Another well-lit shot of flora on campus, taken within a few yards of yesterday’s shot. At least the sun is shining at the moment and we have not yet quite hit the usual early December gloom. And look, people! There haven’t been many of them in the last three weeks… And no I don’t care about the asymmetry.
Going on the visual and auditory evidence on this Friday in August, and the occupancy rates of nearby car parks, I might have been the only person to actually be present for work in the Ellen Wilkinson Building today. It was certainly a quiet one, anyway. I like the patterns on this shot, and a general feeling of monochrome calm.
I am still occasionally invited to offer words of wisdom in the professional settings of others. Which is nice, because no one ever listens to you at your own place of work. (Perhaps that’s just me, though.) And one gets the chance to check out classic 1960s brutalist architecture — in this case, the Heslington campus of the University of York — on another pleasant sunny day. There were worse ways to end the working week.
First shot from Manchester since the 6th. Do I really spend so little time there these days? At some yet-to-be-determined date in the future, I will, of course, take my last ever shot from there, not so much the city but from campus more specifically. I will not be working at uni for the rest of my life unless that life ends unexpectedly, and fairly soon. But for now I am still going in. I do not know what this sculpture represents though it has clearly been built from the same stuff, and at the same time, as the building that surrounds the courtyard in which it stands. If I have a favourite place on campus, this is probably it.
My last scheduled day of on-campus teaching in this academic year. Very few turned up, but that’s OK, it was an optional class. Hopefully they are all off in studious contemplation somewhere, like she seems to be: although quite probably she’s just checking social media while she has her fag.
Back to work, and back to campus, at least for today. This was one of those shots where the shapes pleased me so I went for it, and even the red box is fine, it’s part of the composition. The wonky sign is the anomaly, but I could claim that’s deliberate too. (It wasn’t.)
A place I can still find reason to frequent now and again. There were a few students seen to be doing the same (none of mine, though…).
After three pictures of inanimate objects mimicking live things, here we have a usually live thing — campus — as a more inanimate object. Teaching finished last week, and today there really weren’t many people around. And that’s it for me, too, not just in 2024: there will be no more campus shots on here until early February, if things go according to plan.
This is a fairly stock campus shot, but then again it was a fairly stock campus day. At least there are people in it, which is more than has been the case for several other recent photos.
Amongst various (acknowledged) perks of my job I get to visit some world-renowned seats of learning, and the Humboldt University of Berlin is definitely one of the elite. Scholars who have worked here include Einstein, Schopenhauer, Marx, Weber, Hegel, Planck and von Braun, and if you haven’t heard of at least three of those, you need to do some more reading.
There is something terribly autumnal about this shot, even if it was 25ºC and extremely pleasant in Berlin today. But here we are, mid-to-late September, and I suppose it’s an inevitability.
Being 42 