This one was a matter of looking out of the window at just the right time, and having clouds at just the right layers of opacity. It’s not often we get a visual sense of the sun as being spherical, but this gets close, I think.
The white stuff hasn’t featured properly in my life since I was last in Tromsø in April 2018, and there is presently none of it in Hebden Bridge. But it took only a short walk up into the hills to be faced by scenes like this. Contacts in Tromsø also suggest that at the moment, they have none at all, while Spain and Portugal suffer under the worst winter in living memory. This is one of those shots that honestly is not monochrome, though you wouldn’t know it.
Spring Wood is its name…. but it is going to feel like a very long time until spring. With weeks of stagnancy and economic devastation to come, let us at least hope there are more days with as good weather as today. If Bojo thinks I’m staying at home on such a day, he is mistaken.
No, I won’t do it. I won’t stay cowering at home, plugged into the Matrix and denied the world outside. My physical and mental health — the things we’re supposed to care about, right? — these are too important. And most of the woods and parks that I am frequenting are pretty busy with other people, suggesting that these souls, at least, have taken the same decision. It is not for the gaggle of failed journalists and lobbyists for the tobacco industry who got themselves elected about a year ago to tell us what is healthy and what is not.
Who doesn’t love the colours in autumn, a last hurrah before the greyness of winter. I like the remaining green on this shot and the sinuous branch, with its two duck-heads.
Not pictured on this shot: vast numbers of people. The woods of Hardcastle Crags were heaving today. Because, if you take away other normal weekend entertainments, people will do what they must in order to stay physically and mentally healthy, which is to get out of the house to wherever is available. Thus, congregating closer together than they would otherwise have done, and defeating the object of this latest stupid, mindless, arbitrary attempt at social control.
Nothing about the politics today, no grouching, I promise. Let us just celebrate the peak of autumn. I have pictured this wood before (by now, I’ve pictured most places near my house before), and have always called it the Entwood because here more than anywhere else round here the trees feel like they have feet, that their residence in the ground is temporary.
What’s been lacking over the last three months is not just variety of scene, but variety of event. There’s nothing happening, no parties, no shows, no sports, no conviviality. We just plod on.
At least there is still variety of light. The morning, indeed the whole day, was a beautiful one. This becomes the first pre-8am shot since I was still commuting to Manchester at the beginning of February. But this one is taken within yards of my house, and despite the glorious weather was one of only two photos I felt moved to take today.
I accept that we are not strictly trapped, whether at home or in the Calder valley itself: but with nothing open out there except a few shops (and by no means all), it’s still house arrest in all but name. I agree there are worse places to be stuck but this afternoon and evening I felt like my head was going to pop unless this ends soon. But there are too many people who like this situation — profit from it, even. These are the ones who will drag us all down.
Since I paid a visit to Manchester on 21st March, every picture on here has been taken in the county of Yorkshire, but I am not ‘staying at home’ and nor, any longer, am I supposed to be. Garrowby Hill is the highest part of Bishop Wilton Wold, and the trees shown here stand on the highest point of the old East Riding of Yorkshire, meaning this is number 11 of my county top collection. I passed three people all day at no greater risk to my health than I suffer from simply reading the news at the moment.
When I came home after this walk, Clare was upset as an old family friend has committed suicide. Already depressed, lockdown was for him the last straw and he hanged himself. What did ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ mean for him? How many more of these hidden tragedies will there be, lost in the chaos but no less real than the ones that make the statistics?
We need to restart our lives and our economy, and right soon. ‘Zero risk’ does not exist.
Another day celebrating green-ness, for there is not a great deal else to see at the moment. At least the sun is back out.
