Bonsoir old thing, cheerio! chin chin!

Two score and seven years ago our fathers dragged us into a Continent, conceived in Error, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created European...

Three years and seven months after a majority voted to leave the EU the UK is now, at 11 pm January 31st 2020,  leaving that damned institution. There will be muted celebrations I expect, this is the way things are done here not with a bang but a whimper. Still, a Brexit Party house just a few doors down is putting out the flags in a show of Union rags to put the Mall in London to shame. Now I wouldn't want you to confuse me with those sentiments. I wouldn't have that Butcher's Apron on my property. I wanted to leave the EU but I'm no mad British Bulldog patriot, je ne suis pas un rosbif! I do not feel particularly British or English (I've never, ever felt European, I don't know what it means to feel such a thing, it's an invented identity that has no history or meaning) I'm just a Hartlepool lad a long way from home ... but I digress, anyway I had no choice in the matter, ma and pa just left me here to sing my song. No. I just want this country to be responsible for its own mistakes and its own successes like any other independent state. Make our own laws, pay our own taxes, spend our taxes as we see fit, trade freely with whoever will trade with us, kick out the bastards in our Parliament every now and then and make our government humble and sore afraid of the people. Not too much to ask, I think, just some basic independence.

It might be thought appropriate here to say that I wish the EU well without us ... well no, sod 'em, if you'll pardon my French... They and their vocal friends in this country have done their best to delay, thwart and obstruct the will of the majority. They are dangerously antidemocratic. This is absolutely unforgivable and will be their downfall. They still think they have some right not to have their noses rubbed in their defeat. I sincerely hope the sensitive souls are suffering. I look to the rise of other successful Leave parties across the states that remain trapped in the humourless and historic absurdity that is the European Union. This will no doubt happen but vita summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam ... 

“The lips of the tyrants are trembling and pale, 

In dismay they are dreading the shock, 

Of the millions who, bold in the truth of their cause, 

Are as strong as the adamant rock!”

The weekend in black and white is here.

Sorry! Not in service

This is Hull: Unique. Lively. Historical. Exciting. Friendly. Colourful. Cultural. Artistic. Limitless. And Sorry! Not in service.

The other day we went for a bus home at the bus station or Hull Interchange. We had, we thought, just missed our bus but as we entered the bus station we could see our bus waiting in a massive queue of buses trying to get into (and out of) the bus station ... we had reckoned without the power of the Hull time shift which magically slows down time to match the user. So it was that our bus was some ten minutes late getting into the station and though we boarded immediately it took some twenty minutes to leave the station. The journey home though was rapid, there being no traffic on the roads by that time. The driver as we got off (or debussed as some have it) apologised for being late ... well no worries, mate and thank you driver!.

So what was the cause of this town wide disruption? ... a small accident on one road; that's all it took to feed back and gridlock the whole town for a couple of hours. This was not a one-off event it happens two, three times a week, sometimes two, three times a day.  A survey recently made the town to be the fifth worse in the country for road delays despite being nowhere near the top five in size, I think it's about twentieth. Still this being Hull no doubt someone is working to take the place to the top of the list ...

Oh and while we're on the subject of Hull and mildly silly ideas ... the town council has just written to the Government to ask it to allow it to try out a Universal Income scheme. You might not have heard, it's a scheme to give everybody Government money (£100 per week is the sum mentioned) regardless of need. Yup sounds stupid, is stupid;  which is why the idea got cross party support in Stupidville.

Cultural Compass Bearings

In town yesterday and came across this odd thing in Prince's Dock; a compass cum lighthouse. It's to do with some light show (a "stunning light show" to give the proper description) for the hoi polloi at the end of the month. Hull, or rather its pathetic town council, has a thing with light shows, almost amounting to a fetish: put up a few coloured shiny things and folk are thought (by the delusional council) to touch their forelocks in gratitude and go "gorblimey and gawd bless you, gov" and acquire a warm "cultural" glow in their hearts and appreciate how their miserable lives have been improved by a few magic photons.

I've just read some more about this courtesy of the local rag: seems it "contacts the Met Office and displays a weather omen showing what people can expect for the following hour."(I'm at a loss for words!) ... you'll want know what a Councillor responsible for this tosh had to say ... “This incredible installation from Kazimier is a great example of how art and culture can play an important role in the exciting regeneration and future of our city.” He called it "art and culture" and he's a Councillor responsible for "culture, leisure and tourism" so he must know. There am I thinking it just panem et circenses but then I lack culture and couth.

Blue skies and trees

Snuff Mill Lane

The anticyclonic gloom of the past week has been briskly blown away by a cold front, well, I say cold it's down to a comfortable 6°C so really just a tad below average for late January. Here's some trees from Snuff Mill Lane, Priory Road and thereabouts I took on my morning walk.

Priory Road

Priory Drive

Near Hotham Road North

Near Hotham Road North

Golf Links Road

Gaudy, Maudlin and Twee

On Beverley Road a woman went missing just about a year ago. Her body was found in the Humber some weeks later, a man has been charged and is awaiting trial. The is apparently the last place she was seen and so, as is the style these days, it has been appropriated for what is now a slightly gaudy, somewhat maudlin and, dare one say, twee shrine. I can't see what purpose this serves but I suppose it does little harm.

I wonder when we'll get the seat back.

More Gloom

Somewhere in all that fog is the university.



The weekend in black and white is here.

A foggy day ...

... makes a nice change from a rainy day.

The Old Myth ...

... that we're all in the same boat.

These decorated containers were outside Dock House on St Peter Street close to Drypool Bridge. It's a shelter or hostel for homeless people. This was in June last year so they may not still be there as I read that the homeless shelter was having to move ... it sits on land earmarked for housing.

Newfangled gadget

Being a very late adopter of technology I've just got myself an iPhone and have been playing with its camera. I find it a bit of a strange beast giving hit and miss results. I'm used to peering through an eyepiece, holding the camera in both hands and pressing a shutter button and not used to having to put on my spectacles and concentrate on a screen and dabbing ever so gently at a white button ... feels all wrong but I suppose I'll get used to it. These of Princes Quay shops and the Maritime Museum were the best of a blurry bunch.

The fountains in Queen Victoria Square seem to be a magnet for odd behaviour with screaming kiddies running in and out trying not to get wet (here's a hint: don't go near and you won't get wet). Some however think it a fine sport to deliberately get as soaked as possible and then complain that they're wet ... youth of today are simply beyond help.

Feather-footed through the plashy fen ...

This guy came prepared for the Snuff Mill Lane seasonal puddles. He had a dog, some sort of Spaniel as I recall, a happy, mucky old thing that somehow ran round the edge without so much as getting its paws damp ... his human had a less than dainty approach.

Since September rain fall in these parts has been abundant topping up what an old TV weather presenter once called "the angst filled aquifers" ... and we've still got "February Fill the Dyke" to come.

February fill the dyke, 
Be it black or be it white; 
But if it be white, 
It's the better to like.

To lose two looks like carelessness

On our way to Cottingham via Snuff Mill Lane we came across an amusing sight ... a pair of artfully arranged riding hats possibly by the same guy who brought us the "spectacles on a bench" installation that was such a success the other year.

Kaleidoscopic vacuity

Here from the height of last year's summer is the terminally dull and unoriginal mural that appeared on a gable end on Spring Bank. There are, in the wind, plans to turn this Victorian thoroughfare, a place of many cultures from the Middle East to eastern European, a place that has a vibrancy all of its own, not all together legal, not all together understood by those powers that want to be; in short a place that may not be to everyone's taste but certainly does not need any interfering busybody coming in to "improve" things... to turn this into a pitiful, pastiche of Tobermory or that unique neighbourhood in Bristol with painted houses. Yes, as you might have guessed, there is public money in the form of arts grants washing about and that means people will have the c(lapt)rap, sorry Art, thrust upon them volens nolens by talentless, parasitic oiks who, seemingly, could not get gainful employment other than through the public purse. It is called a community art project, but communities do not make art, communities make sewage and litter and children that need educating and patients in hospitals and so on but never art. Artists make art and on this street artists leave few traces.

I believe this is a spin off of the City of Culture, a so-called 'legacy event' ... a legacy of peeling fading paint and second grade 1960s art school doodles with vacuous, archaic, pseudo-socialist, concepts such as Unity. Unity of what? With what? For what? Pshaw! Unity, that fabled imaginary strength of the multitudinous and disparate working classes, is much like God and religion; what little there was of it died and fell apart a long time ago and is not much missed.

... and carry a big stick.

As if having authority from the almighty weren't enough church authority by the middle ages had sought a more temporal power to keep the great unwashed in order and to organise the day-to-day business of hatching, matching and dispatching the god fearing (and, no doubt, feared by god) populace. To that end arose the position of virger or verger and obviously such a position requires a staff of office, the virge, basically a big stick quite possibly used to clout the unruly in to behaving themselves. Here's Holy Trinity's verger with his ornate magic wand with the triple crowns of Kingston-upon-Hull ... 

It's all really quite silly, this quasi pagan vesting authority into a stick (God's rod; the phallic imagery is clear, is it not or is that just me?) but then you see it popping up all over place not least in our Parliament and town councils with their fancy maces which have to be present before any business can be carried out. Parliament even has its own verger, Black Rod, by royal appointment. All utterly ridiculous or verging on it.

Small Tortoiseshell

Back in August I posted how we were having a good year for Painted Lady butterflies a few days later a host of these pretty fellows turned up to feast on the buddleia and pose on my letter box. These are small tortoiseshell butterflies (Aglais urticae) a species recently thought to be headed for extinction due to parasites, man-made chemicals, global warming, Brexit and the fall of Sterling against a basket of currencies  and so on... clearly no-one told these guys. As the Latin name suggests nettles feature strongly in their life cycle so I always leave some growing if I can (OK laziness plays a great part in this).

These are not to be confused with the Large Tortoiseshell which really is extinct , at least in the UK and Ireland.

Sad soft fries

More of an update on the old Co-op/BHS mural. In early October the council announced that the whole lot was to be demolished, too much asbestos, too tricky to remove, too expensive, too dangerous, too, too, just too much everything...  You get the picture. Then later in the next month and a bit like the cavalry arriving in the last reel of an old-time movie, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (quite a mouthful that) declared that the mosaic had Grade 2 listed protection as it has "special architectural and historic interest". This does not save the mural by itself. I think what this means is that the council now has to apply for special permission to knock the thing down and many a Grade 2 has been lost over the years. This late intervention, however, puts the game into extra time as they say ...

Finally and on a silly note I came upon a site that writes 'haikus' that depend on your GPS location or where ever you happen to want it to be. They're  actually just three line random bits of junk since a haiku must have 5,7,5 syllables, but still it managed to 'know' about the Co-op mural in some strange way that makes the internet a pleasing nightmare.

Faites vos jeux

You recall, well of course you don't, I'm just being polite, the old Clarence Mill and its slow, painfully slow demolition. Well the place where it stood is surrounded by a board fence and, as is the style these days, that has become the canvas for any Thomas, Richard and Henrietta to come along with a can of paint and decorate the neighbourhood. Originality or even talent are not needed just a wilful desire to spray any old rubbish around the place and call it "self-expression". It's really just a mess.

My old post reminds me that there were grand plans for a hotel with a casino ...  I have no idea what's in store for the place now, I guess the wheel's still in spin.

Next Year's Weeds

So that's one more year seen through without too many disasters, still standing (or rather sitting) at the end of it all can't be too bad to paraphrase old Nietzsche (again). So take deep breath and let's go through another turn round the sun and see what a year will bring ... 

City Daily Photo asks for our "photo of the year" again. I chose these bountiful thistle seeds from the year's wanderings in my time. They may be a gardener's nightmare but then I'm not a gardener.

Happy New Year to almost everyone ...