The Mighty Boo Sign

As a contribution to annual insanity that affects this country at the end of October (thank you USA; another great contribution to civilisation) here's a scary Boo sign. It's actually a sign for a café called Boom but the 'm' went walkabout sometime ago and no-one seems to have noticed ... or perhaps it was never there. Tell you the truth I didn't even notice if the café was still there. I maybe making all this up, I've not been well you  know ...

Keep Britian Tidy

Oh yes, it's a reminder to keep the the place tidy and well they can't even spell their own country right ... they meant well I suppose.

Margot spotted this delight.

Colour coded demolition

Well there goes the Osborne Street multi-storey car kennel to make way for a newer brighter better one. Also revealed are the colour codes for each floor in case remembering first floor or second floor or whatever was too onerous a task for the poor drivers of this town

Skell and Wiske

There was a time when it was the rather quaint custom to name university buildings after what when on in them. So physics was carried out in the physics building and administration was in the admin building (unless occupied by students, those were the days my friend). Any way you get the simple idea of connecting name with function. Well that's just so much antiquated nonsense and leaves no room for play by imaginative busybodies with far too much spare time on their hands. So now physics is in the Robert Blackburn building and admin in the Venn building. But that's just getting started; what you need to do is to name buildings after some really obscure rivers in Yorkshire and see if anyone can guess just what on earth goes on in them (I suspect very little but then I'm just an old grump). These are just two of a good half dozen or so rivers that I spotted recently.

Just throw a load of money at it

Here's a little story with a happy ending. Last year I posted about a sad little house that had fallen on hard times. Here it is again, a year later much work done and many thousands of pounds spent. These pictures were taken in May so I expect someone's moved in and is enjoying this remarkable renovation work.

The Happy Couple

A couple of students celebrate paying off their loans by getting married ...


Margot K Juby took this delightful shot.

Friendly Crow

Have I mentioned before that I think crows are a bit special? This one simply would not budge until I took its picture, so what was I to do?

Meanwhile in another part of town (and on a different planet perhaps) there were complaints that crows on Holderness Road were getting too bold and "intimidating" people because (and now we reach new heights of fantasy) the local McDs was closed for a refurb! "Crows on the rampage in Hull because they can't get their McDonald's fix" ran the headline. For heaven's sake! Are the folk of East Hull who survived the Blitz without so much as a whimper suddenly afraid of a few feathered friends? Two crows were seen pecking at a dead pigeon which it was claimed they had killed! Something must be done about it! Well no, something must not be done about it. "Carrion Crows Eat Carrion" wouldn't really make much of a story but in the febrile imagination of a local journo it's practically Hitchcockian out on Holdy Road. Just to be absolutely clear on this, crows clear up the mess made by people; it's either them or rats, you make your choice.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Sky and wires

Here's Sharp Street with its new bunch of houses on the site of the old Goodfellows supermarket. Well they look a bit like houses but in fact they're really the size of rabbit hutches. They're student accommodation so clearly built to pack in as many wannabe debt slaves and rack out as much rent as possible.

Margot took this while I was in the shop doing her shopping; I think it's called job share or some such.

Spells of moths

I did promise not to go hunting for these commemorative glass fibre moths but it seems there's swarms of the little bleeders so you can't really avoid them. Each of these monsters is sponsored by some firm or other, the one below by a firm of solicitors and the blingy beast above by the kind folk who brought us all the orange barriers. So praises or brickbats are due to them. If you are at a complete loss as to why these moths are even here at all (and I do sympathise) then it's all explained here.

Rescue of a daft dog

So I'm taking a stroll by Victoria Pier when I notice the Humber Rescue guys climbing up the stairs at the end of the pier and with them a dog. Strange, I thought, what were they doing with a dog. I paid it no more mind until I got home and found the drama behind it all. Some dogs are just plain daft I suppose.

Comrade of Hull

Well here's a little bit of nautical history moored up in the Marina. The Comrade is a type of craft known as a Humber Keel designed to carry cargoes around the Humber and Trent. The design is ancient and thought to be based on Viking longships with a shallow draught and a square rigged sail. Comrade was built in 1923 and could get as far inland as Sheffield. It's last commercial voyage was in 1975 when it was acquired and renovated by the Humber Keel and Sloop Preservation Society. Of course it has its very own picture filled and informative website.  There's also a pretty comprehensive history of the vessel here.

That old triangle

I started the month off with an abandoned street but did not have the space to include this empty pub also on that street. This is the Dram Shop that I posted before in happier times. There are more, many more, unoccupied buildings on this and other streets but to post them all would give the impression that Hull is the least prosperous place in the country and that would be a poor show, old sport ...

Left behind

Even the litter has a certain sculptural quality to it here in the City of Culture ...

The weekend in black and white is here.

Hull Fair again

So another year has passed and it's Hull Fair once again and as last year was so exciting we decided to try it again. But as the old Greek says you cannot step into the same river twice it was not so fun filled this second time around. Still we took far too many pictures and stayed a good deal longer than we were intending.

A fungal infection

Everything has its 'day' these days from poets to smiles and even cats. So it should be no surprise to learn that today is UK Fungus Day when all things mucid and mycological are celebrated. There's a truly irritating video "celebrating the importance of fungi in every aspect of our lives" here. My knowledge of fungi identification is somewhat limited so the the most I'll say about the two specimens I've posted is that they are both bracket fungi, probably a Ganoderma of some some sort, and they can't be doing those trees any good at all.

A load of codswallop

I don't know about culture (that's probably not come out the way I meant it) but I do know there's a tidal wave of propaganda filling the streets of this incomparable town. And, as any student of physics should know, a wave moves nothing forward but simply shifts stuff up and down often causing destruction as it passes through. Anyhow the hunky hipster fisherman dressed in waterproofs and a sou'wester doing something unspeakable to a dead cod has surely got to win some sort of award for camp cliché of the year. More of this please!

Smile, damn you

I was going to say that today, unlike yesterday, is poets day but then I find that October 7 is Happy World Smile Day! Spread that Joy so it comes back and hits you in the gob.

The weekend in black and white is (thankfully) smiling at us from here.

"A Rumoured City"

Today is National Poetry Day. Yeah, my reaction was 'so what' as well. A whole day of poetry really? ...wake me when it's over. Hull lays claim to being a city of poetry so I thought I'd post Margot's poem about Hull written a few years ago when she used to be a "Hull Poet"; she's given up on all the tomfoolery of poetry, as she calls it, these days. Anyway here goes; it's one of her more cheerful poems, there's hardly any blood in it all ...

 "A Rumoured City"

This is where the poets come to die;
like elephants in their legendary graveyard
they leave their bones, their teeth, but nothing
so rare as ivory.

You know all the stories...
Two of them shared one wife:
one tried to sell his gold tooth, being thirsty:
another drowned in marriage and normality:
a few fled in panic and never dared look back.

You think of it as human, this city.
You think of it as a woman -
decked with flowers, crannied with docks
whose waters have a female, secret smell.

At first she seems to beckon,
to offer you the freedom of her byways,
to twine her streets around you
in a mistletoe embrace.
But her hosts are dependant on her;
they cannot escape, they forget to try,
they learn to love her as she drains them.

Her choice of iconography betrays her.
Here at the place where her heart beats hardest
two copper statues, corroded green -
one a bare-breasted Amazon
threatening with a lethal trident;
the other sexless, nameless, hooded
and draped like death's unbearable face.

You penetrate the vampire streets;
twilight coils you in its caress.
You think of giving it another year
since the city seems to fit you like a glove
and the docks possess your imagination
when sunset shows them brimming with blood.

                                                       Margot K Juby

A Rumoured City was an anthology brought out some thirty five or so years ago; a collection of stuff (some duff some not so duff) by the then "new poets from Hull", a few of them are dead now or left Hull years ago. A Hull poet, it seems, does not have to live in the place. You can get a copy from here but it'll cost you at least £82! Ouch!

Final resting place

Usually fly tippers choose a secluded spot, a back alley or a country lane say. The depositors of this unwanted bed chose the entrance to Spring Bank cemetery on one of the busiest roads in town. Is rubbish dumping at long last coming out of the closet and into the mainstream?

Middle of the road

I know it's been a while since I mainlined you with visions of orange barriers so you're possibly feeling mild withdrawal symptoms. Fear not these colourful additions to the townscape will be around for quite a few months more. We are promised completion in December and then again in March next year. Yeah, I know, two completion dates in case one makes you sick.

Demolished

It would be remiss of me to allow you to gain the impression that it is all abandonment and decay in the City of Culture, by no means is that the case, oh no sirree! Here the old ambulance station is  being gently pulled apart. The car park, too, is coming down if it doesn't fall down first. Roper Street, parts of Osborne Street  and much of Waterhouse Lane [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ] are also if not already down then soon to be levelled. Since there was no plan to use these old buildings then by all means knock them down and build afresh. But what to build? The fallout from 2008 put an end to Princes Quay's planned expansion. So what to do? "Hmmm I know", says a bright spark at the Council (I'm in a generous mood, we all know there's very little brightness in that place), "let's borrow, oh I don't know, about £36 million and build an arena for "bands" to perform and businesses to hold conferences and such like, (other cities have them so why not Hull?) ... and lets put it where access will cause maximum disruption to traffic, and let's make it too small, and let's make look like a giant yellow slug erupting from the ground and let's force it through planning after it's been rejected and and and ... let's call it, oh I don't know, something like, erm, Hull Venue; how about that for an idea?" See I told you it's not at all doom and gloom.

These delightful images "borrowed" from the Hull Daily Mail.

Vacated

This month's theme of 'abandoned' could have been designed for Hull. It's like shooting fish in a barrel (did anybody ever do that?). Staples had been in this store on Ferensway for donkeys years, the place was always empty and almost never had what I needed and if it did it was way too expensive. Anyhow Staples has moved to a slightly smaller, slightly more out-of-town site on Clough Road (along with the Police, the Fire Brigade and old Uncle Tom Cobley and all ...). This building joins on to the empty computer store I posted a while back making a seriously large vacant ex-retailing space in the centre of town. Maybe it can be filled with 'culture' of some sort for next year's bean feast...

Abandoned

An abandoned doll in...

an abandoned shop in ...

an abandoned street.


Guess what today's theme is at City Daily Photo ...