In some years the return of the students to campus is not always exactly a welcome event — it marks the end of summer, it presages a lot of work for the weeks ahead, etc. But in 2021 it would be impossible not to celebrate it. And anyone who thinks that some kind of future lockdown is an inevitability, please leave the room now, I will have nothing to do with that viewpoint. The only way I will be incarcerated in the future is by being arrested.
This beauty — I have given up trying to identify specific species, I always get it wrong (I thought it was a Red Admiral, but apparently not) — was perched not two feet from the traffic on the Keighley Road this morning. Obviously it wanted its close-ups doing.
Also, a curiosity — this is, almost certainly, the first picture of all the thousands on this blog that I have rotated through 180º. Technically you are looking at this upside down.
Actually it became quite a nice day after this rain shower had done its thing. But at this point in time, those with brollies were grateful of them. Those without — like myself — well, we just had to make do.
A day out at the football, and it was Clare’s idea. She sits there looking rather amused at the boisterous but harmless fellow Morecambe FC fans who took over The Leopard pub near Doncaster station at lunchtime. The stencil of Pelé, to the right, also sets the tone. Sadly, no one was feeling as boisterous after watching a rather tame 1-0 defeat, but that was all still to come.
The gentleman with the somewhat alien purple hue and the ‘P’ branded on his forehead (this is what happens when you sit in front of the data projector) is Andy Burnham, the elected Mayor of Greater Manchester. For a politician, he spoke a reasonable amount of sense at the meeting I attended today. 40 people in a room, about the same number attending online — all expressing freedom of choice either way. Seems fair enough to me.
In recent years I have adapted my walk into campus so I don’t go down Oxford Road, but today was an exception, for trivial reasons. It’s the main thoroughfare between the two universities and the city centre, and walking along it today at least allowed an appreciation of the fact that there are people back in view, doing things, enriching the local environment. The big influx of students hasn’t happened yet — but next week this should be heaving. And it’s all the better for it. I heard from an academic colleague today about the research showing how lockdown, spending 100% of our time in one place, is devastating for our ability to actually form new knowledge and long-term memories. Why are there those who love it and crave it?
Anyway, no more pandemic politics for now. I merely regret, slightly, that the angles are not quite right on this one.
These fences along Old Gate are, doubtless, the prelude to the building of new flood defences in the town. Now one might consider this a good thing, particularly if one’s property has ended up under water on one of the four occasions (count ’em) that the town centre has been inundated even just in the lifetime of this blog (June 2012, July ’12, Dec ’15, Feb ’20).
But in the first place, one can question the necessity of these works — or at least, wonder why they have been prioritised over known strategies of flood prevention that could take place on the moors above the town. But that land is all owned by the Walshaw estate, who want to continue burning heather and ensuring the peat bogs don’t hold the rain that falls, because it’s uneconomic for them to do that; so they push the problem down-valley, and now Heben will push it further down, and unless we build walls all the way down to the North Sea, some poor bastard will get that water in the end.
Second, all this will most likely turn the pleasant, leafy environs of the Hebden Water into a stripped-bare drainage channel — as similar ones have in Mytholmroyd. If the foliage in the background of this shot is still there in a few months’ time, I will take this back. But I doubt it. So the attractiveness of the town centre (and it does matter — many of the shops here would not exist without tourism) will be ruined, and we’ll still be blind to the real causes of the problem; bad land management and climate change.
With my legs increasingly suffering from overuse and basic middle age, I went and paid £50 today to get legally beaten up by a masseuse. I think it helped; and your average dominatrix would charge a lot more. So I’m led to believe.
Spent most of the day until 2.30pm behind the wheel, and the rest sat at home recovering from the first part of the day. But this scene did cause me to pause on the way home, on the A702 just north of Biggar, in southern Scotland. I’m not sure I’ve quite captured the sunbeam effect, but I did my best.
A couple of thousand feet up a Scottish mountain (Mount Battock), populated almost entirely by grouse. There were no other people, which meant that the grouse were somewhat surprised to see me. And this beetle was crossing my path regardless of my own intentions, with this determined look on its little insect face. “You’re in my way — move, now.”
Being 42 