I am still occasionally invited to offer words of wisdom in the professional settings of others. Which is nice, because no one ever listens to you at your own place of work. (Perhaps that’s just me, though.) And one gets the chance to check out classic 1960s brutalist architecture — in this case, the Heslington campus of the University of York — on another pleasant sunny day. There were worse ways to end the working week.
Pud (a.k.a. Sean) is definitely the local wizard with this machine. I mean, I try — others try — but Pud wins. Usually. Kind of like Manchester City, maybe not always, but quite a lot.
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.
These days it’s 8:52 that is my more usual arrival time into Manchester Victoria, on days when I deign to show my face there. Today was early, for me. I had forgotten how much busier it is. Everyone is being sucked towards the ticket gates as if by a tractor beam.
I have had a lot of travelling recently but I have already embarked on a sustained period — four weeks, anyway — of Being At Home. Hence… a view from home. There may be more of these coming up.
Well, I got five out of these six. But we didn’t win the quiz. Lost on a tiebreaker. Goddamit.
I don’t think the woodlouse is getting the best of this encounter. I’m no psychic but whatever thoughts might be going through its little brain at the moment, probably they could be summed up by the word on the poster behind.
As part of the contract that is Being Married to Drew, Clare occasionally gets dragged up remote moorlands, like Meikle Says Law in the Lammermuir Hills — the top of this (a County Top) being somewhere in the vague brown moorland to top right. This was the final stage back to the car. I call it the ‘last climb for now’ because I assume she might be motivated to do another one or two in the future before one of us dies…. though who knows for sure?
This is the last of the shots from the current road trip in Scotland, a passage of time which has seen it overtake Australia as the second-most depicted country on here after England.
The tour of Scotland, or at least, the eastern-central part of that country, continued with a visit to “Scotland’s Secret Bunker“, which until 1992 or thereabouts was maintained as the home-to-be of government in Scotland were that country (and presumably the rest of the UK) ever to be taken out by a couple of dozen nuclear missiles. It says a lot for the managerial mindset that a significant amount of money was spent on building and maintaining this place, with its various dormitories, a broadcasting station, two cinemas, a canteen (still in use, for visitors), state-of-the-art air conditioning and fire protection and various Monitoring and War Rooms (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”). Plus a clinic, as pictured here with its touches of black humour.
That this is now open to visitors, albeit privately owned and charging a healthy price (£50 for the three of us), is some consolation but begs a natural question — where’s the current version of this? Or versions, as there were long-standing and fairly plausible rumours that another one of these sat up on Ashdown Forest in Sussex, near Crowborough where I grew up. And how much do they cost in terms of, say, nurses’ or teachers’ salaries? The place was definitely worth a visit, if only to invoke such questions in Joe’s mind.
Joe makes his first appearance on the blog since December. Why this window? Why the post title? This is Doune Castle, and some 51 years ago, in 1974, Michael Palin and Terry Jones were stood by this very window during the filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Doune stood in for at least four different castles in the movie. “But mother…..” “Father, lad, father.” “But father….. I don’t want to marry her, I just want to, want to…..” (The ignorant can check out the scene at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3YiPC91QUk)
Being 42 