I worked out that before today, I had been to 25 of the top 30 cities in the UK ranked by population: as of today I have now been to 26, as I (and Clare) paid a first-ever visit to Swansea this weekend. And among the things I discovered about the second-biggest place in Wales was that it has a superb beach, which seems to stretch for miles. Early January isn’t necessarily the optimal time to visit such a place, but so what?
This is one of those shots where I have deliberately not even tried with the aesthetics and gone purely for personal meaning. Anyone who knows me properly knows that for many years now, to know me has to been to know my coat. The earliest photo of me wearing it that I can find comes from February 2010 – so 18 months before this blog even started — and that means I have been wearing it for at least 14½ winters. And it is honestly true that I paid £10 for it from a charity shop in Hebden Bridge, probably in late 2009. Now that’s good value. That’s a quarter of my life it has served, for a tenner. As for appearances on here — here’s one, for example. I think that this shot in Domodedovo airport, Moscow (at 4:50am on 11/12/2011) is its earliest appearance on the blog, albeit unclearly.
However, it is now completely knackered, particularly the inner lining (see for yourself, on this shot). I am retiring it with full honours. You will probably never see it again…. And its replacement? Another long, navy blue coat … But hey. Why change style this late in life? The new one is woolier though.
Another low-contrast kind of day, spent at home working, little to see other than what the local landscape, weather and birdlife allow. In the end, this was the day’s best combination of those factors.
Yes, I did first type ‘2023’ as the date in the heading. Don’t we all do that for a while? But 2024 it is, and as it starts off in a work sense, here’s my definite aspiration for the year expressed on the cover of the work diary I quite deliberately bought back in November sometime.
In real terms the 1st January is of course, no different from any other day but we give it this symbolism, don’t we. No one can predict exactly what the new year will bring but unless something untoward happens I will definitely be travelling more outside the UK than I have since 2019, with at least one trip back to Toronto already booked, plus a return to St Helena, and hopefully a couple of other places too. Let’s start the year with Halifax, though: not far from home, but all the same, worth a visit now and again. With this shot — the 49th time I have depicted the place on here — it overtakes Moscow to become the 7th most-pictured location.
This picture was taken — at least, according to the time stamp allocated by my camera — at two seconds past noon, so here we are with exactly 12 hours, or 1/730th, of the year to go. As it was Sunday and we had a dinner date at a pub above Todmorden, there was no excuse not to get out, have some exercise and enjoy the scenery. (The sheep do this every day, of course.) This kind of thing is a significant contributor to the fact I’m still living here in Calderdale after 21.5 years.
And so ends 2023, not a bad year at a personal level I suppose but no particular changes were noted, for better or worse — what enthuses me and what vexes me today are all more or less the same as they were a year ago, or indeed two. The rest of the world, well, that seems able to screw itself up without my active intervention. This blog will continue — generative AI-free — as long as I still have something to document. My favourite picture of the year? Probably the gloriously camp duck captured on 20th September. Getting that salmon leaping the falls in Scotland on 11th July was quite a coup, and Clare, taken the following day (12th July) insists she get the award for ‘best human’. Happy New Year to you all.
When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go, but this sign, at the Belle Vue stadium in Wakefield, promises something like the ‘Worst Toilet in Scotland’ (from Trainspotting) waits around the corner. Perhaps fortunately, a gate just round there bars further progress.
Believe me, I’m one of these middle-aged guys who has gone the other way when it comes to hair loss, and I don’t need any. Not on my head and certainly not on/in my eyebrows, ears and nose, thank you very much. But clearly there is a market for the stuff, at least among the women who shop in the Arndale Market, Manchester. And there was me thinking they did it naturally — like me (last haircut, 2/10/19 and still counting).
Yesterday’s drive home went only as far as Morecambe, with the rest being done today. Staying at the in-laws’ always gives the chance to watch the local birdlife feed on the ample supplies Dave (Clare’s Dad) leaves out for them. Not that capturing them, in this case, on another dull day, through both a window and a network of branches proved very easy. Out of the many shots I tried none of them were all that sharp. But I quite like the somewhat disdainful look of the one on the right as it watches its buddy trough the bounty.
This is a totally crap picture, but it epitomises the day, entirely. The sunshine of Boxing Day was not sustained. We left Dundee at about 9am, I gritted my teeth and drove, and we staggered into Morecambe at about 2pm — an hour longer than it should have taken — battered by high winds, driving rain, surface water, low visibility, the lot. This is taken somewhere in the wilds of the Southern Uplands, in the indefinable watershed country between Tweeddale and Annandale, when I just had to pull over and stop for a few minutes.
Being 42 