OCCUPIED COUNTRY

Walk Between the Raindrops

Well it looks like Autumn's definitely settled in for the duration. Truly crap weather has been the order of the day for the past week or two. Scudding clouds, wet, damp, cold, windy. Crap.

Still, mustn't grumble. Could be worse I'm sure.

We celebrated the marriage of Mr and Mrs Eldest at Manchester's wonderful town hall the other Saturday and a great success it was too. They had an excellent Beatles tribute band, The Mersey Beatles, who play at The Cavern every week and they were uncannily accurate - 'John' especially. It's a great venue is Alfred Waterhouse's gothic creation, set in Albert Square, it's an architectral delight. Minstrel's galleries, fan vaulting, miles of eerie corridors and Ford Madox Brown's murals. A fitting culmination of marriage festivities. It's real life for the newlyweds from here on.

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I took a trip to the Lowry Centre in Salford Quays to see the wonderful 100 years of Guardian photography exhibition. In 1908 the Manchester Guardian employed its first press photographer Walter Doughty and has only actually employed a handful since. There's a great slideshow and discussion between the late Guardian photographer Denis Thorpe and northern editor Martin Wainwright here. There's some gob-smackingly good work there especially from two of my heroes Don McPhee and Denis Thorpe. Throughout the 1980s I would read the Guardian and these two unfailingly produced great work and had me forlornly trying to reproduce it with my trusty Pentax K1000 and home darkroom. Happy days.

What I did find out at the exhibition was that a familiar face to anyone in the North West, Bob Smithies - TV presenter along with Tony (aka Anthony, aka Anthony H) Wilson on Granada's early evening local news programme, was a Guardian photographer up to 1974. And a bloody good photographer he was too. The clever bugger also had sidline as the Guardian crossword compiler 'Bunthorne'. Sadly he's best remembered round here for a piece to camera he did at Chester Zoo where an elephant kept sticking its trunk in his crotch in search of buns. It still turns up on out takes shows to this day. A true polymath. Big up to you Bob.

So, with a nod and a wink to the above, here are a few of my recent efforts.....


Albert Square, Manchester.


D. I. S. C. O. Manchester Town Hall.


D. I. S. C. O. 2. Manchester Town Hall.


Fountain, Albert Square, Manchester.


The Newly Weds arrive at the town hall.

That's all folks.