A holiday weekend — no work tomorrow! (Unless of course you work in one of the many professions in which this idea of a mandated holiday is just a pipe dream.) But it was an excuse to go out and enjoy company and dress in silly yellow hats, if that’s your bag.
More plantage. But it’s the season for it. There’s a shortage of vegetable oil at the moment, apparently — as Ukraine was a major supplier, but this year is not, for obvious reasons. So the more of this bright yellow stuff that we grow, the better: at least, if we want to fry our food in an adequately healthy way.
Not quite Wordsworth’s multitude but there are certainly a lot of these sprouting outside the Ellen Wilkinson Building on campus at the moment, something the rather random focus point of this shot is intended to capture. This is the 700th Manchester shot to feature on here, by the way.
Could the great railway pioneers of Britain — people of vision and enterprise, greats like Brunel, say, or Stephenson — have conceived of the ‘rail replacement bus’, do you think? Particularly at 7.50am when it’s not even light yet? At least it was an opportunity for a study in yellow and blue.
The notion of ‘an evening out’ largely died with the dawning of The Great Fear. This is the latest shot in any day since February 19th. We tried today, but it is cold out there, and trying to enjoy oneself is now something to be looked at askance, it makes one suspect, subversive almost. I cannot say there is much to look forward to in life right now. This chap may or may not agree with me — and so may you. But for me it’s the way it is.
It was a public holiday in the UK — for some. Those that weren’t on holiday included the many people who work in pubs, driving trains or buses, police, nurses etc. And me, who stayed in all day reading funding proposals submitted to the Kazakh government. Well, it’s important to them, at least.
Spending all day sat at the dining table at home would not have given many photo opportunities except that next to me were these sunflowers in a vase. They help August 2020 go out with some vivid colours.
Ragwort, or Jacobaea vulgaris, is one of those plants that demonstrate environmental priorities. Its bitter leaves are full of alkaloids and poisonous to horses and cattle, so farmers are supposed to keep it under control and there are acts of Parliament that declare it, by law, a ‘noxious weed’. But apparently horses don’t eat it anyway, as it tastes vile. Meanwhile, it is highly beneficial to pollinating insects: indeed, for some, its their only source of food. So let that ragwort grow, I say. This large clump of it currently flourishes in a field above Hurst Road.
Somehow the little guy on the pedestrian crossing sign just adds to the concept. We are now all islands. Or, supposed to be, by official decree.
This squash plant is growing on the window sill of our room. Now I’m no expert on botany, and it is true that one rarely gets the chance to observe flowers in such controlled conditions. But I have never seen a plant that blooms in such an ephemeral way. This flower had not opened at all last night: here is what it looked like at 8.30am. But it was already withering. By 11am it was visibly drooping and by not later than 4pm it had shrivelled away to the state of the one visible behind it — which had done all this two days ago.
I hope it got what it wanted out of its few hours of glory, anyway. You have to hope that evolution still knows how to build things that are fit for purpose.
I reckon that under these circumstances, everyone is getting to know their immediate local environment better than they might have done last year. Reached through the woods near my house, the meadows on the upper terraces of the valley, near Old Town, are currently a riot of buttercups. Their yellow carpet is a more natural version of those blankets of oil-seed rape that one gets in more arable districts: and more pleasing, somehow.
Being 42 