Day Ticket Traveller!

First thing this morning I was at the foot clinic being strapped up as they think I have Plantar Fasciitis, just like my dad! Will have to get used to all the tape and padding - it felt like I was walking with a rolled up sock stuffed inside my shoe.

The Bee in the City art trail finishes in a week so I had a plan to get a day saver ticket for the tram to get 5 far flung bees. I made a rookie error though, as I was on the tram I remembered I hadn't charged my phone and it was down to 30%. Would it last the day!

My first bee was at Manchester Airport. When I arrived there were so many University representatives welcoming the new overseas students. They looked so young and rather nervous but it was clear they were being well looked after being greeted as soon as they got off their plane.

The sculpture (first extra) commemorates the first non stop flight across the Atlantic by Captain Sir John Alcock and Lieutenant Sir Arthur Whitten Brown, both of Manchester, on the 14th-15th June 1919. The flight was made in a Vickers Vimy Bomber powered by Rolls-Royce engines.  I wonder if they felt as nervous as the new students as they headed off into the unknown. Sadly, Alcock died in a crash 6 months later during a routine flight and Brown died from an accidental drugs overdose some years later.

I got back on the tram to Wythenshawe as one on the bees is at the Forum Centre. I was a ballroom and Latin American dancer for 20 years, from about the age of 5, and danced competitively at the Forum numerous times - and I didn't recognise a single thing. It's been a long time, but nothing was familiar at all. 

Outside was the 'tree' (second extra) with each growth ring representing one decade and a snapshot of people's relationship with the town during such era.  The poem reads: It was fields and farms, then we came - a new start, the picture house, the dance hall, the pub, sliding down steps on milk crates, around the multi-storey in skates, we rolled down the mounds and we climbed back up, we climbed up trees in Wythenshawe Park to see that nature remained, on ever-changing ground we grow - our childhoods replayed.

Back on the tram, I headed off to Manchester United Football Club and on the way there spotted this amazing sculpture which I picked as my main blip. I loved the scale of it! The Liverpool Warehousing Co. Ltd in the background was apparently was the largest firm of warehouse keepers in the UK with cotton as their main commodity.

"Sky Hooks" was inspired by a local tale about an apprentice steel worker who was sent, on his first day at work, to buy some Skyhooks (which of course never existed). The internet says "it is a beautiful example of a practical joke turned into an idealogical emblem because whilst "Skyhooks" have still never been invented, the idea that through his own determination and persistence man could build a structure that would anchor himself to the sky, is poetically perfect.

The last bees I wanted to photograph were in Castlefield and so I made my last trip to find them both and spotted the lovely reflection in the canal (my third extra).

I certainly got my money's worth out of the ticket and best of all, read 70% of my book for Tuesday's book club night (Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng).

Quote for today:
And in the end she became more than what she expected. She became the journey, and like all journeys, she did not end, she just simply changed directions and kept going.
- R M Drake