Sports Event in Gorton

The job here was a spread of images from a sports day at Wright Robinson Sports Village in Gorton. Since it was hammering it down all day I kept myself and my kit inside, where plenty was going on. Besides table tennis, badminton and the like, were seven beefy lads from RAF Halton Physical Education Display Team. Who even knew the RAF had one?

The PM visits the new Christie Hospital

The Christie, a world-reknowned cancer hospital in South Manchester, has built a new centre in Oldham. I'd been photographing tours by patients, local dignitaries and MPs all week, but then I was told to come in on this particular day to photograph a very high profile visitor, but I was not to know who until I was on site myself. I was relieved to learn it was Gordon Brown (and not JLS, for example).

My gatherings? Larger and stockier than you might expect, and is very affable in way that suggests affability does not come naturally to him. But who says leaders have to be likeable?

60 years in the making

Jack and Joan Holding, who are shortly to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary. Joan has a fondness for cats and keeps a stuffed tortoiseshell on her kitchen countertop, which I at first mistook for a slipper. 'They don't do this any more', her friend remarked glumly- 'they just let poor cats starve to death instead'. Out of the frying pan, or what...

Mustelidae

Ferrets seem to show great curiosity in everything, vibrate when you hold them, and as such are only marginally less enthusiastic than their owners. At this show in Timperley the ferrets were first judged, then raced against each other, in a typically bonkers pet show. Regrettably I couldn't photograph the race as I had another job to attend.

Walking to a crime scene at Salford Quays

A body had been pulled out of the canal near the Imperial War Museum, and the paper wanted a GV of the patch of water with the Museum in the background. Pity for the man, but the sun still came out..