Tolerable weather this morning so I left home without any equipment. On the two-mile walk back from my office to the railway station, I decided happiness would have been a small frame of wire with some synthetic material stretched over it, even if it had been red with black spots and had two comedy eyes poking up from the top. I’m still damp now, several hours later.
Same train in so I pass through the same parts of Manchester at the same time. Off I go to work one way, this guy goes a second way, the bird goes a third. I wonder if pigeons sometimes wake up in the morning with a headache, and just don’t feel very much into the day, but set off anyway through a sense of obligation.
After 12 consecutive days in Hebden Bridge or the immediate area, I made it into Manchester for the first time since graduation day (Dec 14th). Started early enough for it still to be dark even after my 50-minute train journey in. This shot is of what looks like the cleaning crew reporting for their own early start, at Selfridges department store on Cross Street.
Why do I like this shot of such a mundane moment? I like the stripes of light, I like the fact that the focus is as good as it could be (bearing in mind the low light levels) on the illuminated guy in the grey jacket, and I like that as soon as Joe saw it he said he thought the two lightsabers were cool.
Back to Manchester. Xmas market still full of stuff this morning. Isn’t it a little late to be expecting to get rid of a few dozen Christmas trees and ten reindeer seemingly made out of compost? Maybe, but what do I know.
December 2011 dawned pleasantly mild – rather different than the 1st December 2010, the defining characteristic of which will be clear from a quick look at this Facebook album. The light this morning was really good: a good sign of that is when you pass a scene you see two or three times a week, on average, and see it in…. well, see it in a new light. As here.
This (on the right) is Boris, one of my colleagues from Moscow (see October 23-27), visiting Manchester for a couple of days. He is well into his 60s but has a 6-year-old daughter, which I find kinda sweet. A nice guy, if you don’t enquire too deeply into what he did in the Soviet era.
I also quite like Manchester’s German-inspired Christmas markets, which achieve the (for me) astonishing combination of being both highly Christmassy and yet not twee nor over-commercial. I like this shot because of the stallholder’s pleasant look of satisfaction as Boris decides whether to get a gift for his daughter.
Although my work location varies, as you can tell from this blog, Monday is most commonly a Manchester day, spent among the dreaming spires…
Dreaming spires? Well, not really. The University of Manchester campus is split in half by one of the country’s principal A roads (this is the A34 which starts here and ends in Southampton, having passed through the centre of England on the way – including Oxford, hence the name Oxford Road). It makes it the noisiest and most crowded campus I have ever visited, and believe me I’ve been to a few. My bosses are spending millions on new buildings but if you ask me a better investment would be simply to pay for a ‘university bypass’ and then grass this over to create a long garden. Who knows, one day we might realise that cars subtract from life more than they add to it and it might even happen.
A bit blurred I know but this was the best picture I came up with to encapsulate what was another rainy day. Apparently Manchester is not, according to its reputation, the rainiest city in the UK (it’s Glasgow, I believe) – but on days like this it certainly feels like it.
Incidentally, is it me or do Caffé Nero spell their name wrong?
On a day spent almost entirely in my office, looking out at grey and rainy skies, there weren’t many candidates for today’s shot and I nearly put something utterly dull (like my office wall) just to encapsulate the feeling. But then my friend and colleague Guyda came along to one of our research seminars to present about her using ICTs to teach medieval Italian literature, and both her and her beautiful books brought some interest into the day.
The Conservative Party Conference continues to provide a rich seam. I’m almost sorry I’m not going in tomorrow. Some fundamentalists wield biblical slogans, others manifestos and soundbites. But they’re all basically the same: they lay blame for the world’s problems on anything and everything other than themselves.
