Easter. A time to celebrate spring, a time of renewal and growth. A day for another few tons of grey slush to barrel out of the sky and drench and depress us all. This should be a tennis court in the park. Instead it’s a sea of crud that doesn’t even have the decency to be solid, at least then we could build a snowman.
I might be off work but there’s still lots of terribly important jobs to do around the house. Like deal with the chaos that the 300 or so DVDs and VHS tapes have descended into down the years. Two hours saw it done, with only one major ‘collapse’ moment. Here, inspect a couple of the Ms…
More non-league football in the village of Emley, whose football team in 1998 demonstrated the equalising power of the FA Cup by playing West Ham, 8th in the league at the time, and only losing 2-1. Ten per cent of the whole village turned out for today’s game, which (fortunately for my quest) managed to survive the wet weather: a higher proportion of the population than a lot of much bigger places manage (like Leeds, say), and for tenth tier football. I have enjoyed my tour of these localities this season, I was vaguely aware of the strength of these roots beforehand but days like today prove it. All seem happy here, and so they should as Emley won a tight game 1-0.
The annual Good Friday hike up to Heptonstall took place, to see the Pace Egg play, but I didn’t get any decent photos of that. Looking back down and over the housing of the home town produced better results. Someone a couple of centuries ago decided it would be a good idea to build a town here and had to come up with some solutions to the difficult topography, and here we still are.
Another very uneventful, badly lit and photographically uninspiring day — but at least it marked my last day of work before a 10-day break. Expect… expect… well, not much out of the ordinary to tell the truth but at least I won’t be working until 9th April.
Mathilda demands to be only the third animal to definitively make the blog three times (though Humph the heron has a case to have beaten her to it, if the various pictures do indeed depict the same bird). She looks annoyed at the neglect, and that at some point since her last appearance, her collar has gone. And she’s got a bit greyer, but then again haven’t we all.
It’s student video-making season: Sissi (bottom left) becomes the latest to come to my office and point a camera at me for sundry purposes. While she reviewed her footage, I became intrigued by her tripod. This is an inanimate object with a secret inner life if ever there was one. People go to certain clubs dressed like this.
A train strike kept me at home so horizons were limited today, even though it was another fairly mild and pleasant one and it would have been nice to be up a mountain somewhere. Still at work though, for another few days before Easter. This is just a local scene then; I like the arrangement of things. A more placid view of this spot than on 9th July 2012, anyway.
A morning’s spring cleaning on the allotments revealed this colony of frogs living in an old plastic bath on one of our neighbouring plots. These two seem close….
The world’s first-ever railway line ran from Darlington to Stockton in 1825, and 192 years later the time it takes to get between these two places by train probably isn’t a great deal less than it was. As one waits, then, for the trains to permit one to leave Teesside there is plenty of time to admire the surrounding scenery, a happy hunting ground for fans of industry and the urban. I am not intending to be rude: I have had two good days out here in the last couple of weeks. But you don’t come for the landscapes. Or the train service.
Being 42 