A Scheduled Monument

Catching up with other news from this charming little town and you'll be delighted to learn that, after an exercise in public consultation hitherto unknown in these parts, the local hole has been saved for future generations and is to be extended with seating and a few hedges and so on. This represents a reversal for the Council which wanted to fill it in but had not reckoned without the power of digital petitions and news articles describing that decision as idiotic. (Quite why that particular decision any more idiotic than all the rest is a mystery). So now the litter will have more space to gather in and the youths will have more space to hang around and be disaffected. But history has been saved ...

The few medieval bricks, tucked away in the corner down there, that make up what was once Beverley Gate have now been made a Scheduled Monument by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (I assume it costs the Government nothing to do this) which means that...., well I don't know what it means, but it sounds good doesn't it.

I've also heard that regarding the dreadful Word Gate proposed for nearby the Council are looking for other sites. They didn't respond to my suggestion that two miles east of Spurn Point was an excellent site.

While I was away

I've only been into town once in about two months or so, so I missed the official opening of this, the C4DI building, that is going to be the fountain of so many brilliant ideas that we will all live happily ever after in a digital wonderland. While the future maybe bright the once gleaming brass skin is already going a bit grubby, sorry, that should read gaining an impressive patina. Work is well under way on the rest of the site and the old dry dock is finally dry with some sort of construction going on in it.

Having another dig

If you've got a few visitors coming round you might tidy up a bit, run a hoover over the carpets maybe sort out those convenient piles of stuff that you like to have to hand. You wouldn't throw out all the furniture and decorate every room all at one go, would you? Well maybe you would if you work for Hull City Council. So it comes about that, with less than a year to the City of Culture thingy, a mad panic has taken over and every street in the centre of town has "works" going on. Well I say "works" but it's hardly a hive of industry, less Ford Maddox Brown more Jerome K Jerome.  And will it all be worth the inconvenience, the loss of customers, the closed businesses, the mess and the hassle? Silly me, of course it will ...

Same old same old

I'll post this and maybe a few more before I disappear again. Hull is like some aged tart undergoing cosmetic surgery at the moment, it's not a pretty sight. Those nips and tucks are all being done in one go so you can imagine the mess.

Woody, Deadly and TTFN

That's nightshade, of course. Above Woody Nightshade or Bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara) and below Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna). Both these plants are poisonous so you wouldn't be daft enough to eat them now would you? And you'd teach your youngsters not to go near them.

Both these pictures were taken by Margot who also grew the plants because she likes poisonous things...

Right I just can't be bothered to do this for the time being so I'll be back when I'm back. Smell you later.

Mission creep

To the sickening braying and howling of a pack wild animals filled with an unsatiated blood lust the Commons after a ten hour so-called debate that was a litany of hypocrisy and cant, voted yesterday to make our streets safer by making the streets of Syria considerably less safe. The RAF likes to practice its killing in the skies over Hull and East Yorkshire presumably because our skies are so similar to Iraqi and Syrian skies.

Yet Another Charity Shop

Charity shop, Hallgate, Cottingham

The long running slow-down in economic activity has been a boom time for charity shops, they were the fastest growing retail sector last year and there's over 9,600 of them throughout the land or so I've read. They're in every town and on every high street. In Cottingham there are seven that I know of, that's more than one in ten shops devoted to raising funds for some cause or other. Now a connoisseur of these places would say that the slightly seedier the ambience the better the bargains to be had and it's a real bad sign when the professionals move in and a Mary Portas style makeover happens. This means higher prices, less stock and a reduction in customers. This one has opened recently for some local charity and has a nice mix of books, bric-a-brac and clothing. All very pleasantly and unprofessionally arranged to appeal to the browsing passer-by on a gloomy afternoon.

'Shop window' is the City Daily Photo's theme for the first day of the last month of the year. See what goodies are on display here.