Sunday 21st February 2021, 11.45am (day 3,468)
“Whaddya mean, in nine and a half years you’ve never had a pig on this blog thing of yours?”
“Nope, never.”
“I wanna be FIRST. (Oink.)”
Debutant pig
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Tag Archives: photos
Market, with real people
Saturday 20th February 2021, 2.20pm (day 3,467)
I had candidates for today that were better pictures, maybe, but I really wanted to see people’s faces today. And no, I don’t mean masked ones.
Wasted effort
Friday 19th February 2021, 2.40pm (day 3,466)
This is the exterior of the Alliance Manchester Business School, built for a vast amount of money and now going completely to waste, along with the rest of the campus; monuments to a time past, now standing in a city of the dead. If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have you been to Manchester lately? Nothing has happened there since October. A sense of rot is setting in, and if you (like the publicly cheery city council) think that ‘recovery’ is all just a matter of a wave of the legislative wand, I say that’s optimistic, at best.
Snowdrops
Thursday 18th February 2021, 2.30pm (day 3,465)
These are little light bulbs, surely; strung up by Whomever to anticipate of the coming of spring. Will this be one of those years where it arrives and stays, or one where we don’t see it until May? The fun thing is, in Britain, you never can be sure.
Vantage point
Wednesday 17th February 2021, 3.40pm (day 3,464)
Life plods on, with little to do for entertainment except watch the local birdlife. The gulls (you can’t really call them seagulls: here, we’re about as far as you can get from the sea in northern England) seemed this afternoon to be making an intervention, for one side or the other, in the ongoing pigeon-duck war. This one uses a street light as a vantage point, moments before swooping down to pick up some spoils.
That face, or not
Tuesday 16th February 2021, 9.00am (day 3,463)
Ten full days have passed without a single human appearing on this blog, in any form. Here are two — one frozen in time, idealised, commercialised. The other mobile, but faceless, distant, dehumanised. I can interact with neither. And the trouble is, I’m not evern sure what is better, any more.
The sun comes out, briefly
Monday 15th February 2021, 1.20pm (day 3,462)
It was about 12ºC today, compared with -2ºC on Saturday. The sun shone for a couple of hours in the afternoon and, just for a moment, there were intimations of spring. This lady appears to be enjoying it, albeit from behind glass.
Icicle creature
Sunday 14th February 2021, 11.35am (day 3,461)
I wouldn’t call this winter harsh, but it has been cold, at least by local standards. Yes, I’m sure those of you who live in places like Montana or Trondheim would laugh at our definition of real winter, but hey, that’s a maritime, Gulf Stream climate for you.
And the creature? Well, a face perhaps. It’s certainly got two eyes, and a pendulous, possibly melting face.
No beauty
Saturday 13th February 2021, 11.45am (day 3,460)
The establishment in question is located somewhere round here but that sign isn’t pointing to it. Instead it just presides over a mostly empty car park, where there should be signs of visitors, shoppers, people just hanging out in the town centre on a Saturday.
One of the lies we’ve been sold over the last year centres around the notion of ‘essentia’ and ‘non-essential’ retail. Amazon can compel their drones to go work in warehouses that are centres of virus transmission, but I am not allowed to patronise a local bookshop, nor to buy a pair of shoes. This has been an unparalleled opportunity to shaft small businesses, one the Tories (backed up by Labour, who are even worse) have taken with glee, while puttng on their concerned face, and telling us it’s all for our own good. Not if you are a business owner, I imagine. But that’s OK, we can just blame them for ‘not adapting’, like not inventing a way to get nails done online. Sorry to break out into this again, but there’ll be weeks more of this crap yet.
Emergency refuge
Friday 12th February 2021, 3.05pm (day 3,459)
I don’t know, one gets the chance to go out for a change, and then the car breaks down on the motorway on the way back. But everyone with whom I then had to engage to sort this out, did indeed get it sorted out, so credit to them all.
Being 42 