This being a British summer, the balmy heat of Wednesday and Thursday has gone, and it’s raining again. It will do this until it feels like being different.
Old Town sits on the hills to the north of Hebden Bridge. In Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579, the first atlas of England and Wales ever published, it’s called The Old towne…. so it’s been around for a while.
Despite everything, it’s still Friday night, the end of a working week, time to relax. What tattered remnants there are of our social life at this time are up in Old Town, so that’s where we headed, despite it being the wettest day for a long while.
The cobbles that surface Sackville Street in Hebden Bridge are classic, but whether they are practical, ask the people that live there. I was just passing. Having reached the ‘bored stupid’ stage of lockdown myself, I wonder whether the painting in evidence here is recent, done by a local householder who has been on furlough for the last three months. But I guess the work looks older than that.
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.
Since I paid a visit to Manchester on 21st March, every picture on here has been taken in the county of Yorkshire, but I am not ‘staying at home’ and nor, any longer, am I supposed to be. Garrowby Hill is the highest part of Bishop Wilton Wold, and the trees shown here stand on the highest point of the old East Riding of Yorkshire, meaning this is number 11 of my county top collection. I passed three people all day at no greater risk to my health than I suffer from simply reading the news at the moment.
When I came home after this walk, Clare was upset as an old family friend has committed suicide. Already depressed, lockdown was for him the last straw and he hanged himself. What did ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ mean for him? How many more of these hidden tragedies will there be, lost in the chaos but no less real than the ones that make the statistics?
We need to restart our lives and our economy, and right soon. ‘Zero risk’ does not exist.
The outdoors is good. The outdoors is healthy. And it always will be.
For most of the teams in England, this weekend should have marked the end of the football season. For me, this started back on June 21st in Anglesey, but seeing as the only anti-COVID strategy anyone could think of involved killing off most of what gave life meaning, it was ended, along with everything else, after March 14th. What remnants of grass-roots sport will be left when the paranoia finally lifts and we realise that in the long run, for our survival as a functioning society, we have to get outside again — that is still to be seen.
This sculpture speaks to me…. This is what we’re trying to do with landscape photography, isn’t it?
I did not have to go very far from my house to take this picture, and nor did I have to interact with anyone in order to do so. For all sorts of reasons, it makes me sad that I have to say these things at this time, but it’s where we’re at. Yet the world is still out there, folks.
Maybe I should have cropped the birds, but I left them there in the end.
The kind of place I do like to hang out on a Saturday afternoon. And on a glorious day like this, how can one be blamed? No money changed hands. There was merely the fun of the game (a decent one too — 5-4 to the hosts in orange, Oxenhope Recreation, versus Headingley) and the view.
