We went to a family funeral today and I faced the moral dilemma of whether to depict it on here or respect the privacy of the occasion. But then while waiting for the train home I saw this little scene over on the other side of Lancaster station, thus saving me the trouble of resolving the problem. I love the way it’s all rectangles, apart from her. Well, actually — a couple of little triangles have slipped in there too. But I’m ignoring them.
The weather was mostly good over these two days and only in the final hour or so was there some drizzle. This came down while I descended, aching and exhausted, from Scarth Gap (the notch in the hillside above) to Buttermere, while these sheep all went up the other way. There is a shepherd and dog just out of shot to the left. I did get some shots of them all coming up towards me as well, but this is the best one.
I am posting this and tomorrow’s pic while lying in bed on Friday morning recovering from a two-day hike. Between 11.15am on Wednesday morning and 3.30pm on Thursday I walked 30 miles, which I calculate as an average of around 1.05 miles/hour even while I was asleep. No wonder I feel a little delicate this morning.
Anyway, looking back — it’s never easy to choose only one photo to encapsulate a day of varied landscapes and experience, but being very close to the delights of Sellafield nuclear power station (or ‘reprocessing plant’, or whatever it is these days) was certainly a significant feature of day 1. i was hard up against the perimeter fence at one point. It hisses, throbs, puts out strange noises and generally dominates everything round here in West Cumbria. So it can feature today, albeit in the background of this shot of the churchyard where I sat and had my lunch.
In case you hadn’t noticed I am becoming rather tired of schlepping into Manchester on a regular basis — not work particularly, but the city, its endless building sites and general crowdedness. But that’s one reason I’m taking a sabbatical from January. So this will change, at least for the first part of 2019. For now, there are still some early mornings to be done. Note the ‘Queen Bee’ scuplture inside this, the Queens Arcade.
I’m tired of the endless destruction and re-capitalisation being wreaked on Manchester city centre. The yellow hoardings on the right surround what is to become a boutique hotel, called “Brooklyn” — or actually “BKLYN”, clearly this was exactly the configuration of letters which wasn’t already a hashtag — scheduled to open some time in 2019 it seems.
However, an objective assessment of the local building stock leads me to conclude that Manchester is already well-supplied with hotels, boutique or otherwise. What it seems to lack are beds for a growing population of rough sleepers, that anyone who walks through the city centre on a regular morning basis will agree has increased substantially in the last year or so.
Welcome to your neo-liberal marketised future.
A full two-day weekend and somehow I still feel like this little girl. Unfortunately I’m too big to be carried around in a rucksack these days.
This wall has been around for a while, separating the beer garden of the White Lion (the oldest building in Hebden Bridge) from the river. When this wall was built, or last rebuilt anyway, the supply of stones must have been a tad short that day. Whomever this headstone was ‘Sacred to the Memory of…’, let’s hope their spirits aren’t still hanging around to get pissed off.
Manchester’s a big city and I only tend to walk through a narrowly-defined part of it when following the usual beat. Got off this track today however, and here I am on the banks of the Bridgewater Canal, built in 1761 and generally reckoned to be Britain’s first canal in the modern sense. A roaring success economically. And still operational — not long after I took this shot of the reflections under the bridge (not dating since 1761…) a barge chugged past. It’s a peaceful spot.
You want plums? Trust me, we have some. But seeing as we don’t have a transglobal shipping service to hand, our ability to export this year’s handsome plum crop is limited to putting them in plastic bags and giving them away for free down at the pub, or cooking them up into what preserves we can. Hence, plum ketchup. If you want the recipe it’s towards the end of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course and I followed it religiously, as one should always do with Delia’s guidance.
Felt obliged to put in an appearance in the big city for the first time (photographically) since signing off for my holiday on 3rd August. The weather brought melancholy in the morning, a feeling of autumn, though it did brighten up. The monochrome adds to the mood though really I only changed it to address a blob of anomalous colour (on the traffic sign in the background: near invisible here, a bright blue splodge in the original).
Being 42 