I said on Tuesday that campus was busying up. I withdraw that assessment after today’s visit, on which I reckoned I might have been the only member of uni staff in the whole Ellen Wilkinson Building that turned up today. And I only really did that for the step count. I have worked (occasionally) in the EWB for coming up to 18 years now, and it does not ever get much more visually interesting than this.
Did something I have not done for 11 days and went onto campus. It seemed busy today: ‘revision week’ has kicked in. This student was one of many using the various little pods and cubbyholes that are littered around the place. This is intended as an abstract, a study in yellow (or is it green?), shapes and shadows. And portrait format rather than landscape, something else I don’t do much of lately.
Another photo of a pack member — in a sense. Mark is one of the colleagues with whom I work most closely. We were recording a podcast this morning, hence the microphone.
Am I a Communist….? well, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ always sounded reasonable enough to me. On the other hand, gulags, no freedom of speech, etc. Maybe I should just follow Lila Zing on Spotify instead.
I think I might finally have provoked the students into some independent thinking. They were talking about something, anyway.
Normally I would object to photos with bins and boxes in them but, you see, this only looks like a grit bin. In fact, like that luggage trolley sticking out of the wall of King’s Cross on its way to Hogwarts, it is actually on its way to another dimension. The guy’s parallel self also makes a fleeting, fragmented appearance. All I need to do is step to the left, melt through the mirror and I can be there too…..
I have got it down to working about two Sundays a year, and today was one of them. Appearance on campus before 9am on the ‘day of rest’ allows the experience of the virtually empty car park, and its mysterious ‘T’. Maybe it was once an arrow, but not any more. A recent run of interiors continues.
Almost every time I am on campus I pass by the front of this building — the Holy Name Church on Oxford Road. Today saw a rare excursion around the back, and thus a chance to inspect its adornment of razor wire, a deterrent you’d think a consecrated place could do without. But clearly divine intervention is not something that puts off the lead thieves (which I assume is the point of all this).
So little time do I spend on campus these days that I had not noticed the great exhibition of old Manchester rock scene photographs in the main canteen, in University Place. Some superb pictures: notice Ian Curtis to bottom left, the rest of Joy Division above, and then Tony Wilson, Peter Saville and Alan Erasmus (Factory Records more or less) under the relevant sign.
Fantastic to look at; but I wonder whether it’s wasted on the students, most of whom, let’s face it, have been born since 2000 AD and unless they have very cool parents haven’t the slightest idea who Joy Division are or ever were — particularly if they come from China. It’s not a value judgment.
It’s the last class of the semester, and the done thing among students now is “get a photo of themselves with the lecturer” at this point. I acknowledge this but it did require leaving at least 20 minutes at the end of the session so the ceremony could take place: what you see here is the queue after at least half of them had already had their time. I was feeling like a cardboard cut-out of myself by this point, although not an unhappy one. Here I said, ‘right, I’m taking a photo of all you lot while you wait to take a photo of me’… and this is the result.
Being 42 