With a whole day spent at home working online, it was left to the sky to entertain. This looks like a hole in the space-time continuum has opened up above the houses of Heptonstall Road. Or possibly just a break in the clouds near the setting sun.
Clearing, yes — but it had still dumped plenty of rain on us before doing so, and it had siblings on the way. Come take some of our weather, please. We have lots to spare.
Allowing for the fact that the first one of all, August 2011, was depicted only partially, September 2015 will be the fiftieth calendar month of this blog. How many times in those fifty months has this view (or ones like it) saved an otherwise drab day?
Having put myself about a bit over the last couple of weeks — this is only the fourth of May’s pictures to be taken in Hebden Bridge — I had a profoundly inactive day today, spent working at home. Lucky for you this dusk shot manifested itself this evening as you were this close to getting a picture of my feet. Be thankful for small mercies.
Maybe I’m the only one who can see, in this cloudscape, the figure of a kind of zooming, superhero Cloud Man, streaking across the sky with his blond hair flowing behind him in the wind. But as I can see it, that’s why I took the picture.
I don’t claim that reality was quite as dramatic as this — I dropped the red filter on this one — but hell, who said digital photography had to always be about reality? I just massaged the raw ingredients, if you like. It’s something to pass the time while spending another day quarantined in the house. It seems I probably have German measles (rubella), by the way.
Paid a visit to my family today who live over the other side of the Pennines. I am lucky that all my family members basically live in quite good-looking parts of the planet.
Finished work last night too late to get home, but not too late to get down to Brighton and spend the night there rather than in the suburbs. And, well, sometimes you just have to say that you made the right choice.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The only real spiritual benefit one gets from air travel is seeing the world from 30,000 feet. It can be an amazingly beautiful place.
I’ve only ever seen this a couple of times before — a rainbow, or at least a spectrum, high in the air, nowhere near the ground and with no rain in sight. I guess it must be caused by light refracting through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Bad weather on the way perhaps. Let’s hope not: I intend to spend next weekend walking in Norway.
POSTSCRIPT: Have discovered this is something called a ‘circumzenithal arc’. They are not rare as such, but apparently only appear when the sun is at exactly the right angle to ice crystals in high-level clouds, and thus can be seen only in very restricted locations on the ground. So if you do see one, feel privileged – it may well only be visible in a space a few metres around you.
Being 42 