I worked Sunday and Monday (I have witnesses) so this was a walk day. Destination, the well-known peak of Great Gable: pictured here, however, is Great End, rising above the stream of Styhead Gill which comes down from Sty Head, one of the major walkers’ crossroads of Lakeland. A very fine day, the sort that makes one glad one has a flexible job sometimes.
Am I making a political point? Well…. not as strongly as I certainly would have twenty years ago, and probably would have ten years ago. But it is May 1st, International Labour Day and all that, and at least this party don’t have plans to abolish it, like the other lot of moronocrats. Vote L…. well, just vote, is all.
The wife…. and a small square thing in the wall. Looking good after a day working at the Hebden Bridge burlesque festival which is in town this weekend. Well, she’s looking good, not sure about the small square thing.
In my mind there is an alternative version of me with hair like this, but of course I would look silly and anyway would never get through that long stage of frizziness where it’s neither one thing nor the other. I guess for this guy the dreads are much more appropriate and probably permanent.
Is he engaging in some Japanese-style blossom worship? (You see Japan — we have blossom too….) Or just clambering along a precarious wall, as small boys do to entertain themselves and worry their parents?
Even if the Chinese Arch is visible, almost side-on, in the background. I don’t know if this is a photo of anything. I don’t think I’ve been taking photos of specific things over the last few days. This is more about colours, shapes, textures. Maybe that’s where my head is.
A number of Hebden Bridge’s residents live on canal barges like these and I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to do so on a permanent basis. I’ve been on a couple of the boats and they are cosy, but I definitely don’t think it’s suited for anyone that has a really serious hoarding habit, which probably rules out me and (more especially) the wife. A sunny day today, but chilly, hence the stove bring run here at full operation.
Some pictures make it onto here for the novelty value more than anything else — so here’s what the Summit Tunnel (the longest railway tunnel in the world when it was opened in 1841, dontcha know) looks like from the inside when the driver forgets to turn the interior lights on in the carriage. Which he then realised, and corrected, some two seconds after I pressed the shutter. Bet you are glad then that I was able to capture this fascinating study of Victorian tunnel architecture.
Wild garlic — the spring version of free food. (Blackberries are the autumn bounty.)
And so, the journey home — deliberately done away from motorways, and rest stops, and all that crap. It took a couple of hours longer than it did on Thursday, but it was infinitely more relaxing, and hey, here is the English countryside, in all its rape-flower-coloured spring plumage. Taken just outside the village of Heckington, somewhere in the wilds of Lincolnshire.
And as I said I would do 11 different places in 11 days, here they were: Manchester, Wolverhampton, Lancaster, Morecambe, the Solway Firth, Haworth, Hebden Bridge, Markham Moor, Cambridge, King’s Lynn, Heckington. These things keep me happy.
Being 42 