Two mornings in a row on campus. Well, I should put in a bit of effort now and again. Not that many other people were doing so today. The solitary, distant figure on the left is the only one to make it into this shot.
Jays are very handsome birds and it’s a shame we don’t see more of them. I could say that this specimen is the second jay to appear on the blog, but it may be the same one as depicted just under four years ago — as this photo was taken only around 100 yards from that one; both in close proximity to the Ellen Wilkinson building on campus (a.k.a. ‘the office’). I can’t spot any obvious differences in plumage, and I have a feeling that corvids like this can happily live for a decade or more, so I think I will declare this to be only the third bird — after two herons (Humph and Maris Crane) — that might have appeared on here more than once.
The bee is the symbol of the city of Manchester (something to do with ‘industry’), so it seems appropriate that this guy and his colleagues were busying themselves on campus this afternoon — certainly they are showing more industry than the human inhabitants are at the moment.
These ‘pagdoas’ have sprung up around campus recently. At least we have more spaces in which we can start getting back to face-to-face. This is one of those shots where I worry that the symmetry is not quite what it could be. But it doesn’t matter too much.
Perhaps it is a little unfair to return to this theme again, because coming back through Manchester city centre in the afternoon, it was busier than I have seen it in a very long time — probably since Christmas 2019. The British populace is supporting the hospitality industry in its time of need, put it that way. But the teaching spaces at uni remain unused. However, I have some one-to-one meetings to organise and this gazebo looks a good place to check out. Like everyone else, I hope the sunshine continues for several weeks.
Misty and cold at home, but sunny and mild in Manchester all day, sun which filled the public spaces of campus with students, at least compared to how it’s been for the last two months. ‘Without making a political point out of it, the idea of ‘lockdown’ is just no longer being confirmed by observation. Small businesses are still being shafted, but otherwise, many people have obviously just returned to living their lives.
This is the exterior of the Alliance Manchester Business School, built for a vast amount of money and now going completely to waste, along with the rest of the campus; monuments to a time past, now standing in a city of the dead. If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have you been to Manchester lately? Nothing has happened there since October. A sense of rot is setting in, and if you (like the publicly cheery city council) think that ‘recovery’ is all just a matter of a wave of the legislative wand, I say that’s optimistic, at best.
The vast MECD, or Manchester Engineering Campus Development, is pretty much finished. In embryonic form it was first depicted way back in early January 2018. It now dwarfs the old Oddfellows Hall, which it has part-swallowed, yet what you see rising here is only a small part of the whole.
Thing is — and I am very sure that, having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on this new plaything, the senior management of UoM are keenly aware of this point — is this now the whitest and most mammoth of white elephants? And what of all the blocks of new student accommodation, and hotels, and office blocks, and all the other city-centre property developments that global capital has been poured into over the last decade or so? If you think the economy’s taken a Covid hit thus far, wait for the whole global commercial property market to go tits-up. This piece of economic elastic does not have infinite tolerance. I predict we’ll be coaxed back out into our offices soon enough: if not, they’ll hear the crash on Pluto.
The fact that I am still going to campus, and intend to go two or three days a week through November, suggests that ‘lockdown’ as a concept is an even bigger con this time round than it was in March. The students in this hall have paid great sums of money and — in many cases — travelled thousands of miles to be in Manchester, but we can’t even see them from across a twenty-foot room. What do we do about it? I dunno, disobey somehow. At least the leaves are still just about hanging on.
Astonishing as this may seem, our Joe is now at the stage where he is putting together applications for university in 2021-22. Staffordshire University, in Stoke-on-Trent, is on the list, but all any of them can offer at the moment are ‘virtual open days’ which provide info, sure, but not a feeling for the place. And that’s essential if you’re going to spend three years anywhere. So we arranged for our own little tour of inspection today, both of the campus and the city. And despite it being dead, like the set of a post-apocalypse movie dead — the campus tour did not seem to be offputting. Perhaps then we will be seeing more of this place in the future.
Being 42 