More flowers. Then again, it is spring: a sunny, but chilly day today. If this is taken to represent my spending time today frolicking in the countryside, it shouldn’t be — teaching has restarted and I spent the whole day on campus. These bluebells sprout outside the entrance to the Chemistry building, in which, most of the semester, I have had the late afternoon slot in theatre G54.
As anyone with a lawn, or responsibilities for some other kind of open grassy space, knows, it’s dandelion season. Soon these will sprout their seeds and fill the air with them, and later on, there will be a bunch more dandelions. That’s nature for you, I guess.
More use of other people’s art, but Swindon, where I stayed after yesterday’s walk, seems to have quite a lot of it and much of it is pretty good. Better than covering these hoardings with advertising anyway. I have noticed in Manchester that there is a mural which is simultaneously an advert, however: corporate public art in other words…. Let us hope this trend is generally resisted.
80s music aficionados will surely recognise the work of New Order (and Peter Saville) on the left: what a fine album is Power, Corruption and Lies. Hook and Sumner’s guitars are melodic and brilliant and they’d all discovered Ecstasy too. The 80s peaked right there if you ask me. Marc Almond puts in an appearance as well, and his lot weren’t bad either. Sadly I will never now see Soft Cell live, thanks to Dave Ball popping off this mortal coil last year (RIP). Clare went in 2021 but I was on St Helena at the time: bugger.
Another day with very little to see, but as the sun was shining the garden once again obliges. These little red flowers are due to become green beans, and I believe that’s a junior version already curving itself attractively down towards the bottom of the picture. Vegetables and fruits of all kinds have done very well this year, even for a black-fingered (opposite of green-fingered) doofus like me.
A still life. Those who know New Order may see my point with the title of this post. But it is just a random flowerpot, really.
This big patch of daffs is coming into flower rather later than many others in the vicinity, but some confident early adopters have made a start on it. Actually I like this picture more for the bark of the tree, which looks very ancient and Ent-like. This is all in the middle of the UoM campus, not a space normally renowned for feeling rural.
Whatever happened on the 22nd February at 9.55am happened while I was in Dubai, so I do not know the details. But going on the location, at the junction of Booth Street and Mosley Street in Manchester city centre, the ‘serious collision’ was most likely between a car and a tram — something which really shouldn’t happen in broad daylight. The tram is never going to come off worse in such an encounter. One therefore assumes the memorial flowers — note the £3.50 price tag visible on one bunch — are for at least one occupant of the car. And their ghost keeps a careful watch.
(OK, actually I’m the ‘ghost’, but it does look a little eerie, and was something I did not notice at the time of taking the shot.)
I wasn’t flying from Cape Town back home, in case you were wondering, but instead to St Helena, for my fourth visit. Who can ever say these things for sure, but it’s possibly my last — put it this way, it’s the last, for now, for which I have the money, or rather, for which someone else has given me the money, in this case the British Academy (to whom thanks are due).
Whomever resides in this particular spot these days has definitely made their last visit to this remote little island, though. There are worse places to spend eternity.
Being 42 