Half a bitter for Lowry

Thanks so much for all the lovely comments, stars and hearts on my 100th blip yesterday. I can't believe it put me on page 2 of the popular pages for the first time!

It was my husband's birthday today. I asked if he wanted to go out for something to eat but he said he'd be quite happy going home and put the heating on! How to live it up!! He changed his mind though and came into Manchester to meet me after work.

We went to Sam's Chop House, a bar and restaurant that was first established in 1872. They have a very famous person sat at the end of the bar, a bronze 700lb statue of LS Lowry. 

Lowry was a student at the Manchester School of Art with the then-owner of Sam's, Bert Knowles, and spent a lot of time in the bar. Many of the waitresses remembered him fondly. It seems he used to sit and draw in the Sherry Room, giving away many of his doodles on serviettes. They said "he was treated special because he was special and he was very courteous and generous in return".

I was interested to read that Lowry's inspiration for his famous industrial scene's of the North came about after he missed a train at Pendlebury station.

"I saw the Acme Company's spinning mill: the huge, black frame work of rows of yellow-lit windows ... against the sad, damp- charged, afternoon sky," Lowry wrote. "The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched figures, heads bent down ... I watched this scene - which I'd looked at many times without seeing - with rapture."

Sounds like he could have been a Blipper!

Quote for today:
All my people are lonely.
Crowds are the most lonely thing of all.
- LS Lowry