm Saturday feeling again. OK, I admit it, this is actually my second game of the 2018-19 season — you don’t think I went to Rhyl on the 12th just to take the air, now, did you? — but the first to be depicted on here. The balmy weather broke definitively, particularly over Gretna, which is just over the border in Scotland and was whipped all day by a very chilly wind coming straight off the Irish Sea. Under this grey blanket Gretna FC, in white, and Edinburgh University FC trot out for their first game of their seasons, in the Lowland League, all full of optimism and hope, something that 90 minutes later the students probably maintained better than their hosts, seeing as they deservedly won 3-0.
Dead and gone
Friday 27th July 2018, 6.30pm (day 2,528)
A few more months of this current climate and the whole planet will look like this. Sort of like the beginning of Interstellar. Or even if it does cool down, we’ll manage it anyway, by killing off the bees.
Being 42 