Today was proving a very mundane day photographically and I was struggling to find a representative picture – until the natural environment obliged with the last light of the day.
Tomorrow is the 50th day of this blog, by the way. So look out for the page of ‘outtakes’ (or ‘best of the rest’) which I’m going to stick up tomorrow alongside the daily picture.
The Indian Summer buggered off back to India at least a week ago and since then it’s barely stopped raining. Not much else worth adding here, except perhaps, ‘enough already’.
This looks like major surgery, except it’s the most routine check-up. Which is, I guess, why I like this picture – professional competence emerging in the every day. If it wasn’t there, we might not notice for quite a while…. but eventually, we would.
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?
I took last Friday off (see below) because I was teaching all day today. At the same time I didn’t leave the house. This is no contradiction; it is a sign that I do good chunks of my teaching online. The classroom of the 21st century can be sat on the lap, my connection represented by the little green eye of the web cam.
Would I want to teach this way all the time? No, but at least two people today said how glad they were that I did, because it opened up an otherwise unavailable education to them. And that, alone, gives it value.
Joe shows his opinion of being asked to hang out in a bookshop. Though I think he did leave with some Dr Who novelization and a ‘Horrible Histories’ paperback so it wasn’t all bad news for him.
I like Haworth, it teeters very close to the edge of being completely twee, but there are interesting things to be found in the shops and at least it isn’t some corporate hellhole. Bizarrely, we were doing Christmas shopping here: yes, I know it’s two and a half months early…
This could well have been one of the best days of my whole life for photography. To pick only one was really difficult, but I like this one a lot because this really looks like a mountain, something Andean or Himalayan, almost. (OK, there’s no snow, but it looks aloof, unattainable.) But almost every photo today was a winner – the conditions were just perfect. Lucky, lucky man.
Plenty more pictures to come, if they are not already there, on the 214 Wainwrights blog. (They’ll all be up by tomorrow night.)
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.
An utterly uneventful day, spent working at home – dull light, nothing particularly to see. Struggled for inspiration photo-wise, so for the first time in the 41 days I’ve been doing this (blimey, is that all?), you can have a self-portrait. Apologies. There won’t be many more.
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.
