Wednesday, December 03, 2003
It strikes me as somewhat ironic that every day last week I intended to bring in my camera to take some pictures of Ilkley (the very picturesque town I work in), but either forgot it, couldn’t find it or just didn’t have the time.
On Monday I remembered, and it didn’t stopped pissing it down between 8am and 8pm. Since then, Ilkley has been wrapped in a mist just thick enough to obscure every notable landmark and classic scene that I wanted to take a picture of.
I felt I should take some photos of Ilkley because I’m generally fairly harsh on the north of England (and specifically Sheffield, where I live), which is dark, miserable, poor, dirty and just pretty overall horrible; in comparison, Ilkley is like a beacon of civilisation. It’s clean, pleasant, properous and generally the kind of town you’d be pleased to have built if you were playing Sim City (unless you have a penchant for regularly destroying your city with Godzilla-like monsters and typhoons, in which case, this doesn’t apply to you). Bill Bryson even visited it and wrote about it glowingly in “Notes from a Small Island”, the quote escapes me at the moment, and Google is blank on the matter, so you’ll have to concoct your own Bryson-esque description of green hills, rolling valleys and the famous moor (of course, it’s probably not too hard to think of it positively when you’ve just come from Bradford).