Monday 2nd November 2020, 2.45pm (day 3,357)
Working at home today … but then again, aren’t we all. The ‘lockdown hair’ continues to grow.
Me and my shadow (or, selfie with ponytail)
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Tag Archives: photography
Clare in the Entwood
Sunday 1st November 2020, 2.10pm (day 3,356)
Nothing about the politics today, no grouching, I promise. Let us just celebrate the peak of autumn. I have pictured this wood before (by now, I’ve pictured most places near my house before), and have always called it the Entwood because here more than anywhere else round here the trees feel like they have feet, that their residence in the ground is temporary.
The last real Saturday for a while
Saturday 31st October 2020, 3.35pm (day 3,355)
Saturday is football day. Bingley Town, in red-and-black, won this match 2-1 over FC Sporting Keighley. But this will be the last one for a while — for me, for them — as, with all the resistance of a wet herring being gutted on a fishmonger’s slab, we are heading back into “lockdown” from Thursday. I use the quotes to suggest that it’s not really lockdown at all, seeing as many things will of course remain open, so actually it’s the selective targeting of a few sectors of the economy that are seen as expendable, and a general excuse to push house arrest as a desirable state of affairs. But we have been sold the long con in any case.
RIP Sean Connery too, who has made the blog in times past; and I stand by what I said about him on that page.
Return to the Picture House
Friday 30th October 2020, 7.45pm (day 3,354)
Hebden Bridge’s hundred-year-old Picture House has not featured on the blog in 2020. Flooded (again) on Feb. 9th and then forced to close by the New Fascism — until tonight. Tonight, we could return to support this valuable local resource, see a good film (Saint Maud) and have a glass of wine at our seat. Next week, as we are pressured back into whatever the hell ‘Tier 3’ is being defined as by Our Glorious Leaders, we will still be able to see movies, but not have a glass of wine at our seat. This is the kind of difference that gives me a warm, cosy feeling of safety and respect for authority.
Home invasion (benign)
Thursday 29th October 2020, 1.00pm (day 3,353)
We had visitors in the house today, and this will make no more difference to anyone’s life than if we were to do the same thing next week. Unless you ascribe to the views of the moronocracy, who’d rather blame us for their own failings, and screw up local economies just that little bit more. Meanwhile, Ellie & Marcus work on the jigsaw. It’s half-term.
Darkness falls
Wednesday 28th October 2020, 4.50pm (day 3,352)
I’ve given up wondering whether I’m being metaphorical or not. Fact is it’s that first week after the clocks go back, and dusk oppresses us an hour or more earlier than it did last week. Winter is coming. The Christmas lights are ready.
Crown Street, Tuesday morning
Tuesday 27th October 2020, 8.25am (day 3,351)
The schools are shut for half-term, there are no trains to Manchester and it rained most of the day. Hebden Bridge is back in lockdown almost by default. It’s a depressing time, a silence hangs over the place that is unnatural and wrong.
Joe the filmmaker
Monday 26th October 2020, 1.55pm (day 3,350)
Time is on our hands. I can’t easily get into Manchester this week as the train line is having one of its bouts of ‘maintenance’. Joe is on his half-term break. I needed a film making for teaching purposes and it gave us both something to do, and him something to put on his portfolio for later life.
Turning their backs
Sunday 25th October 2020, 2.20pm (day 3,349)
I can see no reason at all for this rather odd sight of spectators at today’s football match turning their back on Newcastle United women’s no. 21, Maisie Cole. Except that there was a game on the other pitch below. Mind you, as the game between Newcastle and Brighouse was 0-0, they didn’t miss much.
Cui bono?
Saturday 24th October 2020, 10.50am (day 3,348)
This is Leeds railway station, at what should be peak time on a Saturday morning.
You may think this desperately depressing scene is justified and necessary. I do not. When a crime has been committed the good investigator first asks — cui bono? It means ‘who benefits’? And who does benefit from all this — if we are not travelling, not spending money in the same places we were spending it last October, seeing friends, partying in nightclubs, going to Elland Road or wherever? I name Rupert Murdoch, Jim Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt and all their kin as people with the most profoud vested interest in keeping us locked up through the spreading of fear and this year’s sudden, digitally-driven enhancement of what Michel Foucault called the carceral state. If I’m wrong, sue me. If you don’t like it, defy it.
Being 42 