Another day that can really only be epitomised by something fairly abstract and meaningless. The back of a road sign, warning of road works (the red lighting being the traffic light in question), seems to fit. I do like the swirl of reflected street light, caught in the window of a passing bus, and the reason why I chose this shot in particular.
I have been looking at this sign for some months now, but only today really understood the implications. I’ve seen dog ice cream for sale, and in the Arndale centre in Manchester there is now a whole stall selling little doggy cakes and pastries. But dog karaoke? Methinks we are starting to pamper our little pooches just that little bit too much. Although I doubt the singing would be appreciably worse.
Helium is abundant in the universe but not on Earth, as it’s so light, and unreactive, that all it wants to do is escape back into space. I guess this shop has just discovered this fact of chemistry.
I had a work meeting today, that included lunch, face-to-face with two other people. The rail service is having its annual summer ‘upgrading’ spasm and so my journey to and from this meeting was a complex — but not, it should be said, unpunctual — tangle of three different trains, two buses and a taxi.
All in all then, a sense of normality returns (perhaps leaving out the bit about punctuality).
Hey, it’s day 3,500 of the blog. It doesn’t take a lot of mental arithmetic to see that I’m approaching the ten-year mark. At my own sweet pace. (As a multiple-of-50 day, the stats have had their latest update.)
Is the picture a representation of how I feel today? …..Yes, actually. It’s a government thing, a Covid thing, as so much has been lately.
The establishment in question is located somewhere round here but that sign isn’t pointing to it. Instead it just presides over a mostly empty car park, where there should be signs of visitors, shoppers, people just hanging out in the town centre on a Saturday.
One of the lies we’ve been sold over the last year centres around the notion of ‘essentia’ and ‘non-essential’ retail. Amazon can compel their drones to go work in warehouses that are centres of virus transmission, but I am not allowed to patronise a local bookshop, nor to buy a pair of shoes. This has been an unparalleled opportunity to shaft small businesses, one the Tories (backed up by Labour, who are even worse) have taken with glee, while puttng on their concerned face, and telling us it’s all for our own good. Not if you are a business owner, I imagine. But that’s OK, we can just blame them for ‘not adapting’, like not inventing a way to get nails done online. Sorry to break out into this again, but there’ll be weeks more of this crap yet.
It’s just some graffiti on the old pumping station up in the woods above my house. But wouldn’t it be nice if this really were some portal into another world. One where the pubs were open, would be a real good start.
I’m not a ‘mask shamer’. There are plenty of people out there who for one reason or another can’t wear one, particularly not for any length of time, and everyone else just needs to live with that fact. But all the same, this signage did make me laugh.
There were several other photos that could have made it today and they were all more artistic than this one. But I have gone with this one simply to provoke some consideration. Is this sign a joke? Or is it meant seriously? What’s more to the point is that right now it’s actually impossible to be sure, and that alone is a sign of how screwed up things have become. I will continue to document the world that I see, but it doesn’t mean that I understand it any more.
Now there really is a sense of desperation about this one: I could claim I like the abstract arrangement of shapes and colours, and that strange white covering (is it snow? No, salt, I think). But really I just wanted to get a shot from outside of Hebden Bridge today, thanks to a necessary trip to Mytholmroyd just down the road. We do what we can under the current circumstances…
Being 42 