Alan Burnett

.... I suppose I am a categoriser; never happier than when I am distilling life and storing it labelled apothecary jars.

All In A Day: 2. Remedy. There is something symbolic about this row of jars. The way natural elements and minerals have been extracted, categorised, compartmentalised, ordered and labeled is strangely appealing. ....

..... I took a very similar image to this first one sixty years ago - but I have to say that this one is a better photograph.

I'm calling this little mini-series of calendar images "All In A Day" as they were all taken on the same day, indeed within the same couple of hours. They were all taken at the same place, but I will leave that up to you to work out.....

.... However, I can't pin down the location and I have wandered around both physically and via Google Street View and have been unable to find the same combination of chimneys, houses and mills. Hopefully, someone might recognise it; otherwise it will have to remain a bit of a mystery.

I've called this "Back Street In Elland", but I'm not sure it is. The next couple of shots on the negative strip are of Elland, and I certainly took a lot of photos in the town in the 1970s. ...

.... Designed by William Hill of Leeds - the architect of some beautiful town halls including those in Bolton, Yeadon and Portsmouth - and built in 1879-80, it suffers from the fact that it is built side-on to the main road. It is well worth turning onto Saville Road to see it in all its glory.

I walked past Bethesda Church in Elland the other day. I must have passed it by a thousand times before without pausing to look and appreciate its fine features. ....

.... I'm not sure of the answer, but zooming in on the background and seeing which buildings have gone and which have survived is a fun way of spending an afternoon. The horse, I assume, didn't survive.

This is one of those photographs where you try to line up buildings and, with all the skill of a CSI officer, work out where I might have been standing when I took the photo fifty-odd years ago.....

.... After half an hour, I found an old 5000 Mark German banknote, and after that, I spent a good half hour researching the potential value of this intriguing find (it turned out to be £6). After that, I gave up and went to the pub.

I decided to tidy my room yesterday. Given the amount of junk/priceless antiquarian collections of ephemera my room is home to, this is both a major undertaking and one that is never completed. ....

.... As for my memory, part of it says the sun always shined and the sky was bright blue. The other part instantly recognises the scene.

HALIFAX POWER STATION FROM CHARLESTOWN ROAD, 1967 : The clouds can't really have been that dark, the walls that soot-encrusted, the chimneys so stark. Time must have paid tricks on the film emulsion, or my exposure calculations were somewhat inaccurate. ....

.... The great craze at the time was the new flying machines, and many photographic studios would have mock-up sets for sitters to use. Thus we have the magnificent girl in her flying machine.

This is a wonderful photograph of my father's cousin, Ivy Burnett. She was born in Birmingham in 1906, and this photograph must have been taken when she was three or four. ....

.... There was something quite cinematic about the constrained view as the bus made its way up Godley Cutting, and then you were confronted by this splendid industrial vista as it crowned the hill and made its way majestically down New Bank.

This is a sight familiar to a whole generation of Halifax folk. I took the photo from on top of Godley Bridge, but you got the same view from the front seat of a Corporation bus. .....

.... Around almost every corner would be a history-steeped bridge over a stone-stepped brook, flanked by pubs that would tempt a Son of Temperance. This example was in the village of Kettlewell.

Driving through the Yorkshire Dales last weekend, you didn't have to seek out picturesque scenes, they formed disorderly queues in order to present themselves to you. ....

.... I know that he lived, worked - and bowled - up in Cumbria in the early years of the twentieth century, and did not return to West Yorkshire until the First World War. This photograph, I suspect, dates from the 1920s.

My mother's uncle, the splendidly named Fowler Beanland, was a great bowling enthusiast, and this is one of his photographs. It has a caption - Bowling At Devonshire Park, Keighley - but no date. ....

.... So celebrate this Yorkshire Day with me overlooking a Halifax that is now a bit of a distant memory.

I took this photograph of Halifax nearly sixty years ago. I have used it as one of my calendar images before, but that was back in 2021, and, anyway, the rules say that I can use the same image more than once if it is Yorkshire Day. ....

... Unable to stop and take the photograph I sensed was waiting to be taken, I had to wait until I got home and play around with one I took earlier - twenty years earlier to be exact.

Last weekend I drove south through the Yorkshire Dales National Park on a day when the sun and the clouds promoted shadow boxing matches between the moors and hills. ....

.... In the 60s, I saw endless wrestlers thrown from its canvas-floored, rope-encircled ring, and in the 70s, I heard the sheer beauty of the sound of the Modern Jazz Quartet flow like velvet from its stage.

The fine proportions of Halifax's Victoria Hall, the town's monument to culture. In the 1950s, I remember seeing a Scottish pipe band march down the theatre aisles during a colour slide presentation about the beauties of the Highlands. ...

.... This is the gloriously named Rumtickle Viaduct that used to carry the Sheffield to Manchester railway over the valley between the equally gloriously named Cheese Bottom and Thurgoland. Now it carries the Trans- Pennine Trail and provides glorious views of the countryside.

I took this photo several years ago, and I'm not sure whether age has mellowed it or some random Photoshop filter has done it for me. Who cares? ....