Wednesday 22nd February 2023, 12.50pm (day 4,199)

Life at the moment is having its uneventful spells, and this is the middle of one of them. But at least the immediate locality continues to provide sufficient photo opportunities.
Life at the moment is having its uneventful spells, and this is the middle of one of them. But at least the immediate locality continues to provide sufficient photo opportunities.
After getting out and about yesterday, I kept closer to home today. But it’s also a nice part of the world. For once, I don’t object to the cars on this shot, which I think help give it a sense of scale and perspective.
As I post this on Saturday, I already know that both Thursday and Friday were highly uneventful, even by recent standards. Changes to this state of lethargy are afoot, but not this week. In fact the most exciting thing to happen lately was the erection of scaffolding around our house, meaning you can climb up to have a look in our windows if you like; though we’d rather you didn’t. It’s not even for work we need doing: we are just passively wrapped in metal for a few days. That’s scaffolding two days in a row, isn’t it?
Although this has been given a certain extra layer of grim by being taken through a rain-spattered window, it is nevertheless a reasonable depiction of what the weather was like this morning I don’t know what the face of the guy walking along the roof was looking like, but I’m damn sure I wasn’t going out there today. This is one reason why I am spending most of November 2021 out of the country — but more on that over the next few days.
“There’s not enough room up here. You’ll have to stay down there.”
“Ah, come on you jobsworth. Look, Bob’s up there and he’s not even grey.”
Another day working at home, of such excitement that I feel moved to document only this event: possibly the first time our exterior back windows have been cleaned in recorded history. But then again they are a long way up in the air, and we didn’t have a 40 feet-long pole (that can squirt water) just lying around. But you never know what you will find if you look long enough.
So exciting was yesterday that it slipped my mind that it was the day on which this record was confirmed — this is now the longest run of English-only pictures on this blog. As of today it is 144 days since day 3,312, when Scotland (in the form of Loch Skeen) featured for the day. That, and the one from about 100 yards into Wales on 24/6/20, are all that I have taken outside England in over a year. This is not the life I was leading up to that point; make your own judgments as to whether it’s a better or worse thing for all concerned, but it at least illustrates the impact of all the present crap. (And it is crap. This is not a political point.)
Also, in West Yorkshire anyway, it’s still snowing.
After yesterday’s observation about the recent paucity of evening shots, here’s another evening shot. It’s been a while since the skies have been interesting enough to warrant a reappearance of the ‘back of the house’ view: they’ve been blue and sunny, but bland. Perhaps tonight’s display is one sign of an imminent change in the weather.
The blue skies of the last two days were definitively absent today. The view from the back of the house was the limit of my horizons. Had I not set the monochrome filter you wouldn’t really see a great deal more colour beyond a kind of dull green on the hillside. Happy Mondays.