It’s not been the most exciting of weeks and local flowers and walls are about the limit of my ambitions for a time. Summer colours perhaps, but no summer weather: the monsoon remains clamped overhead with few signs of it shifting just yet.
It’s becoming harder to crank myself up in the mornings to get the 06:32 — best train it might be, when I need to pull an early start at work, but it’s now still dark even when it deposits me in Manchester city centre, a state of affairs which will last until into February. Some places have the lights on at that time, but by no means all. This should be the last of a run of a couple of months spent only in England, but I’m off somewhere else for a few days tomorrow.
Our exertions of yesterday finished late enough to make crashing at the in-laws’ desirable. Morecambe was still a fine, sunny place this morning however. These flowers may, or may not, be columbines — the identification is hesitant. I like the one in the centre, though, just opening up, stretching its tentacles like a little octopus. Or pentopus maybe.
Things have been happening in the outside world of course, but on a purely personal level it’s been an uneventful period: 12 of the last 16 pictures taken in Hebden Bridge. Went on a walk today mainly to give myself something to photograph; the buttercups helped it work out. I’m off on my travels again tomorrow however.
A wholly unexciting day in every respect, so this is a stock photo pulled out of the bag. This patio belongs to a house just a couple of minutes’ walk away and I pass it frequently, been meaning to picture it at some point because I like this moon-face decoration. As nothing else happened today — it finally makes it.
I’m sure that somewhere in the textual ether there’s a better title for this shot but it wouldn’t come to me. I see the slug as a kind of advance scouting party, keeping itself inconspicuous while it checks out the rich pickings ahead. As it wasn’t my garden, I left it to it’s task…
Spring continues to try to struggle through the general atmosphere of chill and damp. Taken by the Stubbing Holme lock on the canal, heavy with water thanks to the snow melt from Thursday’s unexpected fall.
Sometimes these photos are planned. When Joe (birthday yesterday) was born the ground was strewn with crocuses (croci?) like these and my mum-in-law predicted the flowers would become a symbol of this event in our lives. She was right. I passed these growing plants in the Sackville Street gardens in Manchester yesterday (home of the Alan Turing statue) but there was no time to get a shot. Repeating the walk to work today though I spent a few minutes there to see what I could do to mark this sign of spring.
Nearly four weeks ago now (it was the evening that I returned from Dubrovnik) a pedestrian was run over and killed in the centre of Hebden Bridge. These flowers appeared at the spot within a couple of days, and remain there still, wilted and fading but still constituting a memorial to the dead man.
An absolutely glorious day today, a perfect summer’s day. These flowers were pictured up in Midgehole, near the entrance to Hardcastle Crags, where we were gathering wild garlic to cook and eat with dinner. I love this time of year.
