As predicted on Thursday, the weekend is seeing a family effort with manual labour on the allotment. Joe is contributing his bit, having discovered power tools (namely the hedge trimmer), although this photo doesn’t really reflect this. It’s interesting to compare this photo with another one of him in a hedge, taken in January 2012; that’s what adolescence does to you (visually anyway).
It is approaching 12 years since I started work in Manchester. In that time I have only rarely been in the city every day of a five day working week (indicated by the fact that there has only been one five-day run of Manchester pictures on here, which happened to be in March 2014). I have managed four this week, however. Anyway — the city might not be photographed as often as it could be, but this shot marks a nice round number — the 400th Manchester picture to appear on here.
Incidentally the blue plaque to the top left marks the founding of the Northern Rugby Football Union, later the Rugby League, in a hotel that once stood at this spot.
The garden is a riot of vegetation; only most of it is growing in places it shouldn’t, the consequence of a month of neglect. A weekend of agricultural labour looms. Attractive as it is this unidentified plant will be categorised as weed; its days are numbered.
So scabbed has my walk to work become by various building sites of one form or another that each day I go into Manchester I find myself driven down further obscure corners of the urban architecture. And who is Gurn? Who knows what claims are made here?
Feels like a while since I have spent any proper time at home, with its indoor herb garden, its dust bunnies, its strange collection of bits of dead animal.
Last day of this seven-day road trip to both ends of the country. This view is seen by thousands of commuters daily just before they pull into Cannon Street station in London, or just after they leave it (which is what I did this morning). Tower Bridge is on the left, the Shard, now Britain’s tallest building, dominates the view. London is a fine city and I seem to be spending an increasing amount of time here, but I am glad I do not live here all the time.
Still in London, and back in the usual haunt of Argyle Square, home of the cheaper hotels around King’s Cross. And a nice place to chill out on a sunny evening, as it was. Like the textures on this shot, and the colours.
The Saturday afternoon of this weekend in London was spent at the Barbican centre, where at the moment, among other things, there is a superb exhibition of sci-fi paraphernalia, films, art and so on. If you are a geek and are anywhere near London, you really do have to go and see this — John Hurt’s space suit from Alien, Leonard Nimoy’s from Star Trek The Motion Picture (Spock’s space suit!!), the original screenplay from 2001, storyboards from many movies including Dune and Star Wars… and those were just my personal highlights. Go! I don’t know what movie these two were enjoying but I like the image, the face, the shadows.
I have been excessively mobile during June. The trips to and from Siberia and Norway had already taken 11 flights and eight different airports, and on the last day of June I added one more flight and two airports — Aberdeen to London City. Too much… I need to reconnect with home over the next seven weeks (the next major trip being the last two weeks of August to the USA). How is Aberdeen airport? Same as other airports, except that it doesn’t seem to have been refurbished since about 1980.
Aberdeen is known as the Granite City and for good reason, as almost every building in the centre seems to be made of this mid-grey stone. It’s not unattractive, but on a day of foul weather like today was the effect can be to swamp you in grey. This picture was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but yes, I could perhaps have been six inches to the right for perfect symmetry.
Being 42 