The Campaign for Real Christmas long ago lost its fight to restrict this festival to December, and so Hebden Bridge, like most other places, can’t wait for November to end before switching on its decorations and accompanying this with the sale of vast amounts of plastic that within two weeks will be in landfill somewhere. But the photo opportunities this affords were better than those at work today, so here we go, it’s Advent — here, anyway.
We are getting longer platforms! And lifts to and from them, from the subway! It’s a miracle…. or will be, if we ever get the train service to match.
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.
Most of the local train service remains a scandal of national proportions (some 2,000 trains cancelled across Northern’s domain since the new timetable was launched, blunderingly, on 20th May) but I must admit I have been a small locus of punctuality all week. But no one should have to suffer a 6.30am train too often. Or, two of them.
OK, maybe I didn’t take the picture on May Day. But that’s when I’m posting it, so it still seems appropriate. Let’s hope spring is here to stay now.
Mathilda demands to be only the third animal to definitively make the blog three times (though Humph the heron has a case to have beaten her to it, if the various pictures do indeed depict the same bird). She looks annoyed at the neglect, and that at some point since her last appearance, her collar has gone. And she’s got a bit greyer, but then again haven’t we all.
I confidently predict January 2018 will play itself out without a great deal happening in any way. Being taken out for lunch (by the wife) was the main event of the day…
Oooh — must be nearly Christmas. The carol singers are out. But it’s a nice way to raise money, in this case for the Railway Children charity (protecting street children in India, East Africa and the UK); and greeting us poor commuters as we stagger home on another freezing cold evening.
Red Helen DJs at the Nutclough City Limits night at the Trades Club every couple of months or so. She used to run the legendary Brighton Beach nights in Leeds. We are lucky to have her. This woman is one of the few people in the world who can get me dancing. As happened tonight.
This mallard and I were both watching the world go by, above the Hebden Water on this Sunday afternoon…. the first real bite of autumn, I think. Wonder what he thinks about it all.
Being 42 