Someone Else’s Art — but very fine it is. It doesn’t matter that her left eye is mostly replaced by the window, and the security camera totally fails to intrude, too. Great work. Sometimes even just a minor variation in one’s route to work brings new sights in view.
At the moment it’s a case of — do I sit at home all day working, or trug into Manchester and sit in my office all day? Well, at least going into Manchester gets me a bit more exercise. There always seems to be at least one person smoking outside this building on Booth Street in the city centre, no matter how early I pass by.
A first ever visit to Arbroath. The town has offered plenty of things to the world, not least: the Bell Rock lighthouse (the world’s oldest extant lighthouse built directly in the sea); Arbroath FC who still hold the world record for the largest ever win in an official, senior football match (36-0 in the 1880s); and the Arbroath smokie, a very fine way to treat a fillet of haddock. But in 2022, while it’s attractive enough, not a lot seems to go on there. Though I admit I spent a good few minutes to get this shot without cars on it.
A Tuesday morning in Manchester. Either I was having a major case of déjà vu, or this same guy was still sat in the same spot when I came back past this point in the afternoon.
My debut attempt to ride a scooter — which took place at a sports day in about 1991 — was so phenomenally embarrassing that I have never got near another one since. This is quite a hill the guy is about to head down, too. He has my admiration. At least it’s a one-way street.
As being made by the guy on the “Dosa” stall in St. George’s Square, Hebden Bridge, this lunchtime. I did eat my lunch out today, although not here. Although this is a little out of focus, I like the mixture of colours and textures on this shot.
Here’s 1960s town planning for you. Build a concrete monstrosity of a street in the centre of your city, with a car park on top of it, and name it after a female character from that city’s history who was alluring enough to appeal to its most dashing hero. Maid Marian’s appeal is at least hinted at by whomever decorated the wall, but that’s scant consolation.
Tough brief today, to document a day spent marking, and in meetings, and no light, just a grey December flatness. And we remain in not-quite-life, of course. Everything that Authority feels it cannot control, it has shut down. Bojo the Clown still can’t do something that he’s been campaigning for for half a decade now. On such a day, a shot of, basically, nothing seems appropriate to the mood. Best I managed, anyway.
The schools are shut for half-term, there are no trains to Manchester and it rained most of the day. Hebden Bridge is back in lockdown almost by default. It’s a depressing time, a silence hangs over the place that is unnatural and wrong.
Pubs now have to shut at 10pm, and so with no nightclubs or alternative venues available for anyone wanting to carry on with their evening, everyone now mills around and gets into taxis and buses at the same time, thus compressing all those infective agents together instead of spacing them out more. And if you think this idiocy will be repealed soon, recall that the licensing restrictions brought in during World War One remained in place for eighty years.
Meanwhile, your friendly local high street is becoming a ghost town; if your place looked much different from Hebden Bridge at 10.50pm this evening (or on any given evening), then I would say that’s unusual.
Being 42 