Really, not an exciting Christmas Day, but are they ever, these days? A pleasant one though, and mild, so Clare and Joe were dragged out on the usual pre-consumption walk, where was captured this piece of hogweed in front of the pine (Christmas) trees, simply because I like the shape it makes. A natural candelabrum, maybe.
Anyway — a happy Christmas to you all, I hope you enjoyed the day, however it was spent.
Attempts to create a new tradition by running a bunch of tractors and trucks, decorated in lights, through the centre of Hebden Bridge on 24th December were greeted by this photographer as an opportunity to depict something different on the 14th Christmas Eve to grace these virtual pages. Did he (I) really see the point, though? Well, not really. But it did draw a reasonably sized crowd.
Well, I didn’t have anything better today, and by the signs of it, neither did he. I hope he enjoyed his bout of exercise as much as I did. (For more details see my other blog.)
Joe — or his hands, anyway — makes his first visit to Hebden Bridge since the summer, and first appearance on the blog since 7th September, demonstrating a rather nifty card trick: I did work out how it was done in the end, but it took some figuring out.
Can we both note that the deck of cards (and they are all like that, more-or-less) in fact belongs to the wife, although she claims I bought it for her….
3pm on a Saturday, and all around the country, a certain proportion of the players and spectators stand for a minute of tribute to someone or other. Here at Brighouse Town (the guys in orange), it was to commemorate a recently deceased former goalkeeper, it seems. Not that anyone had heard of the guy until this moment but all the same, it is good to take a minute now and again to stand and collectively create silence, a commodity that is not always easy to acquire.
No Christmas break in sight for the herons, who still have to fish, and thereby eat. This one, rightfully, looks with some disdain at the litter that has been chucked in the Hebden Water next to its usual spot at the weir. Bloody humans, leaving their crap all over the place. And it’ll be there for weeks, I bet.
The birds are there, you just need to realise that they’re not grit on the lens. A beautiful afternoon to mark my last day of work until 2025; a shame it is not forecast to last.
After three pictures of inanimate objects mimicking live things, here we have a usually live thing — campus — as a more inanimate object. Teaching finished last week, and today there really weren’t many people around. And that’s it for me, too, not just in 2024: there will be no more campus shots on here until early February, if things go according to plan.
Some pictures get on here because they are exactly the shot I wanted to capture when pressing the shutter. This is not one of those pictures. Until I uploaded it later and had a look I was assuming it hadn’t worked out; I was just trying to take a shot of these two mannequins in a shop window with mirrors instead of faces. Why anyone would design a mannequin in such a way I don’t know, as I thought it looked kinda creepy; hence my taking the photo.
But then the trees over the road crowd in, reflected in the glass of the shop window, plus, is that a self-potrait of the photographer captured in the lower part of the parallel dimension that seems to have opened up where that face should have been? Ghostly….. Or, possibly, just a bad photo, but here it is anyway.
More inaccurate replication of some animal or other — koalas are just not this big, or this colour, though nevertheless, that is what it is supposed to be. 4th prize in the Christmas raffle of the Hebden Bridge Picture House (£1/ticket, if you’re interested). This was very early in the evening: the place filled up by the start of the movie, which was Conclave: very good (another unsolicited advertisement).
Being 42 