Passed on a walk through the countryside, on a muggy day. I dislike this kind of agricultural mess (why should someone feel free to litter the place just because they farm it?) while at the same time liking it as a subject for a picture.
So I find myself in Glasgow for a couple of days, meaning the four biggest cities in Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee) have all made it onto the blog in less than four months. I don’t know the place well but at least this afternoon proved that it does give good cemetery.
Estate agents would describe this as ‘in a highly desirable location with a world-class view, but in need of renovation and lacking certain amenities’. In other words it isn’t on a road and doesn’t have mains anything, which is probably why it’s been abandoned for many years. This is Clough Head Farm, off the Widdop road above Hardcastle Crags near Hebden Bridge. I’m still in training for the walk I will begin a week from today.
Three days of work to go. For me, that is. This is how I feel.
This is taken in the same churchyard as the photo a day short of a year ago: the same Saturday of the year, that is. And for the same reason, in that we were seeing Joe’s annual drama club show in the attached church hall. But I am not supposed to take and publish pictures of all that (child protection and all that) so here are some memorials instead. The fact that this has all their blank back sides on gives it a rather eerie feel, I think.
Manchester yesterday was the exception — I’m back in London. This is Senate House, which contains the administrative offices and the main library of London’s university colleges. It was finished in 1937 and was one of the tallest buildings in the city at that time. In WW2 it was occupied by the Ministry of Information, and George Orwell’s wife Eileen worked there in the censorship department, thus inspiring the physical description of the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was also a key location in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
The title has a double meaning. Yes, it’s a new era for Victoria station, which after a long period of renovation is now just about finished and looks infinitely better for it. It’s also a new era photographically. Half an hour after taking yesterday’s shot my old Fujifilm Finepix camera conked out, I’ve had it some three years now and used it (obviously) every day so I suppose it was due to happen at some point. Went into Manchester partly to buy another one. I can’t afford to upgrade however so we are now working with a Canon Sureshot compact. You can work out, through following this blog, whether I get on with it as well as its late predecessor.
And so home again, a 7-hour train journey from Aberdeen to Hebden Bridge. My second return trip up the east coast of Scotland in the last few weeks, so a chance to revisit a theme hit not so long ago, the crossing of the River Tay. The stumps are those of the first Tay bridge which collapsed (due to crappy construction) in a storm shortly after it was built.
Was up at 5am to go to London for the day to work, and did take a gratuitous shot of Hebden Bridge at that time mainly because I have still yet to offer a shot from the hour of 5:00 – 5:59 in my near four years of doing this blog. However, this one twelve hours later was a more creative effort. Taken from the train home, just south of Peterborough.
Left Dundee this morning after an enjoyable stay. Anyone travelling south from there by rail will begin their journey with a crossing of the Tay Bridge, scene of one of Britain’s worst rail disasters when the original, and poorly-built, version of the bridge collapsed in high winds in 1879, taking a train and 75 people with it. (The only survivor was the locomotive, which was salvaged and remained in service for another 50 years.) Fortunately for us all, the replacement bridge was built rather more durably.
I know this photo teeters on the brink of being deliberately bad but hey, I’m feeling experimental. The rain was sheeting down outside the windows as I crossed on the 0924 Dundee – Edinburgh service, so this is the best I could do. And, of course, this photo is taken from the rail bridge — but it’s a photo of the newer road bridge (completed 1967), with the still-extant shipyard behind.
Being 42 