This agreeable piece of whimsy sits in the Cafe Torrelli outside Kew Gardens tube station. I don’t do advertising on here but lunch was pleasant, and I ate better than this guy seems to have recently.
It was a nice café and I certainly needed a decent breakfast this morning. Getting down to the fine details of the compsition, I’d rather the pole in the centre wasn’t there, but otherwise this works for me — though of course if she had been smiling I might not have used it. So it goes with irony.
Spinningfields is the bit of Manchester city centre by the John Rylands Library, behind me at this point and outside which I was sat waiting for my second 2pm Monday class to start. The lack of people in the vicinity was the first thing I noticed and prompted the taking of this shot; an attempt to get a pleasing mix of line and colour, basically. Clare says she ‘likes the turquoise’, and who am I to argue?
Paid one of my occasional visits to campus today; I count 22 pictures in Manchester in 2024, so one every 10 days, and not all necessarily because of work. Not that there seem to be many people around when I do turn up, although this is excusable in August.
It’s been a few months since I did a self-portrait, and the prospect of this one did occur to me while sat having a pre-meeting cup of tea in Tim Hortons, pondering how we can find ways to continue the collaboration that has brought me here three times now. I am here sat in more or less the same spot from which I took this shot in October 2021, and armed with the knowledge of the venue, the building in the background and Google Maps you can probably pinpoint the exact location should you wish to.
Since I last changed planes there in 2015, on the way to Kilimanjaro, Istanbul has built a completely new airport about 30 mies out of the city which is now the second-busiest airport in Europe after Heathrow. It did seem to me that you could catch a plane from there to just about anywhere, certainly in Europe, Africa and Asia — a landmass of which it occupies a very strategic point, and always has done.
I was there early, left early, but so did a lot other people — this moment of solitary contemplation was not characteristic of the whole. This becomes only the second shot in 4,652 days to be taken between 5 and 6am — the other also being in an airport, Manchester’s, while on my way to Moscow in January 2017.
Very little happens in Windhoek on a Sunday, except some football, which is where I went. But enough pictures of football get on here, so I will spare you that. The stadium was on the edge of town, and in anticipation of the long queues which formed for the single ticket booth (behind me as I took this), these guys were opportunistically setting up before the match — and why not, I bought a beer from them, certainly. The landscape seems typical of the surroundings of the capital.
I assume the visual pun is deliberate. Is that Minnie Mouse, or her male counterpart? I think Minnie. Either way, the first mouse to appear on here in 12+ years…. kinda. Taken through the window of one or other of Hebden Bridge’s innumerable cafés, I forget which one this is exactly. Perhaps it would have been nice to have not had the reflections, but it is what it is.
And so breakfast, and then home again. Had the shot not captured the eye of the woman in the kitchen, there would have been nothing to show here: though I guess his ears are shapely enough.
This is not particularly Toronto-specific. There are at least three, and probably more, blatant electrical wires running across the shot in various directions. There are all sorts of reflections intruding and the head resides above what appears to be a fusebox. Nevertheless this is certainly my most interesting shot of the day, it feels to me like a collage. (The food in this place had similar characteristics — that is, random and possibly incompatible things nevertheless pushed together into the same space — but that’s another story.)
Being 42 