Tag: difficult

#365daysofbiking An awkward subject

January 26th – Like the village itself, Walsall Wood Church of St John is a quiet, understated gem. Originally a tiny church, extended massively by the Victorians, then again pretty brutally by the diocese of Lichfield in the 1980s, its personality has maintained surprisingly well.

It’s a lovely subject at night, has a great clock and presents a great aspect to the road. But for a couple of things.

The bloody streetlight just out of shot on the right, and the pedestrian crossing light in the foreground.

Any decent angle on the building includes one, the other or both, destroying the shot. It’s one of those frustrations that just make the character of a place.

But that’s Walsall Wood for you. Never less than quirky.

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June 24th – A terrible, terrible day; bad news locally made social media and managing the main blog fraught with difficulty, and in the evening, I just had to switch off everything and walk away.

I found solace in spannering the bike and taking a ride around a late-night, somnambulant Brownhills to get some shopping from Tesco, which doesn’t close until midnight, and late hours Tesco is always an otherworldly, odd experience.

The TZ90 I’m currently using – having returned the Canon deeply unimpressed – is much better in low light that the TZ80 and I’m much happier with it as a camera than I thought I would be. There’s hope for the Lumix superzoom compacts yet, it would seem.

At points this day, I could quite happily have taken a torch to my entire online existence, as if it never happened; sometimes running the kind of local blog I do gets more serious than one would ever imagine. 

But a run out on the bike and some healthy distance made me feel better, and I started Sunday refreshed.

November 16th – A particularly hard ride home, and I’ve no idea why – I was just tired, I guess. The Black Cock Bridge was a tough too – and taking a breather at the top, I realised that this was the first time this year I’d commuted in both directions in darkness.

Still, it’s little more than a month until the darkness stops closing in and begins to retreat for another year.

Just where has this year gone?

May 9th – I went to Leicester today. This involved catching a train from Platform 12 at New Street. Platform 12 is rapidly becoming the platform nine and three quarters of the New Street, new start project. It’s the bête noire of the whole place – hard to get to by lift and without yet any of the benefits of the rebuild. To get to it using lifts involves a complicated route that would challenge Mario the plumber, but main access is from the still open old access bridge, which feels oddly end-of-days now. The advertising hoardings have gone, sections of false ceiling are missing and huge hanks of data cable hang in the exposed rafters. It’s grubby, dark, and people move cautiously and quickly past boarded up doorways, sheets of polythene and purposeful technicians in hi-viz.

Oddly, the cafes are still open here, due to the new units not being ready in the revamped side, but the pub is stripped. There’s lots of noise here, the death rattle of a once bustling place, being changed forever.