So ends June, probably the warmest, sunniest month to yet feature on this blog, at least in the UK. The Hebden Bridge Arts Festival is underway, which doubtless explains this collage visible on Market Street — it’s the kind of thing that happens. Better than plastic bags hanging from the foliage, anyway.
Day 2,500 of this blog — six years, ten months and three days, as it happens (give or take a couple of February 29ths). With this being an otherwise mundane day I kept my eye out for occurrences of the figure 2,500 and saw none at all, but there were a couple of £2.50 moments, like this one, which I considered near enough. I also admire this café for printing out all their menus — and laminating them — with a blatant spelling mistake on each: it’s there at the top.
Will there be 2,500 more days? I guess I’m keeping going, for now, though there won’t be a great deal happening over the next few weeks at least. Day 3,000 will come some time in late October 2019 I reckon: which doesn’t seem so far away.
With no running water on our allotment we depend for irrigation there either on rain or on lugging up liquid from the house. The buckets are waiting… but the rain has not come. So the bottles go up the hill, again and again.
A double meaning in the title of today’s post. The good weather continues, that’s the first thing. But it’s also a time in which I am sticking around familiar places for a good long spell. There has always been a steady drip-feed of new locations on the blog. The only previous sustained period without them was spring 2016, broken when we went to Portugal that summer. Football matches in obscure places have kept up the run of new locations in 2017-18 too. But since the season finished at Poulton on May 19th (the last new location) every shot has been from somewhere familiar and this is going to stay the case until well into August.
Still, in such lovely weather — familiarity definitely does not breed contempt. It’s nice to be here.
The sun shows no signs of going away, so rather than wonder when the hosepipe bans and drought orders will come in, let’s just enjoy it — albeit, under cover. Too hot to sit out in direct sunlight for long, even with a beer. Mr John Bailey makes at least his third appearance on the blog.
In work before 8am for the second Monday in a row. But, you know, on a morning like today it’s really not so bad. Hottest day of the year so far.
Hebden Bridge’s annual ‘Handmade Parade’ has featured on here every year since the blog started, and will probably continue to do so. Although it is easy to be blasé about it when it’s seen every June, it remains an amazing outburst of creativity from hundreds of people, done purely for the sake of one performance along the main street of the town, which lasts 90 minutes or so — and for no direct commercial reasons whatsoever. Long may it continue. If someone can look this sophisticated and cool while wearing a large blue cardboard snake’s-head as a hat — then there must be benefits to it.
Saturday morning…. but still Friday night, in practical terms. Clare makes her way back from the party through the streets of Walthamstow. Two notable things about this picture, if we’re being statistically geeky about it: the first time London has made it onto this blog five days in a row; and the latest ‘true night’ shot, in other words, the end of an evening out, beating the previous record holder by five minutes.
My week’s work is done — time for the weekend, which started when Clare arrived to join me in London in the afternoon and I took her to see this exhibition in the Barbican. I saw one of the world’s most famous photos today — Migrant Mother — you’ll know it when you see it. But we weren’t allowed to take photos of that nor the other photos from Dorothea Lange who documented the Great Depression in the USA and the internment of Japanese-Americans in WW2, many photos from these collections were shown today and very interesting it was too.
McGlynn’s pub in Bloomsbury declares this afternoon for the French, before their game against Peru in the World Cup: note the tricolour in the window. What gets me about this shot though is how much Roy Keane looks like a little orange animated version of himself, sort of like Max Headroom….
Being 42 