Clhoe

One Street: Market Square, Shipley #32

The rain seems to be following me around at the moment. We left a sunny Cork to arrive at a very wet Manchester last night. The morning dawned damp and misty and, after being teased with a little bit of brightness late afternoon, it is now pouring down again. Forrest has his first cricket match of the season tomorrow and the forecast is actually reasonably good, at least until late afternoon when another band of rain is due to hit. They may get some play if they're lucky.

So, back into the office and a long day of catching up with a lot of tedious shit. But it's a small price to pay for what was a fabulous few days in Ireland. I've come back with some much needed headspace and I now need to make sure that I keep that space protected from invasion. Before I took this last break it was almost as if I had run out of both memory and disk space. My mind was working about as slowly as a Windows machine does when it hasn't been rebooted for a few weeks! Actually, it wasn't that bad. If my mind ever works that slowly I'd hope someone would come along and put me out of my misery!!

I only had a few minutes at lunchtime to try to get some photographs taken. I was immediately drawn to a young couple at the bus stop, not shy at public displays of affection. I was hoping to get them in an embrace but the girl was very shy and would not let me take her picture. The guy was more receptive, though, and I think it was possibly his face that I was actually most intrigued by. I really rather like this portrait.

I was helped in that I had an old friend also waiting at the bus-stop in young Gwendoline. I was quite pleased with my patter, even though I wasn't able to persuade the girl to pose for me. It all felt very relaxed. The wonderful thing was that this engagement served to change my mood completely. I was a bit fed up when I went into town, but by the time I'd got back to the office I was in altogether better frame of mind. That was also helped in that I was shortly after propositioned by a young girl who had observed my moves! She actually asked if I was a professional photographer. She's involved in community projects around Shipley and was looking for someone to lead a community photography project. I gave her my email address. I'm intrigued.

The sad thing is that I would normally have pointed her to blipfoto.com, but I hesitated about doing that because of the stupid new front page. I don't want to direct people to a site where they immediately have to respond to a request for an email address and a password to continue. I could have said that all that is necessary is to type xxx@yyy and any letter for a password, but that would not have lent much credibility. The more I think about these changes that have been made the more ludicrous they appear to me. It's like replacing that welcoming open door with a heavy grey padlocked one - except that the door isn't actually locked at all and anyone can still walk in ... if they can actually be bothered to give it a push. It serves no useful purpose.

PS I'm pretty sure I got the spelling of this guy's name right ... in case anyone was wondering.