A burst of freedom. As we are allowed to visit family at the present time — under conditions of whatever — we had a day trip to the great gash in the landscape that is Morecambe Bay. On the other side, Grange-over-Sands. The figures seen on the tidal flats are presumably a family: but even if they’re not, what business is it of mine.
On this day last year I was in Corfu. Today, I should have been in Tromsø at the “Creating Knowledge” conference. The stats of this blog show that over the last nine years or so I have subsisted on a diet of a lot of travel, mainly for work but with a healthy amount of personal exploration thrown in. Not this year, though. And what with the devastation that this will wreak to airlines and the welcoming nature of immigration counters around the world (that was irony), who knows? Perhaps this will be a permanent shift. We will have to see.
‘Paul’s Fresh Fish (from Fleetwood. Lancashire)’ has been present at Hebden Bridge’s Thursday market every week for years: the van appeared on the blog way back in December 2012 (a picture I always quite liked due to its sense of late December desolation and some decent lighting). He missed a couple of weeks in April, but clearly there is too much tuna in the Irish Sea off Fleetwood to sell on, so he’s back now.
A deeply dull day. By the evening I was reduced to casting my eye around the randomly organised piles of DVDs around the place and playing mash-up games, cross-fertilising. I’d pitch this one to Hollywood, but probably someone has already done a screenplay.
I credit Clare as ‘spotter’ on this one. While on the allotment this afternoon she drew my attention to this insect and said, “Try getting a photo of this one.” And so I did. And thank you my love — I rather like the result. This grasshopper has a sense of nobility I think.
Enjoy the sunshine, as the Westerlies will be making their annual return in a couple of days. The woods over the road have become a vital source of space and fresh air, a place to clear the head in the morning and crank it up for another week’s work obligations. As I sat and cogitated, I looked up, and here was the view.
This is one of the very rare occasions on which I’ve done no post-processing to the image at all — this is exactly as the camera holds it.
The monument on top of Stoodley Pike was first built to celebrate victory over Napoleon, but this version dates from 1856. Much of the graffiti on it may have been there for about this amount of time: who can tell whether the “MAN CITY” scrawled on one side is from the late 1960s Franny Lee era or has been added since the Sheikhs took it over and they became decent again? Are “R. Crowther” and “E. Mitchell” (visible here) still alive and proud?
There continues to just about be enough visual interest around my locality to keep this all going. Who knows how long it will be before Authority deigns to say that we can not just travel to other places, but stay there, and explore. Until then, let’s fake it. The thing I like about this shot is that there’s little sense of scale. This could be a substantial island just off the coast, with cliffs behind that are hundreds of feet high. Or, just a little rock in a stream, well lit. You decide.
It’s a bit out of focus but this was taken with a very long zoom and squirrels move damn fast, particularly up trees. The light’s good, though. This is the earliest shot in a day for three months, which isn’t saying much, but that’s life under house arrest for you.
What are we losing at the moment? There is no sport that is meaningful (meaning, played in front of spectators). I’m assuming that very little music is being performed or created; if it is, it’s not happening round me. Maybe some great novels are being born in all this crap but we won’t be seeing them for a while. There is only this endless banality, and if my blog is itself banal under lockdown, that’s the way of it. But the hedge on the allotment still needed strimming, and that’s Joe’s job.
Being 42 