The place of rescue — a skip, it seems, destined for landfill. The rescuer: Dex, that’s him behind sporting the P hat. The ultimate fate of this bear? No idea. It will probably never be seen again. The red-eye effect makes me wonder if, in fact, this is some heavily-disguised surveillance camera.
Going on the gig posters that still sit, forlornly, behind a metal screen just to the right of this shot, the Retro Bar, on the corner of Sackville and Charles Streets in Manchester, closed in summer 2025. The reason? Because there are no longer any students up at this end of the campus. Whatever is being planned for the acreage of the old UMIST buildings, it has involved gradually emptying them over the last decade or so, and accumulating what must amount to real estate value of tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of pounds. I’m sure my employer is well aware of this.
Meanwhile — it was loud and peaceful, so Mark attests. Note the train heading over the viaduct.
This one is the result of me sitting on a train (somewhere in the vicinity of Bolton) and feeling experimental. I did my best to capture the reflection of this man in the hat in the train’s window, really just to see how it turned out. And, well, it’s OK. It’s the shot I intended to take, anyway, and that’s always the source of at least a little satisfaction.
Most of my previous cameras have died more-or-less instaneously, but the present one is going more for the long, slow death. It stops working — the zoom lens, always that — but if I leave it overnight it seems able to drag itself into some kind of action again the next day, at least so far. (A bit like its owner, at the moment.) It was just after lunch today when I checked its status and it did, indeed, revive once more. At this point in time Clare was standing as you see her and so this is a technical test as much as anything else. But, still, the best photo taken today. C hasn’t been seen on the blog since Halloween, so it’s about time she returned.
This spider was not a big one, but its web was expansive enough, and as you can see, it’s still hard at work with the building. What marvellous creatures these are: there are many species which build some kind of dwelling, of course, but can’t manage it purely with goo extruded out from their bodies.
However, you can see that it’s working on the outside of a rather grubby window (the kitchen one, as it happens). By the evening, evidence (like, a bill on the doormat) then suggested our window cleaner had been round on one of his seasonal visits and all this was nowhere to be seen. I bet the spider was substantially pissed off, I know I would have been.
One has to admire the level of detail that has gone into this ‘Halloween’ window display, even down to the ‘Mushnik’s Flower Shop’, backwards, to the left. In the sign I have cropped to the right, the creators claim this is ‘Audrey III’, perhaps because Audrey II already passed through Hebden a few years back.
Some might say we haven’t had enough rain in 2025 and probably they have a point, but there’s been quite a bit lately, and today it was obvious even at 8.20am that there was going to be plenty more. So profoundly uneventful was today that this is basically the same shot as on last Monday — only without the boots and with more water outside. But I had work to do, so what the hell.
However you interpret the title of this post, as I get older the idea of a Day of Recovery is becoming more appealing. I needed it — and the boots certainly did, after Friday’s sogginess and then, two days stuffed into a pack. I think they’re feeling better after a day sat around doing very little. As am I.
You could consider this an abstract. Or, a sign that I didn’t particularly leave the house today and so was needing to point the camera at something that could be seen from within it. Or that I’m spying on the neighbours again. Either way, that’s been nearly four weeks at home, and 18 of the last 26 photos in Hebden. Time to go somewhere else for a bit.
Joe makes his first appearance on the blog since December. Why this window? Why the post title? This is Doune Castle, and some 51 years ago, in 1974, Michael Palin and Terry Jones were stood by this very window during the filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Doune stood in for at least four different castles in the movie. “But mother…..” “Father, lad, father.” “But father….. I don’t want to marry her, I just want to, want to…..” (The ignorant can check out the scene at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3YiPC91QUk)
