The Academy is the University of Manchester’s principal music venue, and has appeared a couple of times on this blog from the inside, most recently a few weeks ago when we saw Gogol Bordello there. So here it is from the outside, one of its facets anyway, a study in line and shadow.
Snapped for no other reason than I liked the image. There is no deeper agenda. Another pleasantly sunny winter’s day in Manchester.
Rainbows are a kind of cheap shot, but they usually offer something — you at least know there will be colour, shadow and light all around somewhere. This was taken from inside, after I glimpsed the possibility while drifting off in the post-lunch death slot at the seminar I attended today. There’s a double rainbow visible if you look closely.
Incidentally, this is Alan Turing’s second memorial appearance on the blog after his statue made it back last year.
The period since Christmas Eve has been very relaxing, but not very photographically inspiring. Three things have not helped this. One: I’ve been mostly isolated at home. Two: it’s been gloomy and grey. Three: the Mac died on 9th December and as yet had not been replaced.
Three things then happened today: One, I left the dale, only to Manchester, but it’s a change of scene; Two: the sun came out (in the morning anyway); Three: I have a Mac back 🙂 I like this picture, first one I’ve really thought was decent since Christmas Eve.
I’ll post this now partly because I am on a machine that works properly (not consistently true for me at the moment, nor will it be until into January now), but also because the sun has long disappeared behind clouds: this beautiful morning light was, unlike on Tuesday, all we got today. So I doubt I’ll get a better shot later. Having done this walk a lot, I know where the sun shines in Manchester city centre on a winter’s day by now, and at around this time on Oxford Road/Oxford Street (its continuation), it shines right down the road as if it was the avenue of a stone circle like Avebury. In fact, considering it’s the solstice on Saturday, perhaps I am on to something there.
There is often beauty in unexpected places. This is all done with concrete, graffiti and strips of fluorescent light.
Cross Street, Manchester. Some of us are on our way to work, past the guys opening up the Christmas market. I’ve talked myself into liking this shot even though it’s out of focus. It was how I felt this morning.
This will be a long run of pictures from only Hebden Bridge and Manchester. These will continue to be rich seams for photography as long as the light is right, which it certainly was today. And the other astonishing, perhaps even unrepeatable feature of this shot is that there is NO TRAFFIC. Just for a moment.
The half-timbered structure in the rear is Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, probably the oldest extant pub in the city of Manchester, even if it has moved a couple of times. The lights in the foreground are reflected in the perspex fencing that keeps the Mitre Bar — where we were — from its more venerable and also cheaper rival.
Coat and thermos flask notwithstanding, the fact one can be doing this in Manchester in mid-November is a sign that we continue to have plenty of mild weather. The more insane newspapers in the UK seem convinced that the storm that has hit the Philippines will somehow leap two oceans and half a world and, specifically, hit middle-class districts of the UK in the next few days, but there’s no evidence of this. (There never is very much evidence for anything included in the insane newspapers.)
