I did want to get a photo of Joe posted from this weekend; after all we did go all the way to Scotland just to check up on him. Well, mostly. This is the first time he has appeared on here since July 23rd last year.
Did I mention Joe was back here for a couple of weeks? Well, here he is. The blanket was not unreasonable considering the recent weather. Great encouragement to spend an afternoon in. The movie — Gimme Shelter.
The family’s annual concession of a bit of exercise, alongside the eating and drinking that is also to come. We were only about another fifteen minutes from the pub at this point. Happy Christmas to you all.
It’s not really accurate to say that we came up to Dundee to bring Joe “home” for Christmas. Home, for him, is up here now. You can’t see the windows of his place on this shot but it’s close by. But he was returned to Yorkshire, at least — by 4pm. I like the zones of red on this shot, spacing themselves across the bottom.
Back to Dundee then, and back to the storage facility, in which, a few weeks ago, the contents of Joe’s room in halls were deposited. This place reminds me of nothing so much as that scene in Matrix: Reloaded where there are all these ‘back doors’. I expected a hundred Agent Smiths to leap out at us.
This seems a very long time ago now. Another reason that I could not sort out my dead Mac for as long as I did was that we had to run Joe back up to his second year of uni in Dundee (of which more shortly). Two days before, we had the latest in what seems a series of farewell meals. Doubtless there’ll be more, unless of course this time he never comes back at all.
It’s three-quarters of an hour into the afternoon, he’s still in his dressing gown and wearing odd socks. Guess a first year at uni hasn’t changed Joe all that much.
Including this shot Joe has appeared on 142 days of this blog, an average of about once every 26.5 days, and the most depicted person on here. But this is his first shot since 9th September, a date located just before he went off to university. However, here he is back from said posting. Different? Perhaps, a little.
There remains a Joe-shaped hole in the house at the moment. But perhaps this shot, taken on a rare foray into his unoccupied room, is evidence that we didn’t pack him off to Dundee after all. Although decomposition has set in pretty fast, if that is indeed the case.
The beginning of what will probably be a trilogy of pictures. On Saturday Joe leaves home — at least for university, in Dundee. We took him out for dinner tonight, not very far away (hence this also becomes the 1,500th Hebden Bridge picture to feature on the blog). Of course I sincerely hope this will not be his ‘last supper’. But whether he will ever live here again in the truly permanent sense that he has for the last 18 years, five months and five days (he has never lived in any other house than he does now) — who knows… But that’s the thing about the future, isn’t it? Who knows?
Being 42 