Saturday 9th May 2020, 12 noon (day 3,180)
The outdoors is good. The outdoors is healthy. And it always will be.
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Tag Archives: photos
Dandelion snow
Friday 8th May 2020, 5.05pm (day 3,179)
The white dots that speckle this whole image are not the result of some camera fault. They are dandelion seeds, storms of which blew over Hebden Bridge this evening, as they have for a few days now. The warm, dry weather is bringing them out but also, this year, there are not so many lawns being mowed regularly — not the public ones, anyway. Perfect conditions for them, then. There will be some allergies being born at the moment I can tell you.
No play allowed
Thursday 7th May 2020, 11.10am (day 3,178)
On Sunday our glorious leader Mr. Johnson will apparently announce, well, something: as eagerly awaited as the (absent) football results, this speech will define our fate for the next few weeks. My prediction — we will be let out to work, but not to play, a conclusion I somehow try to illustrate with these taped-up swings in the nearby playground. But who will admit that play creates work…. one of those ‘non-essential’ elements driving the economy and giving meaning to our lives? You can’t have one without the other.
In the woods, again
Wednesday 6th May 2020, 9.20am (day 3,177)
Another day celebrating green-ness, for there is not a great deal else to see at the moment. At least the sun is back out.
Chimney pot group portrait
Tuesday 5th May 2020, 3.20pm (day 3,176)
I love the individuality of these chimeny pots, and the different characteristics of each of the groups. The four on the right are definitely having a conversation, the leftmost of the four turning to the others as it mutters some choice gossip.
First caterpillar to complete the Pennine Way?
Monday 4th May 2020, 1.05pm (day 3,175)
Well, OK, perhaps it is ambitious to expect that this caterpillar will manage to complete all 300+ miles of the Pennine Way, but if you’ve never been near it, it’s done more of it than you. And it also becomes the blog’s first caterpillar, a singular honour.
Football landscape, awaiting inhabitants
Sunday 3rd May 2020, 1.20pm (day 3,174)
For most of the teams in England, this weekend should have marked the end of the football season. For me, this started back on June 21st in Anglesey, but seeing as the only anti-COVID strategy anyone could think of involved killing off most of what gave life meaning, it was ended, along with everything else, after March 14th. What remnants of grass-roots sport will be left when the paranoia finally lifts and we realise that in the long run, for our survival as a functioning society, we have to get outside again — that is still to be seen.
Fresh bread
Saturday 2nd May 2020, 5.55pm (day 3,173)
During the Great Hebden Bridge Flour Famine of early April 2020 I panic-bought some organic rye flour, at a ridiculous price, when it seemed to be the only bag of flour available in the town. Subsequently, I have tried making pizza with it, and then batter, and both were dismal failures. Then today, Clare suggested the entirely logical approach of making rye bread with it. At this it — and she — was a roaring success. There will be more of this.
The last class of the year
Friday 1st May 2020, 9.25am (day 3,172)
It was my last scheduled teaching of the semester today. Normally we would have concluded this significant moment in the academic year by some kind of group photo, as on 4th May 2018, and said our goodbyes, at least amongst those I will not be supervising over the summer. There can be none of that this year. I sit in a room and talk to a laptop for an hour and twenty minutes and take questions here and there and that’s it. I do plenty of distance teaching anyway, so it’s not that I’m pissed off about this as such — but I miss people, and if you claim not to, then I worry for your sanity.
Birdwatching, again
Thursday 30th April 2020, 10.45am (day 3,171)
So, there went April 2020, spent entirely under a form of house arrest for reasons that I am finding increasingly hard to understand — ostensibly to protect me from a disease that I may well have already had, but really because having dug ourselves into this hole, we now have no idea how to get back out of it. And I’m not just pointing the finger at the British government here. Six weeks ago everyone panicked, and it’s now, ‘OK, now what?’. A question to which no one seems to have a very plausible answer.
Meanwhile, as we look forward with no joy at all to what is very likely to be an equally dismal May, I have to point my camera out of the window and capture the small part of the world that is permitted me. Hello jackdaw. Enjoy your freedom.
Being 42 