With the closure of the Contact Theatre cafe, adjacent to my office, for all of 2018, Café Muse (at the Manchester Museum) has become the nicest place nearby to buy a lunch. I like this back room, with its tiles and incongruous porthole-style windows. A cool spot to hang out as the tropical weather continues.
Today was even more uneventful than yesterday, but I have been doing stuff, starting by sorting out all my season’s football programmes. There are some games missing here, either because there was no programme available or I lost or didn’t buy one, but the 31 in view here give a nice cultural cross-section of my movements over the last 11 months despite the lack of any real photographic quality. Although it will always bug me that I got the Leeds and Hassocks ones the wrong way round.
A wholly uneventful weekend. These were not even my cocktails.
A year ago today I was in Siberia and Britain was having its latest inconclusive and pointless electoral spasm. But early June 2018 is a highly uneventful time. With a cloudy day spent working at home I came as close as I have in any of these last 2,479 days to having nothing to photograph, and that’s eventually how this blog will end: there simply will be nothing more to say. Maybe this one doesn’t say much… but it is, at least, something.
The weather doesn’t show any real signs of getting crappier. Expect hosepipe bans by the end of the month, at this rate. These two jackdaws had found a shady spot to shelter and wonder what the strange human was pointing at them from across the road.
Two LCD Soundsystem gigs in a year… But being brilliant and versatile, they could play a whole different set than last time in London. No one is ever going to do high-quality gig photography from the next-to-back row high up in the circle and with my camera: but it’ll do to document the evening. James Murphy is a master lyricist (“Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut… it comes back, but it’s never the same”) and superb front man yet always remains a slightly chubby, unshaven fortysomething in yesterday’s T-shirt. Which is why we love him.
It is perhaps better not to speculate on the fate of the former owner of these spectacles, forlornly lying abandoned on Canal Street in Manchester early today… One assumes that the position of the, let’s say, splodge is coincidental. But I guess it might not be.
Started the first day of my working week in London, travelled to Manchester, finished it at home in Hebden Bridge. This guy may not have left Argyle Square in that time, but I’m sure he was just as productive as me in the end. I like all the vaguely different colours of brick on this shot.
It is undeniable that there have been a lot of football matches on this blog this season, 2017-18. But today was definitively the last. The players of Ellan Vannin — a.k.a. the Isle of Man — warm up before their ConIFA World Football Cup tie with Barawa — a.k.a. the Somalian diaspora in London. If you want to be a country and play international football, ConIFA is the place to do it. But this did not diminish the day: like most of the other 39 games of my season (not all depicted on here….) it’s been enjoyable. But less football for a while now. I promise.
In both 2013 and 2015 our plum tree fruited in ludicrous profusion. In 2015 we were taking bags of fresh plums down to the pub and giving them away, we had too many to use: the tree produced about 45 pounds of fruit (20kg) that year. Not so much in the last couple of years — but looking at it right now, it’ll be a bumper harvest in 2018. As long as the branches can bear the weight.
Being 42 