Thursday 2nd April 2024, 12.40pm (day 5,334)

Good to be home, and on a pleasant day. There are new places to sit. Or, some kind of artwork. If it wasn’t then, it is now.

This pub at Manchester Victoria station has not been opened all that long (a couple of years by now, I think) but it has rapidly become a Pub of Choice in the city. I don’t do advertising on this blog, except when I do. The dog belongs to one of the regular bar staff: when she’s working, it just hangs out, happily enough, with the rest of us.

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.

An estate agent might still describe this a “Manchester city centre apartment, including private balcony, with intimate views of the River Medlock below”. The reality is that this building has been swathed in scaffolding for months now (certainly since at least early February, as this pic proves), and the Medlock is a litter-speckled concrete drainage channel at this point. I doubt those stairs have much purpose in existence, either.

When academics grow up they still behave as their students do: sitting at the back and hoping no one picks on them for input. I wonder how many chairs there are at the University: tens of thousands I imagine. Perhaps the entire student population could sit down there at once, but many of them would definitely be visible at the front.

It’s not been the most dynamic week, though work was done. Time to pack up and look forward to the weekend.
The sun deigned to make a brief appearance this morning, shining on the chairs of the breakfast room at our hotel. Though it was the last chance to see it on our trip to Eskdale, as we were back in Hebden by lunchtime. But even if the weather has been somewhat dubious, how good was it to have got away for a while.