Ten full days have passed without a single human appearing on this blog, in any form. Here are two — one frozen in time, idealised, commercialised. The other mobile, but faceless, distant, dehumanised. I can interact with neither. And the trouble is, I’m not evern sure what is better, any more.
A year has passed since there was a shot taken outside the UK (it was in Bucharest on 2/2/20) and in that time only two of them have been taken outside England. Without going through the stats in detail, it’s probably twenty years since I last spend this amount of uninterrupted time on this island. Am I bothered about this? Not for myself, I’ve decided, but I am when I think about what this change represents. Even going into Manchester seems to risk being subversive these days. These two guys were a welcome flash of hi-vis humanity this morning.
I am still obliged to go into Manchester now and again. It’s good for the step count and the general variety but it’s not an edifying experience. Since March, it’s been a city of the nearly dead. Buses come past plastered in adverts that — in essence — shout “Live In Fear” and “It’s All Your Fault, You Know”. I pointed my camera upwards. This shot is taken from Cross Street; I like the red chimneys, and the corrugations of the tower block peering through the mists behind.
Cheap this may be, but ths squirrel was virtually posing for the camera, if a little nervously. It was one of the few signs of life on campus today, or even in the whole of Manchester.
Still going into Manchester for now, because I need to. The times these shots emerge is a factor of the train I catch — compare this with last Friday’s, taken, well, 10 minutes earlier in the walk. I just like the abstraction of this one. You can’t photograph buildings like that from ground level without losing the parallels somewhere or other, but this looks reasonable.
A scene I have passed frequently over the last nine and a bit years but never really noticed before; still, that’s one point of the blog, isn’t it. I thought at first there was a real live human in it (something not prevalent in Manchester city centre right now) but in fact its one of the mannequins, or the start of an android takeover, seeing as we’ve made such a mess of it. A nice ‘rule of thirds’ illustration although I didn’t want to lose the red door at the bottom, and yes, the foliage does get in a way just a little bit. This is the earliest post in a day since 21st September.
My penultimate day in Manchester, 2020. A year which has had fewer such days than expected. How often does the place display its appalling street drainage? I think this is a big contributor to the city’s reputation for wetness.
The traffic lights say go, for what cars there are. No social commentary today, I just like the effect of a fairly long zoom down Brook Street, taken on my way to the office.
Here I am still going into Manchester a couple of days a week, largely because it gets the step count up. I will try not to get symbolic and just observe that I like this picture because of the various chunks of detail, which seem to lay over one another like a collage, particularly on the right hand side. And the pigeon which sneaked itself in.
The vast MECD, or Manchester Engineering Campus Development, is pretty much finished. In embryonic form it was first depicted way back in early January 2018. It now dwarfs the old Oddfellows Hall, which it has part-swallowed, yet what you see rising here is only a small part of the whole.
Thing is — and I am very sure that, having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on this new plaything, the senior management of UoM are keenly aware of this point — is this now the whitest and most mammoth of white elephants? And what of all the blocks of new student accommodation, and hotels, and office blocks, and all the other city-centre property developments that global capital has been poured into over the last decade or so? If you think the economy’s taken a Covid hit thus far, wait for the whole global commercial property market to go tits-up. This piece of economic elastic does not have infinite tolerance. I predict we’ll be coaxed back out into our offices soon enough: if not, they’ll hear the crash on Pluto.
Being 42 