Time for a summer holiday. Time for the blog’s 36th country: Iceland. Time for tiny but endearing museums devoted to the Icelandic punk rock scene from the 1970s on, built in old subterranean public toilets. The fabled landscape of Iceland? I’ll capture this if it stops raining. It’s forecast to: eventually.
I had declared an unofficial moratorium on pictures of building sites in Manchester but I don’t mind this one. What it does not show is the huge scale of the Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD: eventually to be renamed after some corporate donor or other I’m sure). Since being depicted rising from the ground back in January 2018 it has taken on vast scale, like a modern cathedral. No wonder my employer is worried about its cash reserves.
Joe finished his GCSE exams a couple of weeks ago and so now, like all the UK’s 15-16 year olds, has an extended summer holiday, interrupted only insofar as his parents nag him to do things to get him out of the house. Attending part of the annual allotment summer tidy up (July is inspection month) didn’t seem to enthuse him much though. But the redcurrants are ready to eat (all six of them).
And you thought all bees lived in hives, correct? Well, apparently not. Some bees are solitary and if one wants to be nice to them, building a little place like this in the secluded corner of a garden is one way to do it; they like nesting in the tubes. None seem to be at home today in this one that my in-laws have set up, however.
On 2nd July 1999 Clare and I were married at the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster, and today we were back there with some friends and family for a 20th anniversary reunion, which was small-scale, informal and a great deal of fun. It was excellent to just hang out with the people we’re still in touch with and see how things have changed — or not — across those two decades. “20 years eh? Blimey” was the general conversational tone of the day, but that was fine.
But although I do try to make these blog pix more-or-less representative of the day… Look! it’s a meerkat watching us! And meerkats are not the usual fauna you expect to see, not in Lancaster on a Saturday morning anyway. But there it was, in the small zoo that is up on the top of the hill by the Memorial. So though I agonised briefly about this choice, sorry, but the meerkat wins. Too cute by half.
A warm and sunny day, too warm really to be out yomping another ten miles over the Lake District, but I think I survived it. The foxgloves were certainly relishing it. Pictured on the descent of Steel Fell, which is up there to the right, and above the valley of Greenburn Bottom (a name, which if unpicked, could result in all sorts of images).
The sun appears to have arrived in Hebden Bridge, bringing with it the bugs. But whatever bugs actually are, most of them in a British summer are not usually turquoise, with orange legs.
A sign that I have passed many times over the last years, and yet never depicted on here before today. Is there a reason for this — either way? Probably not. Was the message apposite today? Also probably not, but I like it anyway. I have got on many wrong trains down the years, as I’m sure we all have. Yet here we all are.
Could John Logie Baird have foreseen ‘the box set’, I wonder. Perhaps so — after all it’s not radically removed from the novel as Dickens wrote it. With his exams finished, Joe here adopts a position he’ll doubtless choose to remain in all summer, although we’re working on it. Meanwhile, Clare knits to relieve the excitement.
It’s nice to be reminded that the canal that runs through the very centre of Manchester still operates properly, a couple of hundred years after it was first built; and as ever, shots like these also remind me that this is the same canal, the Rochdale Canal, as runs through Hebden Bridge. So this boat could have been chugging through my home town a week or so ago. I imagine a few things about this scene have changed since the 1820s, however.
Being 42 