The sun is just about still making it over the hillside in the mornings, but not for much longer in the year. It will be February before it makes a reappearance in the east before noon on any given day.
9th November 2021 was the day on which I landed on St Helena. No such adventures await me this November, but then again, I don’t have to spend ten days in quarantine again. It was too nice a morning to stay indoors, wherever I was.
I’m not even trying to hide the fact that I went to another football match this morning. For a while, the light was good. Better, then, than staying inside. This is how I make my life calculations these days.
Two mornings in a row on campus. Well, I should put in a bit of effort now and again. Not that many other people were doing so today. The solitary, distant figure on the left is the only one to make it into this shot.
I guess it would be nice to have got both the moon and the leaves in focus, but that would only be possible with a long zoom, and I was standing just below the tree as I took this one. In any case I was aiming more for the nice combination of colours and shapes, and capturing the vivid blue of the sky as the backdrop to it all.
Tried to get on a train today to go somewhere other than home, but when it turned up 20 minutes late and dangerously overcrowded, I remembered, only then, that Manchester United were at home (not to mention Leeds and Liverpool), and the hourly Sunday service was really not up to the job. I therefore returned home: but there were things to see on Calder Holmes Park that were just as interesting as what I might have encountered elsewhere. So the bad planning (mine, and the train company’s) didn’t matter in the end.
And from the evening, to the morning — not having moved very far. These houses constitute home; although I have neatly covered up our own windows with a tree trunk.
Well, I was walking back from Old Town — I don’t know where this person’s itinerary had taken them. I am reminded now and again that I do live in a pleasant part of the world. That’s not an accident.
Although I spent most of the day in Manchester, Hebden Bridge should feature on here for the fourth day in a row thanks to the unexpected scenes which greeted its residents when opening their curtains in the morning. While we were enjoying the balmy spring weather a week ago, I joked with my international students saying “British weather — it could snow again before we’re done”. But I didn’t necessarily think I would be proven right. This was all gone again by the time I came home, however.
This trip down to London also offered the chance to pick up a County Top (see the other blog); specifically Bushey Heath, the highest point in the historic county of Middlesex, swallowed up by London in 1965 although at least it still retains a county cricket team. It wasn’t major mountaineering, though. Clare here strolls through the woods near Bentley Priory (an ecclesiastical relic? no, a premium housing estate) in one of those shots that chews up the bandwidth thanks to all the foliage.
Being 42 