December, and what endless delights this month is going to offer to us in the UK, beyond even just the usual encroachment of dusk into ever-earlier segments of the day. I did not find a huge amount to inspire me photographically today, but this one will do; the rule of thirds is met well enough. The floodlights illuminate Spotland, the home of Rochdale FC.
After it became apparent, around lunchtime, that flooding was going to cause some, er, interesting wrinkles in my journey home, I headed back early — and it still took me over three hours to get home from uni, whereas the normal itinerary is about an hour and twenty minutes. The major obstacle was the need to get a taxi from Rochdale, way over the tops, thanks to the direct road and rail links from Todmorden to Hebden being under several feet of water, apparently. Photographically, I did my best — the red spattered throughout this shot seems somehow symbolic. But I could have done without it.
Taken through the train window this morning, and more of an abstract than anything else: the rain (or rather sleet) drops on the window in the upper left quadrant are all too apparent. But it does at least illustrate that we had our first real snow of the winter today. Pretty feeble stuff, admittedly: but it was there.
Rochdale FC’s manager Keith Hill takes questions from representatives of the local media, who, for some unfathomable reason, included me amongst their ranks this afternoon. His team had just beaten Bury FC 2-0, but that didn’t necessarily make him the jolliest of interviewees.
Second shot in a row of one or more of my commuting colleagues. Possibly he is lamenting the loss of his sunglasses — though I suspect more likely just to be tired…
More distinctive, though still trivial, is the fact that after years of passing through this place on a regular basis, this is the first of these blog posts to be definitively taken in Rochdale; we were stopped taking on passengers at that station. Place 176 on the official list, anyway.
