Buskers have been around longer than most professions. We used to call them minstrels, but the whole singing for one’s supper thing is much the same as it was in the time of King Arthur. Fishmongers have been around for a while too.
This is a rare photowhack — the only photo taken today.
It’s gosling season… the parents programmed to keep a close eye on the brood. There were at least three substantial goose families on the Rochdale Canal this afternoon.
Even Manchester’s crowded, fully urban campus can crank up the architecture quotient now and again, especially on a sunny May day. The Beyer Building and its cloak of ivy have featured before. My only day on campus this week, so I’m glad it was a pleasant one.
I had to put together a plan for finishing off my book. There is no reason why this had to happen sitting around at home — not on a day like today.
I had two strong candidate pictures for today’s shot, following my walk around Honister Pass and Buttermere, in the Lake District. The other one was flowers, this one industry. I think this shot shows that the latter can be attractive too. The spoil heap looks at first like a stark, grey mountain in the distance, but it appears on no map.
The football season comes to an end. At the very top, everything is won by those with the most money; at the lower levels, not necessarily. The Waiters Arms team in yellow shock their previously undefeated opponents, FC Panda, 2-1 to win the Mel Owens Invitational Cup on this sunny Sunday morning. You might not care, but 100 people turned up to see this.
Back in Hebden Bridge. In the afternoon, a sudden storm, but with enough sunlight around to make the drops glisten and shine: beautiful, but not if you were out in it. This is taken from the shelter of home.
At one point during the conference I was attending at the Goethe University in Frankfurt today, there were vague references to ‘our famous building’ that drifted through my Friday consciousness but didn’t take hold. Then, on my way back into the city centre afterwards, I saw the building.
The IG-Farbenhaus has had a chequered history to say the least. HQ to the eponymous company, when built in the 1920s it was the biggest office building in Europe and remained so for thirty years. IG Farben manufactured the world’s first antibiotic — and also the gas that was used in the Nazi concentration camps. After the war the USA used it as a military base — the ‘Pentagon of Europe’; following German reunification ownership passed to the state of Hesse who renovated it and then helped the Goethe-Institut build a new campus around it from 2001 onwards. And all set in parkland (kept free of development by the Americans for security reasons) right in the city centre.
I’m sure this photo doesn’t do the architecture full justice, but what the hell, the sun looks good too.
Left Zagreb, with regret when it comes to the people and the general pleasantness of the place, but with no regret when it comes to the weather which was dreadful today. Further chewed up my CO2 allowance and hopped back to Frankfurt, which is one of the worst airports I’ve ever been to but at least you get a good view of the city on the way in. I’m here for just over 24 hours. This is about as intimate with the place as I’ll probably get.
When I was younger, propaganda convinced me that everywhere behind the old Iron Curtain was grey, drab and polluted. This is of course not the case, was never the case. Eastern European cities (see also Prague, Tallinn, more) seem to have this effortless sophistication, a handsome civility that should shame all who voted for the idiocy that is Brexit. Britons have much to learn from such places, the trouble is that 17 million of them said, we don’t want to. (The Croatians have also learned from us though — at least, they have acquired an understanding of ‘the pub’.)
One of those photos that looks like I’ve converted it to monochrome, but I haven’t. Zagreb’s Grič tunnel was built in 1944 as an air-raid shelter and, indicating changing times, has since been a flop for the homeless, a site for techno raves and now, a tourist attraction. Am I just to the right of where I should be to get the final arches dead centre — or is it not quite straight? Everything else looks symmetrical enough to me, so I’m claiming the latter.
Being 42 