Awwww. Snapped today during a working lunch in the Students’ Union in Manchester. As well as her super-cuteness I like the symmetry of the various hands and limbs of both mother and baby but also the asymmetry of the other face in the background. Iris (5 months) thus becomes the youngest person to feature on this blog.
Another one of those days: look up, see a sky, want to move to a different city. Half an hour after this came another intense cloudburst: until a couple of months ago I’d have said ‘I’d never seen anything like it before’ but of course we have. (The building is the AQA headquarters on the Manchester campus.)
Today was a dull day in every respect. The grey skies and rain are now a permanent feature of existence. Back in Manchester for the first time in 10 days but I spent most of it in my office, which isn’t a particularly great photographic subject (which is why there have been, to date, precisely no photos of it on this blog). This is the university’s new ‘learning commons’, due to open in time for the next academic year, and doubtless full of all sorts of exciting new devices that someone has decided will ‘enhance the learning experience’. Not that they ever asked any of the academics around Manchester who specialise in educational technology their opinion as to how it should be built. I know this, because I am one of them. I am sure it will be just perfect.
Despite how it probably appears from this blog, I do spend the usual proportion of my life at work. But it appears relatively rarely on here simply because it’s not usually appropriate to whip the camera out and start taking photos of colleagues, students, whomever I should run into in the course of working life. Here’s an exception. And well done to my student Ainna (not pictured) who passed her part of this event unconditionally.
I know I did this theme a couple of days ago but there really wasn’t any other photo today which encapsulated what was an absolutely glorious spring day.
Incidentally, those who know the Manchester campus may be bemused as to where this is, because it really must be one of the least green campuses in Britain – there is hardly any green space, plus this bloody big road running right through the middle of it. Trust me however: this is just outside Blackwell’s, under the ramp to the shopping precinct and opposite the Kilburn building.
Couldn’t take lots of photos at this happy event because I had an official role to play: it would not have done to have been snapping away from up on the stage while reading out the names of the many graduates celebrating their achievements this evening. (Reading the names out is a harder job than it looks, I can assure you.) This was the best shot to encapsulate the most important thing about the day however – it makes people happy.
I would say, somebody please tell our government that higher education remains a public good, but we have done so, and they don’t care. Very soon Fei, and I, will sod off to work and study in a country which still values the notion of higher education as something which benefits everyone, not just the student. And we will take all the expertise and economic gains that it represents with us. Their loss. I hope it never happens, but we teeter on the edge here in the UK system, right now.
Although my work location varies, as you can tell from this blog, Monday is most commonly a Manchester day, spent among the dreaming spires…
Dreaming spires? Well, not really. The University of Manchester campus is split in half by one of the country’s principal A roads (this is the A34 which starts here and ends in Southampton, having passed through the centre of England on the way – including Oxford, hence the name Oxford Road). It makes it the noisiest and most crowded campus I have ever visited, and believe me I’ve been to a few. My bosses are spending millions on new buildings but if you ask me a better investment would be simply to pay for a ‘university bypass’ and then grass this over to create a long garden. Who knows, one day we might realise that cars subtract from life more than they add to it and it might even happen.
The Whitworth Hall (named after engineer Sir Joseph Whitworth) is the ceremonial hall for the University of Manchester. People say you end up working somewhere appropriate for your name. Well, not only is my family name Whitworth, but my mother’s maiden name is Hall, so I guess that does it for me.
On a day spent almost entirely in my office, looking out at grey and rainy skies, there weren’t many candidates for today’s shot and I nearly put something utterly dull (like my office wall) just to encapsulate the feeling. But then my friend and colleague Guyda came along to one of our research seminars to present about her using ICTs to teach medieval Italian literature, and both her and her beautiful books brought some interest into the day.
I got interviewed by ‘student TV’ today so found myself in the annual chaos that is the Freshers’ Fair. I know this picture is a bit blurred but as you can’t read the sign, it says, ‘Gardening and Permaculture Society’. Now I am not at all mocking this guy: I have found myself interested enough in gardening over the last few years. And though I didn’t talk to him, he seemed pretty sweet. But I’m sorry, if you look up ‘walking cliche’ in the dictionary, it says ‘see him’.
Being 42 