When the 07:42 cattle truck to Manchester turns up half an hour late, like it did this morning, you can be damn sure there’ll be a few people wanting to get on it. Why was I not among them? Because there was another three carriages along three minutes later, with blissful peace on board. Take this picture as an illustration of how humans typically fail to delay gratification.
Peterborough becomes the latest station to feature, I don’t know how many different railway stations there have been on here by now but 20 or more seems a reasonable estimate. I spend enough time on trains for this to be an inevitability, but that’s OK, the mixture of people passing through and the general sense of waiting (here for the 18:18 service to Cambridge) makes them interesting to me.
After three days at home, working, made it back into the big city, to do some more work. So be it. I like this shot because while I’d normally feel that the newspaper stands were clutter, here I like how they feel akin to the people, randomly distributed across the field of view. And the patches of green colour to the right.
I try to keep this blog apolitical, but it’s not always easy. I was educated into the idea that we were making steady progress toward some better future. In 2016 that is a view of the world that, at best, has taken a severe blow. But at least someone is here with this guy.
It really has been a fine run of weather over the last two months and still shows no real signs of becoming unpleasant. My train to Manchester this morning was 15 minutes late and I cared not at all, just 15 minutes longer to hang out in the sunshine and take pictures.
As you can tell from this blog I don’t go into Manchester every weekday. But if I did I think I would try a project of taking a version of this view every time, whatever the weather or light or arrangement of passengers. It helps that it’s a quite picturesque station but I think it would be interesting anyway. Sometimes you see the same people, sometimes not, like a river that’s always the same and always different each time.
Doubtless there is a parent just out of shot waiting to make the strategic grab if necessary, but at some point in the future these two will be going through their big scary doors all by themselves. Good luck to them. Pictured at Manchester Victoria station, as I ventured there purely for shopping purposes — the return to work can wait another 36 hours or so.
It’s on its way…. Although it looks like the guy on the right may have busted me, I doubt it — this was taken with a very long zoom from the far end of the platform.
Still hot — and still schlepping into Manchester most of the week on non-air-conditioned trains. The summer holiday approaches, but it’s not here yet.
This was supposed to be a five-day trip down south but I have had to truncate it for reasons too annoying and stupid to bother discussing on here. The picture matches the mood today. Yet another umbrella — there have been too many of them in the last four weeks.
Being 42 