Pulled duty on the 06:31 train out of Hebden Bridge and it was still dark by the time it finally ambled into Manchester. This looming darkness will briefly be relieved this weekend when the clocks go back, but all the same, winter draws inexorably nearer each day.
Six days away from campus and in that time, everything seems to have turned gold. Is that a jacket in the branches at the top? Or the ubiquitous and planet-killing plastic bag? Guess we can find out for sure when the rest of the leaves are gone.
I did not notice the inaccuracy of the clock at the point of taking the photo. But I can assure you that I could not have been here at 10.15am. If you ask me, the ‘pumpkins’ are also too early. What influence do I have over the ongoing encroachment of The Festival of Utterly Disposable Tat, however.
I’m sure the guy in the sleeping bag looks forward with keen anticipation for M & S’s “lovely new Manchester store” as if it will be radically different from the present one. It’ll be unlikely to offer overnight accommodation, I assume.
I go one way, the bird goes its way, the cat goes that. None of us necessarily find out about what the “NO” is so keen to dissuade us.
A Saturday night out in Manchester and, to start it, a return to the Food & Drink Festival also depicted (more abstractly) yesterday. On both days there were plenty of pleasant things to consume. Manchester makes its five-in-a-row: only the second time I have managed this, the first being in March 2014.
The weather over the last few days has been changeable to say the least, and another drenching on the way back to Victoria was avoided by taking shelter in this large tent that has taken up residency nearby. That it lived up to the promise of the sign was just a bonus. Well, it is the weekend.
Four days in a row in Manchester and as I’m there tomorrow as well for non-work reasons, this may well become only it’s second five-in-a-row stint on the blog.
A break in the moratorium on pictures of building sites in Manchester, but I was sat in my office all day and there isn’t otherwise a great deal to see in this city, a state of affairs which, as locals will know, has lasted years now. The Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD), vast in scale (this is just a small wing of it), grows up like an incipient volcano on Upper Brook Street: apparently it’s due to be finished at some point this century.
When I started work in Manchester in 2005, Oxford Road, which runs down the centre of the main campus, was still a carbon monoxide-choked arterial road. Gradually, over the years, there’s been some decent (and much-needed) traffic management, and last year, Brunswick Street was finally closed off and turned into this walkway, “Brunswick Park”. It’s not a very green park, admittedly — but still, it’s a definite improvement. This was the one little burst of sunshine of the day.
It’s nice that after nearly a decade and a half working in Manchester that I can still discover some new places. This was one: I just fancied a cup of tea at this point, and surely an establishment named like this can deliver? It certainly could. Inside had to be seen to be believed as well, but I couldn’t just snap away at the customers; the profusion of flowers in the porch does give something of the right impression, however.
Being 42 