Another train shot, though this is a portrait of a person rather than a locomotive. Somehow yesterday’s loco just seemed much happier to be where it was. Then again, I sympathise: when is 7am on a Tuesday morning in February a time of vim and vigour?
What goes down South, must come back up North again (at least, unless one wants to be paying hotel bills for an excessive length of time). I don’t know where this train was going, but I was on the 10:30 back to Leeds, and then home.
An early start for me on this Sunday morning, for a walk that bagged me the County Tops of Kent and Greater London (which are very close together in case that sounds like a more significant expedition than it was). Not a great walk scenically, but redeemed by the sight of four deer in the woods. You try capturing these guys on camera, particularly if they know you’re there, which this one clearly does — but he tolerated my efforts for just long enough before scooting away to rejoin his gang.
A substitution at, but not for, Crowborough Athletic FC; however, the guys in the retro black-and-white hoops are the visitors, Deal Town. This was an early substitution due to injury but it didn’t matter, as they went on to win 3-0.
This was a nostalgia trip in one way — the 6-hour journey from Yorkshire being explained by the fact that Crowborough is the town where I grew up, and lived until 1988 (as I have noted on this blog before). But until today I had never seen their principal football team, Athletic, play a game. So this is both familiar and brand new at the same time. And I liked it, though always, whenever I come back here, I am reminded how high up in the air it is (the ground is 550 feet above sea level) and thus how cold, even on a sunny February day. The south-east of England is by no means semi-tropical — northerners take note.
Somewhat continuing a theme from yesterday, but hey. Definitively, the first blossom I’ve seen of the year turns up in the courtyard of the Ellen Wilkinson Building, as it has done before (it’s a finely sheltered spot).
It’s early yet, but the world turns, and we have to start getting things ready to put into the soil. These potatoes will then sit in there for 10 months or so and, usually, we just dig up about the same number as we put in, of about the same size. So maybe we should just eat them now. But who knows, maybe this is the year they will run riot.
I haven’t had three days in a row of Manchester pictures since February 2020 — what happened after that, I wonder. But today’s the latest burst of two-in-a-row, and with good light to boot. Manchester’s Chinatown is, in no way comparable to, say, San Francisco’s in scale (not to mention anywhere in China) but in European terms it’s sizeable enough. At this point it is possible to imagine one is far away.
The students are back — fortunately — and campus was busy today. All the same I want to epitomise the day with this unpeopled shot. If even recycling bins, and yellow warning signs, can look pretty, then you know the light is something special.
There have been a few of these down the years. If the owner — or the parent of the owner — wants to retrieve it, it’s up in Nutclough Woods, near the water race. Though it’s always puzzled me how someone can just lose one boot or shoe, at least, when one is out and about.
Asserting the “Right to Repair” electronic items is in the news (at least, the sort of news that I read); but largely it’s still cheaper to buy another one. We call places like this “recycling centres” these days but one has to wonder just how many of these items do, in the end, get reused.
Being 42 