The latest in an occasional series on this blog — Abandoned Shoes, n+1. (A previous episode is here, for example.) As this one is waiting at the top of the subway that leads down and into King’s Cross station, perhaps it’s just trying to get home. I am reminded of a joke from an early series of Red Dwarf about “shoes having souls”.
This afternoon I paid a first-ever visit to the town of Pontefract, which has a significant amount of history, as is first of all indicated by its name of almost pure Latin — pontus fractus means ‘broken bridge’. Its castle was once the second-largest in the country and in its dungeon, King Richard II was starved to death in 1400.
But while I did take pictures of some of this history, in the end I am going with the surreal sight of these mannequin’s legs at the local footie ground. The absurdity of life and its trivia, and all that.
I would not normally go into Manchester as late as this, particularly not on a Friday. But my employers said in order to get my new hardware, hard-wired, I needed to pay homage at the Desk of Service. In person. So be it — I ultimately cared as little as the owner of these legs.
So begins the long journey home. Allowing for the time difference, some 28 hours elapsed door to door, between leaving the office in Melbourne city centre at about noon (Eastern Australian time) on Monday and getting back home on what was Tuesday morning UK time, but felt like late afternoon to the body clock. This first shot of two was taken only an hour or so into it all. There is a strange levitaty quality about the bag, don’t you think?
Another abandoned shoe, presumably its owner had a particularly good Friday night. Like with the bins yesterday, I accept in this shot another usual spoiler of composition — the lamp-post — because here it works perfectly.
Some people insist on doing this kind of thing every day on their holidays. I have never been one of them, but occasionally I indulge. Pictured at Praia da Rainha (Queen’s Beach), Cascais.
I took another picture I quite liked this morning, at Leeds station; but it was kinda brown, and the last two have also been very brown. So here is some colour, not to mention shape, on the blog courtesy of the wife’s legs.
Being 42 