Halifax’s Piece Hall was built in 1779 and was originally a textile market. It reopened last year after a very expensive restoration project, and certainly is a very smart place now: at the same time it has lost its old ramshackle appeal. Maybe there’s no way of keeping both. It’s not an easy place to photograph from ground level without getting the perpendiculars askew, but I did my best here.
Dukinfield Town of the Manchester League Premier Division have just scored their fifth of the game. It’s safe to say their opponents, Chadderton Reserves, have an uphill struggle to get back into it. I guess here you don’t need to ask which team are which.
Although the game I saw today involved their reserves, rather than the first team, this gives Chadderton FC the dubious distinction of becoming the first team to twice be depicted on this blog conceding a goal (see also 4th August 2018, at their place).
In the time I have been doing this blog, I have made two previous trips to this place, but it has not been documented here for some reason or another. Strange, actually, considering what The Forbidden Corner actually is, a gloriously imaginative folly, a labyrinth where (the first time I visited, at least) I had genuinely no idea what might be around the next corner (forbidden or not). The third trip today was made with my students from Manchester as I had decided that the FC would be a good place to start developing some team-building skills. Better than leaving them up on a moor somewhere, particularly on a rather dull and rainy day like today. Better than being stuck in an office on a Friday, too.
Sofas left on the pavement, that’s one thing. But half a sofa? Like the single abandoned shoe, what’s the story here? Was it just one hell of a party? Has it been sheared off, caught in mid-transition through a wormhole to another dimension?
A morning meeting with a colleague, held in the pleasant surroundings of the Christie Bistro. I had my usual builder’s brew but she went for the mint tea option and I was taken by the appearance of the leaves suspended in the water. As you see here. (I mean, that’s what this blog is, isn’t it? I show you what I see each day…)
Also, a minor milestone — I make this the blog’s 500th Manchester shot.
As well as a profusion of fruit this year does seem to have produced larger-than-usual amounts of fungi. I don’t know what species is this butter-coloured toadstool, but I liked the way one of them had turned up its edges and thus allowed a little pool of water to gather at the top, that then glinted in what sunlight had managed to push through the trees above. Like a little bird-bath in a garden. The fairies gather…
The second monochrome shot in a row but it was a way of bringing some added interest to this view. I worked at home all day and did not leave the house. I know it’s a pretty distinctive view, in relative terms. But it is also everyday, for us at least.
This is one of those junk shops that has grandiose self-image and calls itself an “Antiques Centre” but we’ll let it off. I believe this object is an old typesetting tray, the kind of thing useful when typefaces came as hundreds of small carved pieces of metal. What practical use to anyone it is nowadays, I cannot imagine, but on the other hand it is a pretty cool lump of wood if you ask me. Not that I decided to lug it home or anything.
Football again, but definitely not non-league today. The Etihad Stadium is the home of current, and probably future, champions Manchester City, where even the pre-match watering of the pitch is done on a suitably grandiose scale. To call these massive jets of liquid ‘sprinklers’ rather diminishes them. Better a picture of them in the sunlight than of anything that happened on the pitch today, anyway — at least from my ‘visiting fan’ perspective.
Being 42 