Eccles

Back to work today, and office bound apart from a quick trip to Eccles.

I took this outside the Eccles Gateway, which includes a library, as well as health and community facilities. I liked the reflections.

It is over a year now since local taxi driver turned humanitarian volunteer Alan Henning was beheaded in Syria by ISIL. The artificial flowers and wreaths to him remain at the bottom of Church Street, and there are still lots of yellow ribbons tied to lamp-posts around St Mary's. And of course Syria and the consequent humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Middle East and now Europe is one of the big stories of 2015. Sometimes you want to ignore what is going on in the wider world, but the yellow ribbons in this not well to do centre remind you that that's not possible in this connected world we live in.