My Most Interesting

I've always kept an interesting eye on which of my photos the big, clever computers at Flickr think are the 'most interesting'. So I've made a mosaic of my top 100 Most Interesting. I'm always amused that out of the thousands of pictures I have at Flickr, it's often the ones of food and graffiti which come out on top. Many of the food ones are perfectly nice pictures, but just as many have been taken on mobile phone cameras, or in very dim light or just aren't very good at all, but they still get masses of hits. It's the ones from the big name restaurants like El Bulli and the Fat Duck so I suppose people read about them and then Google them and my pics come up pretty high up the image searches, it's not particularly flattering, but I shouldn't complain. As Flickr has such good stats it's interesting to see what's going on, for example one of my Banksy shots from Liverpool got about 5,000 views in one day. I've not managed to find out why. It wasn't on the front page of Explore (as far as I know) and I didn't get many comments. Very odd.

See all of these images bigger and clearer here.

First Class Males

I went on the Manchester Flickr Groups jolly to the wonderful Victoria Baths on Sunday. The Victoria Baths are a work in progress. There are three pools, one for First Class Males, then for Second Class Males and finally the Women get a place for a dip. There were also little cubicles on the galleries above the three pools where you could rent a bath and hot water for you and your grubby family to have a wash as your house wouldn't have had a bathroom.

The Baths won the BBCs very first Restoration competition a few years ago which got the much needed restorative work under way and the don't seem to have stopped since. It's a really impressive place and we were very lucky to have a private tour for about one (very cold) hour and we were just left alone to wander where we wanted and take as many pictures as our memory cards could cope with. I'll definitely go back in six months or so to see if any new parts have been uncovered (some warmer weather would be welcome too). I'd particularly like to see the Turkish baths which are being worked on at the moment.