Not much to do other than look at plants again, and to save having a second ‘autumn colours in the mist’ shot in a row (though the woods looked good once more), let me instead document the reason why one of our gutters was overflowing onto the front step below. A garden cane with a fork taped to the end provided a solution. I bet you’re excited now… There went weekend no. 1 of House Arrest 2.0.
Who doesn’t love the colours in autumn, a last hurrah before the greyness of winter. I like the remaining green on this shot and the sinuous branch, with its two duck-heads.
Not pictured on this shot: vast numbers of people. The woods of Hardcastle Crags were heaving today. Because, if you take away other normal weekend entertainments, people will do what they must in order to stay physically and mentally healthy, which is to get out of the house to wherever is available. Thus, congregating closer together than they would otherwise have done, and defeating the object of this latest stupid, mindless, arbitrary attempt at social control.
Now that’s a mackerel sky if ever there was one. A change in the weather is on the way…
Let us ignore the rest of the world and indulge in some Hebden heron-spotting. I have no idea how long these creatures live, but I would expect a few years at least would be normal for a bird that size, and so I think this is the same bird as pictured on 8/5/17. The particularly sharp neck markings are one clue, but to be honest, the main one is those slightly comical knock-knees. Both photos show this. This is not the rather more butch-looking, and generally bigger, one that I had christened Humph (see 25/5/16, 23/1/17 for example).
So this one needs a name of its own. And I’m going to call it “Maris Crane”. You’ve seen Frasier, right?
For now, I’m not saying anything about the reimposition of house arrest that comes tomorrow. The weather was far too good for that, and far too good to stay at home, so I went out and bagged another of my County Top walks while I could still do so without breaking some ridiculous new legislation. And a good walk it was too, given added interest by walking over this gargantuan piece of engineering, the Humber Bridge. This was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was built in 1981: 1.4 miles long, it took me over half an hour to cross, and the colossal stanchions are over 500 feet high.
Great bridges to have featured on this blog? In the UK at least, the Tay Bridge, the Forth Bridge, Devil’s Bridge, Hebden Bridge 🙂 (OK, maybe not the last one). There was that very long one in Lisbon too. It’s good to get out and see parts of my country that I’ve not seen, which is the ultimate point of my walking project. It’s good, and it’s healthy, and Johnson and his cabal of losers can all piss off. Oh, I said I wouldn’t say anything about it. Sorry.
The fact that I am still going to campus, and intend to go two or three days a week through November, suggests that ‘lockdown’ as a concept is an even bigger con this time round than it was in March. The students in this hall have paid great sums of money and — in many cases — travelled thousands of miles to be in Manchester, but we can’t even see them from across a twenty-foot room. What do we do about it? I dunno, disobey somehow. At least the leaves are still just about hanging on.
Working at home today … but then again, aren’t we all. The ‘lockdown hair’ continues to grow.
Nothing about the politics today, no grouching, I promise. Let us just celebrate the peak of autumn. I have pictured this wood before (by now, I’ve pictured most places near my house before), and have always called it the Entwood because here more than anywhere else round here the trees feel like they have feet, that their residence in the ground is temporary.
Saturday is football day. Bingley Town, in red-and-black, won this match 2-1 over FC Sporting Keighley. But this will be the last one for a while — for me, for them — as, with all the resistance of a wet herring being gutted on a fishmonger’s slab, we are heading back into “lockdown” from Thursday. I use the quotes to suggest that it’s not really lockdown at all, seeing as many things will of course remain open, so actually it’s the selective targeting of a few sectors of the economy that are seen as expendable, and a general excuse to push house arrest as a desirable state of affairs. But we have been sold the long con in any case.
RIP Sean Connery too, who has made the blog in times past; and I stand by what I said about him on that page.
Hebden Bridge’s hundred-year-old Picture House has not featured on the blog in 2020. Flooded (again) on Feb. 9th and then forced to close by the New Fascism — until tonight. Tonight, we could return to support this valuable local resource, see a good film (Saint Maud) and have a glass of wine at our seat. Next week, as we are pressured back into whatever the hell ‘Tier 3’ is being defined as by Our Glorious Leaders, we will still be able to see movies, but not have a glass of wine at our seat. This is the kind of difference that gives me a warm, cosy feeling of safety and respect for authority.
Being 42 