Tipping Point
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Monthly Archives: August 2019
Flies In The Ointment; Jackdaws On The Grass
Apologies are winging your way if I’ve not replied to your comments or visited your blogs recently. I’ve had a little fly in the ointment, so to speak, which is non-technical jargon for I’ve been having problems with WordPress recently and I haven’t a clue why.
I’m writing this post in the hope that it has now been rectified, and if it hasn’t, well, there’s only me reading this and you guys are none the wiser. Please let me know.
A couple of days ago, at a motorway service station, I was walking down a corridor, flanked the whole way by a glass window, whilst seeking out the Gents. At the end of the corridor a little girl was loudly banging on the glass. “Look, Daddy, pigeons!”
Her father, wearing the forlorn look of one waiting for his wife to come out of the toilet, a look I knew only too well, replied: “They aren’t pigeons, darling, they’re crows.”
As I passed them both I too glanced out at the birds.
Actually, they are not crows, I thought to myself, they are jackdaws.
And, with a certain smugness:
And I should know, being, unknown to you, the anonymous author of the City Jackdaw blog.
I didn’t say this, of course, for who was I to destroy the little child’s fantasy of her all-knowing father.
And besides, at that moment in time, I couldn’t even get City Jackdaw to work.
Breaking Light At Dusk
I’ve written that much, over on Facebook, about the tragedy and travesty that is unfolding at Bury FC, that I don’t feel like adding much more about it here.
But tonight, with tomorrow’s deadline looming, a deadline after which this historic club, after 134 years, will slip from existence, I took my son to Gigg Lane.
This is his club. Not a club he inherited from me, just as I inherited Manchester City from my father, but a club that he gave his heart to of his own accord. It’s a club that I have learned to love because he loves it.
On the journey there we heard a first glimmer of hope over the car radio. A chink of light in long-gathering shadows.
I feel a little more optimistic, but the margins are tight. It will go right down to the wire. It’s not dark yet.
Hinge Moments
from my poetry blog
Hinge Moments
there are hinge moments
that connect
the before and after
beneath the blustering larches
we make them visible
on crowded carriages
the fingers that brushed briefly
in causal static
an eidetic clarity
of toss-a-coin
choice
take off your shoes
this is sacred ground
this is the place where we first met
You Try To Help . . .
I sent this to my wife, said it might help her with her fear of cats.
Back to the drawing board.
And divorce court.
Claws For The Weekend: Going Out On A Limb
My wife always says that she needs an extra pair of hands.
Well I found her some in Leeds.
Jackdaw regulars may recall that the last time I was there it was legs that caught my eye.
Pretty soon I’ll have my self a new woman. My own Frankenstein’s monster.
Have a great weekend everyone. See you on the flip side.
In Remembrance
Remembering Sharon Tate who, along with her unborn child and four other people, was savagely killed fifty years ago today by the Manson Family.
Within A Dampened Twilight
I love this photograph of Deansgate, Manchester, taken during a heavy rainstorm this August, 2019.
Taken from Deansgate Station, it has been likened to a Lowry painting.
It was taken by Simon Buckley, an artist whose photographs I discovered in his blog Not Quite Light, featuring photographs of the older, northern parts of the city that I love when, well, it was not quite light.
His blog led me to his website, where you can view and purchase copies of his prints:
22 Miles; 300 Million Gallons
Yesterday, the 1st of August.
Lughnasadh, the beginning of the harvest season.
What will we harvest? Will we reap what we sow? I don’t mean to get all biblical on you.
In Manchester yesterday, some of the older buildings of Dantzic Street here are dwarfed by the omnipresent CIS tower. The blue skies obscured by menacing clouds. The transition point of old and new; the transition point of summer and autumn.
I had 19th Century ancestors that lived on Dantzic Street, though I’m not as knowledgeable about that particular branch to tell you about them. Yet.
I got home to learn about the drama unfolding twenty two miles away in Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire. Toddbrook Reservoir looms high above the town, much higher than that Manchester CIS tower. As torrential rain continued to fall, it was discovered that part of the dam wall was damaged. With a 50-50 chance of the water, all 300 million gallons of it, rushing down onto, into, over, the town below, the thousand residents were evacuated.
Whaley Bridge now sits as a ghost town, a ghost town waiting to be either swamped or saved. An unwanted cleansing of biblical proportions.
There I go again.
Today, this second day of August, the battle goes on. RAF helicopters, engineers, volunteers, all working together to try and hold back the tide, aided thankfully by a dry night.
We wait to discover the nature of this harvest.
City Jackdaw 