It’s been a hard few months. Photographically I mean (of course there have been other reasons). But lockdown, in all its arbitrary ways, has drained the land of life, at a time of year when we really benefit from the company of others and the things they bring. In that respect, at least, things are slowly looking up. Manchester now seems to have some energy back, as befits a big city. Finally.
Into Manchester for the first time in 16 days. The city centre has busied itself, at least in the afternoon. Campus is still a wasteland, however. The government and administrators in their wisdom have decreed that they will only consider letting students actually meet their professors and each other after it’s far too late to make a difference this year. Optimistically the finishing touches get made to the new Engineering building but whether this white mammoth will ever be used to its full potential remains to be seen.
Should I have retouched the ‘exclamation mark’ at the top? I did consider it. Maybe it’s symbolic.
Even the traffic warden was somewhat bemused by this saloon ‘parked’ not only on one of the slip roads to the Mancunian Way, but across a pedestrian crossing. However, I suspect the true owners of this car are not — at this point in time — aware of it being parked there. Hey, maybe they’ll beat the tow-truck.
A generally optimistic sheen to the day. Even the unused footbridge in the arse end of Victoria station has had a new coat of paint, and I suspect the pigeons know this somehow.
Reyner Street is a back alley if ever there was one. But it looked good today. I doubt the establishment pictured has seen much business lately, and I managed to obscure its phone number, too. Apologies to them.
Going into Manchester gives my step count a boost and makes me feel like I’m doing something for the students, many of whom have travelled a very long way to be there and still been imprisoned for months on end in halls like the George Kenyon Building (a row of its windows forming the top of this image). But it’s depressing, all the same. In places, the rot has firmly set in. “How will you change the world?” this billboard asks. The question is an ever more pertinent one.
In fact, this is so dismembered I’m not even sure it is, or used to be, an umbrella. But never mind. It makes a difference from depicting the dead city of Manchester more generally. And does reflect what was a quite windy day.
This is the exterior of the Alliance Manchester Business School, built for a vast amount of money and now going completely to waste, along with the rest of the campus; monuments to a time past, now standing in a city of the dead. If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have you been to Manchester lately? Nothing has happened there since October. A sense of rot is setting in, and if you (like the publicly cheery city council) think that ‘recovery’ is all just a matter of a wave of the legislative wand, I say that’s optimistic, at best.
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.
Being 42 