After, like everyone else, having ‘a couple of years off due to Covid’, the annual Imperial Stormtrooper Convention gathers once again in hall Darth 4 of the Emperor Palpatine Memorial centre. “It was so nice to be able to strap on the white plastic again”, one delegate was heard to mutter through the helmet.
Or, maybe, it’s a Lego construction, exhibited at this year’s Bricktastic in Manchester. You decide.
It is five years to the day since I took probably my favourite picture of this blog, and certainly the one I worked hardest to get — the one of the summit of Kilimanjaro. In 2020, such expeditions have become pipe dreams, although being fair about it, there have just been nine pictures in a row that were not taken on home turf. But I am back here in Hebden Bridge for a few days at least, and there’s work to get back to. Here, there at least remain toyshop owners with a sense of wry humour.
21 years ago today I did not walk down the aisle with Clare, because we didn’t get married in a church: instead the venue for our wedding was the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster. Either way… happy anniversary.
The heady feeling of freedom engendered by three days in a row out of Hebden was decisively brought to an end. I had to work — which means, these days, staying at home (it is now over three months since I was last on campus on March 8th). And it was cold, too: cold enough to put the heater on, anyway. In the background, Lego guy turns his back in disgust at this lack of moral fibre.
This Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton is made of Lego — some 80,000 bricks, apparently. Currently the centrepiece of the ‘Art of the Brick’ exhibition in Manchester. Which (review coming up) is not bad, but the creator’s claim to be making high art is a little hard to sustain. On the other hand, who doesn’t like a dinosaur, even a plastic one.
Advent calendars which just involved opening a door and seeing a picture of an elf or something have long been deemed passé; now there must be something to consume, or play with, or build. As in the Harry Potter Lego Multimedia Cross-Disciplinary Advertising calendar that the wife has acquired this year. Day 2 — build the Hogwarts Express, for Master Potter who came out bright and fresh on Dec 1 (that’s him to bottom right).
A Saturday without a football match to go to. How odd. Instead I paid a visit (amongst other things) to the wife’s treatment room down in town. The tools for Lego therapy are all there awaiting the end of the post-Christmas hiatus. What is Lego therapy? Art therapy — but with Lego. It works… so I’m led to understand.
Clare does Lego, so for the second time, we visited Bricktastic where there were many examples of the art of building just about anything with small plastic bricks (and many other components). The machines that, via a variety of means, transported hundreds of balls round and round the room were works of pointless genius. Moving parts and low lights meant I had to use a flash to capture them hence the hopeless over-exposure of this shot, but so it goes sometimes.
After the cider tasting, the Lego therapy. i2c2 is a conference devoted to (as its name suggests), “Innovation, Inspiration and Creativity”… and Lego seems as good a way to get this kind of outcome as anything else (as the wife would doubtless agree). Asked then to create the ‘ideal librarian’ in Lego, I (as a non-librarian) decided the epitome for me was someone who could help me navigate the maze of info: hence this model. At least my Lego avatar looks happy at the prospect, anyway.
The title is irony — as this was an indolent day all round, back at home after our week in the Lakes. Don’t expect much to happen this week…
Being 42 