Went into Manchester and back, and did hope to get a photo from there to provide more variety to the locations. But it’s been a while since the view from the house at sunset made it: and today seemed a good day to return to that theme. Red sky at night is good news, right?
I didn’t leave the house all day today. There didn’t really seem a great deal of point. This tortoiseshell butterfly has also moved in, it seems. I guess a domestic house is like an old people’s home for butterflies; the winter isn’t biting yet but I doubt these will last long outside, regardless. It’s welcome to inhabit our living room. It gave me something to photograph today, at least.
If to “anthropomorphosise” is to assign human characteristics to animals, is there a word for assigning animal characteristics to plants? For this tree is clearly doing a good impression of something or other, maybe a lizard, with not only that obvious eye and snout but a crest of moss. I’m inventing (perhaps) a word for it — zoomorph. Noun: a plant that takes on the shape of an animal.
An all-too-welcome excuse to get out and about was offered today — yes Mr Johnson it counted as ‘essential travel only’, so call off the wolves. The destination was a new one for me, Fleetwood, standing at the corner of Morecambe Bay and thus with a magnificent view that could not possibly be captured in a single camera shot. This one’s OK, I like it because of the fishermen (appropriate for the town, whose football team, Fleetwood Town, are known as the ‘Cod Army’) and also the bird which gives a nice touch. The weather was a lot better than it looks here, too. Anyway — an escape, for a while.
To stop the walls closing in any more than they already are I’ve been making a point of sitting out in a spot by the river in the early evenings, when the weather allows. Just to take some air, watch the ducks (my post of a few days ago was taken from this same point), have a couple of beers. Feel human. Clare joined me for this one and so, for 15 minutes or so, did fellow ex-Railway habitué Bernard, who happened to be passing with a bottle of his own. We talked. As much as anything, we just enjoyed the fact we could see someone else’s face, for real.
The vast MECD, or Manchester Engineering Campus Development, is pretty much finished. In embryonic form it was first depicted way back in early January 2018. It now dwarfs the old Oddfellows Hall, which it has part-swallowed, yet what you see rising here is only a small part of the whole.
Thing is — and I am very sure that, having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on this new plaything, the senior management of UoM are keenly aware of this point — is this now the whitest and most mammoth of white elephants? And what of all the blocks of new student accommodation, and hotels, and office blocks, and all the other city-centre property developments that global capital has been poured into over the last decade or so? If you think the economy’s taken a Covid hit thus far, wait for the whole global commercial property market to go tits-up. This piece of economic elastic does not have infinite tolerance. I predict we’ll be coaxed back out into our offices soon enough: if not, they’ll hear the crash on Pluto.
A turntable has made a reapperance in our house for the first time in twenty years, so we’ve been digging out some of the old records that survived the Great Vinyl Cull of the 1990s (I was a student, I needed the money, I regret it now, sure). And it’s been an excuse to pick up some new material as well, including that of the very fine band seen to top — previous blog stars themselves. I wonder what music will, in the end, emerge from this time of paralysis, or what art of any kind.
Another deeply unexciting day. At the moment, this fungus probably has more of a social life than the whole human population of the UK. I chose this shot because I like the stately swelling of the grey trunk to either side; but the fungus has made it inside, and looks there to stay.
3,371 days into this blog (nine years, two months and 22 days) and I am buggered if I am going to let this profoundly boring and pointless period see it peter out through sheer lack of interest. But it’s not very interesting, is it. This is the true impact of this bloody virus. It’s made the world so goddamn boring, suddenly. (With no offence meant to my family members, pictured here, who are about the only things that are keeping me sane.)
As good an illustration of the encroachment of sand dunes as you could show to a geography class. That sign is of current design and cannot have been there all that long, but of the ‘shared path’ which it once indicated, there is now no other evidence at all.
The docks are those of Liverpool, by the way. Did I stay at home today? Nope.
Being 42 