The last time anyone other than myself or Joe was depicted on the blog was 4th January, the afternoon before Bojo the Clown put us all under house arrest again. Since then, portrait opportunities have been very rare. This can almost be considered a crowd by recent standards. Though even the dog now takes its lead from us and remains apart. Who’s going to actually start to rebuild the bridges? It won’t just happen.
It’s Joe, and his generation, that I feel sorriest for right now. He turns 18 in a few weeks yet is spending this time locked in a room with, or rather without, everyone else. At least he’s still prepared to get out into the landscape now and again: here, on Brown Wardle Hill, above Whitworth in Lancashire.
Of course, this is not a model, it is a real landscape above the (awkwardly-named) town of Penistone, in South Yorkshire. But though there area actually two large turbines to the right, it sure looks to me like one is the shadow of the other, cast on the backcloth of a diorama built in a shoe box, or something. And the patchwork of frost and field, the general graininess of the picture…. seems fake to me. Perhaps there is a model railway below, just out of shot.
If anyone in the UK has any better ideas for what to do with this Friday evening I’d love to hear them. Have a good weekend y’all.
Two days of more-or-less constant rain and the Hebden Water looked like this in mid-afternoon. The general approach to flood defence here still seems to be, essentially, just cross your fingers and hope.
The world is still out there, somewhere…. so we’ve been told. Across the valley, there’s a house that doesn’t seem to have removed its Christmas lights yet. Meanwhile, at home, the movie collection keeps a semblance of entertainment ticking over.
… to pubs, or anywhere else, until Our Glorious Leader decides. The only person with whom I had a face-to-face conversation today, family members excepted, was some paranoid stoner who started hurling abuse at me as I walked to the shop. Other than that, deadness. Do we have a government — a society, even — so lacking in wit or intelligence that this is really the best we can do?
This ersatz life continues. Walking is about the only entertainment available — at least, the only one that should be depicted on here. The monument on Stoodley Pike has featured several times on this blog (follow the tag); the houses are the northern end of Heptonstall; and last week’s snow has all gone, for now.
The topography of my home town is such that many of the paths that wind up and down the particularly steep hillsides have never been turned into roads. This one winds up the steep slope of Lee Wood, past the cricket club to the road at the top. I took it today for variety: expect a lot of ‘local’ colour at this time, ‘cos local is all that’s on offer.
Hibernation continues. And it’s cold out there. Although a beautiful day today, in many ways. But I imagine few people in Britain are going to remember January 2021 at all, in the long run.
Being 42 