I've been very bad at keeping up with my ramblings in various parts of the country since we went to press four weeks ago. This post is intended to catch up with assorted picture spam from March.

( Nine pics of Ely cathedral )

Progress ( Read more... )

The Tories are in town again for this week's party conference, so naturally the marchers were in town again too. Two years ago, we got about 35,000 demonstrators; this time, the police figures put us at 55,000 ("So add on 20,000," as one speaker said). The weather was a hell of a lot better, too.

( Photos behind cut )

I've been meaning to post for about a week, so this will be a collection of miscellany ( Read more... )

This weekend I joined friends at Manchester Pride. This is a month's worth of LGBT events, most of which I've missed as I've been so busy in August (I suppose I could still fit in the exhibition at the People's History Museum, which I was aware of when I was there last week but didn't have time for because I was doing the Peterloo stuff) ( Read more... )

Today was the second half of this year's Peterloo commemorations, and I'd bought a new camera after the fiasco of the old one breaking down on Friday and preventing me from getting any photos of Maxine Peake reading the names of the dead and laying a wreath. So there are photos this time ( Read more... )

Today is the 194th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. The wreath-laying ceremony under the plaque on the Free Trade Hall (now masquerading as a Radisson Edwardian hotel) was our biggest yet. The Peterloo Memorial Campaign had persuaded Maxine Peake, who performed Shelley's Peterloo poem The Masque of Anarchy at the Manchester International ( Read more... )

I'm a very long way behind on everything, and haven't posted photos from either of the two Tests I've attended. So I'm trying to catch up now.

First, Old Trafford; for the first time I was able to get to the ground entirely by tram (plus walking), which was quicker and cheaper than bus and tram. It was horribly hot on the first two days (though I ( Read more... )

On Sunday I went to the final performance of The Masque of Anarchy, part of the Manchester International Festival. The Masque is a poem by Shelley written in response to the Peterloo massacre, though as the programme pointed out he had a rather hazy grasp of events as he was in Italy at the time. It's not an account of the massacre, but of Murder ( Read more... )

Sunday was the final day of the Didsbury Festival (which lasted nine days, but I missed last weekend as I was away). I decided to follow up my visit to Didsbury mosque last year with one to the nearby Shaare Hayim Sephardic synagogue. I'd never been there before - only to the Ashkenazi synagogue on Wilbraham Road, which has now pushed off to ( Read more... )