It’s a stock local shot, from a stock local walk, but all the same, there are worse things to do on the last Sunday of the summer than to trundle out in the direction of Stoodley Pike. Not that I actually climbed up to the monument itself today, but it doesn’t photograph any better there than it does from below.
With little else to do today (the football season hasn’t started yet), I visited the Calderdale Industrial Museum and learned some things about local industry around the Halifax area that I didn’t know before. Like, John Mackintosh became very rich and successful, founding the company that bore his name, and whose successors still manufacture Quality Street chocolates in Halifax, thanks only to the cooking of his wife Violet. She was the one who invented modern toffee — he was the one who called himself “The Toffee King”, though.
But for the photo, I’ll go with this mass of red and blue strands of wool, all converging into the Jacquard loom that is currently operating to the right, having been turned on for a few minutes during which time it produced plenty of noise and a few dozen lines of carpet.
The first shot taken in Hebden Bridge since 25th January. It’s nice to travel, but it is also nice to come home. Even if the weather while I was away was wintrier here than in Canada — this much is obvious.
This picture was taken — at least, according to the time stamp allocated by my camera — at two seconds past noon, so here we are with exactly 12 hours, or 1/730th, of the year to go. As it was Sunday and we had a dinner date at a pub above Todmorden, there was no excuse not to get out, have some exercise and enjoy the scenery. (The sheep do this every day, of course.) This kind of thing is a significant contributor to the fact I’m still living here in Calderdale after 21.5 years.
And so ends 2023, not a bad year at a personal level I suppose but no particular changes were noted, for better or worse — what enthuses me and what vexes me today are all more or less the same as they were a year ago, or indeed two. The rest of the world, well, that seems able to screw itself up without my active intervention. This blog will continue — generative AI-free — as long as I still have something to document. My favourite picture of the year? Probably the gloriously camp duck captured on 20th September. Getting that salmon leaping the falls in Scotland on 11th July was quite a coup, and Clare, taken the following day (12th July) insists she get the award for ‘best human’. Happy New Year to you all.
From leaving Gareth’s place in St Helena on Saturday morning, to arriving back in Hebden Bridge at about 3.30pm on Sunday afternoon, was a 28-hour journey. Had the pilot of the third aircraft felt like it, I could have been dropped off three hours earlier: but I probably wouldn’t have survived that experience. Nevertheless, here we are, directly over home, with my house just about visible to the bottom right of this image. Centre bottom is Heptonstall and up the valley curves to Midgehole and the woods of Hardcastle Crags. I don’t know whether we were actually at 15,000 feet here, but it’s a reasonable guess — if it looks lower, I did use a certain amount of zoom.
No more flights for a while now: there’s work to do at home. Well, at least until I go away again.
A fairly standard ‘tourist’ shot of my home town, but what the hell, it was a nice day and it does look good from this particular angle. I nearly took it monochrome, but that meant the two figures on the bridge became very camouflaged, and I think they set it off nicely.
Flat land is at a premium in the valley, so round here, the recreation grounds are built high up: as with the Astleys, a set of one cricket and three football pitches above Sowerby Bridge. There are worse things to do on a Sunday morning.
The last day of my latest break from work provided an opportunity for Clare and I to finally finish off the Calderdale Way, which we started 15 months ago. Nine legs and 50 miles later we returned to Heptonstall church and thus completed the circumnavigation of our home valley. On the way, some very fine views, even if they were of familiar places. This is one of the rare shots that just about gets away with having a telephone wire stretched across it: it’s there, if you know where to look.
A pleasant, sunny, but surprisingly cold Easter Monday, Hebden Bridge and all points around being swished by a breeze straight off the North Pole. Did anything biblically happen on Easter Monday? Or is it just a modern excuse to give the plebs another day off in lieu? Either way — Heptonstall was looking good, as it always does. It’s been there for a few hundred years, it’s had time to bed in.
I accept that we are not strictly trapped, whether at home or in the Calder valley itself: but with nothing open out there except a few shops (and by no means all), it’s still house arrest in all but name. I agree there are worse places to be stuck but this afternoon and evening I felt like my head was going to pop unless this ends soon. But there are too many people who like this situation — profit from it, even. These are the ones who will drag us all down.
