Monday 6th July 2020, 3.25pm (day 3,238)
The scarecrow itself is long gone. But its boots remain, like a sort of imprint, or memory. I doubt they’ll scare the birds off much. But then again, nor do scarecrows, particularly.
The scarecrow itself is long gone. But its boots remain, like a sort of imprint, or memory. I doubt they’ll scare the birds off much. But then again, nor do scarecrows, particularly.
Plenty of rain over the last few days has swelled Yorkshire’s rivers, including the Wharfe: and high winds last night and today presumably have brought this big chunk of tree down into it somewhere upstream of the weir at Wetherby, which is where this picture is taken. For now, it waits here… doubtless to continue its journey toward the sea once the next swell takes it over the lip.
It has been 105 days (March 21st) since I was last in a pub, and 6 more since the last time one featured on here.
But they’re back open. So a pint was duly raised in the Bay Horse, Oxenhope, Yorkshire, to celebrate this fact. And celebration it was: anyone about to come back with messages of doom and gloom in response, please don’t.
Over the last 3,235 days of this attempt to document the rest of my life in pictures there have, of course, been plenty of days where I’ve just stayed at home and not really done much. But there hasn’t been such a concentrated run of such days, day after day after day where there is nothing happening outside. And on a day when it never stopped raining…. this swell of smoke, a bonfire presumably, really was about the most interesting thing seen all day (with apologies to the family).
By the end of this month we may have been able to visit a pub and go away for a few days. If you think either of these things is a bad thing… let’s just say I disagree with you.
21 years ago today I did not walk down the aisle with Clare, because we didn’t get married in a church: instead the venue for our wedding was the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster. Either way… happy anniversary.
We are all starting to lose it. Why is he photographing this puddle? More to the point, why am I photographing him photographing this puddle? Which one of us is losing it more?
The sign is the added touch that will roughly date this scene for ever more.
First trip to campus since March 8th, which as it was a Sunday, already had a desolate, end-of-the-world feel about it that the subsequent closure has cemented in place. On the few days over lockdown that I have visited, all of the city of Manchester has seemed like a coma patient. There is a certain amount of internal activity, things moving around from place to place, but there’s no real life or consciousness to it. This guy looks very much like he’s pondering his future and so should we all. Plants are doing well, though.
This is a follow-up shot to last Monday’s shot. As we have more flowers on the squash/pumpkin/potential producer of large orange fruit, but a lack of insects buzzing around inside our house in the brief hours of flowering, we’ve been doing our own pollination, with cotton buds. It’s a good thing my hay fever has gone down over the years — though the weather was so revolting today that I doubt there was any of this stuff doing the rounds outside. If you don’t believe a whole country’s weather can turn from Mediterranean to Arctic in three days, you’ve never been here in June.
It is getting difficult to sustain the (my, your) interest over the endless, repeated days of lockdown. Particularly when they are cold, grey and wet, like today. I sorted out and dusted the CD shelves: this is as exciting as it got. The extra decorations have always been there.
This being a British summer, the balmy heat of Wednesday and Thursday has gone, and it’s raining again. It will do this until it feels like being different.
Old Town sits on the hills to the north of Hebden Bridge. In Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579, the first atlas of England and Wales ever published, it’s called The Old towne…. so it’s been around for a while.