Beyond a darkened bedroom, this was the first view seen on opening the curtains to greet February 2021, the waning moon on its way down above the hillside, tinged red by the rising sun. It’d be nice if the rest of February were as pleasant as this morning was, although I already know that won’t be the case.
January 2021 hasn’t featured a football match, a visit to a pub or a night away from home — and I sincerely doubt February 2021 is going to differ in any of these ways. But I have done my damnedest to have it feature some healthy exercise. This gets no less healthy if one travels more than five miles from home — in fact, for those who live in urban areas, the opposite may be true. This fact seems to elude those who find it blithely OK that the government has removed freedom of movement within our own country.
For more pictures from today’s bout of exercise along with the usual accompanying self-reflection, see my County Tops blog.
From back to front: the big monument on Stoodley Pike; Heptonstall church; and the war memorial near Pecket Well, built in obvious mimicry of its bigger brother in the background. Nineteen and a half years I have lived here and until this week, had never been to this spot. Yet as with many days recently, there was a need for some leg-stretching: the guy walking his dog surely concurs.
It’s just some graffiti on the old pumping station up in the woods above my house. But wouldn’t it be nice if this really were some portal into another world. One where the pubs were open, would be a real good start.
I am still obliged to go into Manchester now and again. It’s good for the step count and the general variety but it’s not an edifying experience. Since March, it’s been a city of the nearly dead. Buses come past plastered in adverts that — in essence — shout “Live In Fear” and “It’s All Your Fault, You Know”. I pointed my camera upwards. This shot is taken from Cross Street; I like the red chimneys, and the corrugations of the tower block peering through the mists behind.
Pecket Well is one of the little settlements up on the hilltops above town. Architecturally, it probably hasn’t changed much in a while. Though if that fire was not kept under control it might have lost a barn yesterday.
Today was tough to get through whether photographically or otherwise. This shot means nothing, except maybe to show that it’s getting lighter in the evenings. But only astronomically.
The last time anyone other than myself or Joe was depicted on the blog was 4th January, the afternoon before Bojo the Clown put us all under house arrest again. Since then, portrait opportunities have been very rare. This can almost be considered a crowd by recent standards. Though even the dog now takes its lead from us and remains apart. Who’s going to actually start to rebuild the bridges? It won’t just happen.
It’s Joe, and his generation, that I feel sorriest for right now. He turns 18 in a few weeks yet is spending this time locked in a room with, or rather without, everyone else. At least he’s still prepared to get out into the landscape now and again: here, on Brown Wardle Hill, above Whitworth in Lancashire.
Of course, this is not a model, it is a real landscape above the (awkwardly-named) town of Penistone, in South Yorkshire. But though there area actually two large turbines to the right, it sure looks to me like one is the shadow of the other, cast on the backcloth of a diorama built in a shoe box, or something. And the patchwork of frost and field, the general graininess of the picture…. seems fake to me. Perhaps there is a model railway below, just out of shot.
Being 42 