Butter and Eggs

This is common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) growing by the side of a busy road. It's by no  means a rare plant and is a favourite of bees who need to be fairly strong to get at the nectar hidden in the snapdragon like flower. The plant has many names relating to the colour , butter and eggs as I've indicated but also bread and butter, butter haycocks and yellow rod. Other names seem to be local folk making stuff up to please themselves so here's a small sample of alternative names: brideweed , rabbit flower, bunny mouth (?) and calf's snout (??). My favourite though, among the many names, has to be dead men's bones which might possibly relate to the practice of using the plant medicinally, who knows?

Leni Riefenstahl without the uniforms

I took this a few days ago by accident almost as the camera was playing tricks and I needed to see if it was working properly. So anyhow I notice that this annual shindig, the Freedom Festival,  that started as a one-off one-day thing a few years ago has now grown and grown and grown an awful size to a five day "celebration of arts, community and humanity". Do any of these need celebrating? I think not, arts should be suppressed and certainly not state sponsored (not a penny), community is a word used by crooks to get elected and humanity couldn't give a monkey's for Hull or its stupid festival. Should the taxpayer be coughing up for this? I am certain not. Nevertheless the grasping arty types, filled with a sense of their own entitlement, demanding (because hell they're celebrating art innit? and the community whatsit called? and the humanity thing yeah, oh the humanity!) and getting their grants from the numpty Hull City Council and other agencies filled with taxpayers hard earned money. The event is, of course, a load of phoney baloney batshit! It's five nights of torch lit parades (think Leni Riefenstahl without the uniforms or the stage direction) and clowning around likely to appeal to the community and humanity innit.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Four years ago Humberside Police were given the worst possible efficiency rating and were condemned as inadequate. Public confidence in the force was the lowest in the country. Last year it was reported that the same force had failed to record thousands of crimes every year. (Let's just forget about this, shall we, nothing to see here, move along now ...) The new PM has promised 20,000 new officers for the country so no doubt there'll be even more sitting at the nearby Costa coffee hut on Clough Road just opposite the inordinately expensive new headquarters, looking menacing at anyone who gives them more than a casual glance.

You only live once

So you're 18 years old, you've attained the maturity that comes with adulthood (Hah!); you've passed your A levels (or maybe not ) and now you are wondering where to spend your thousands of pounds of student loan debt. And so you ponder the standard of your future education, the standard of your lecturers, what degree you are going to take, the amenities of the town, the accommodation and all the other petty considerations but having done all that what is going to sway it for you to come to the city of culture? Could it really be that monthly gym membership is cheaper than London? Gosh! well that clinches it then ... 

Given the choice, at 18 years of age, between three years in Hull or three in the Big Smoke (or indeed any other proper sized big city in the UK) paid for by a debt I most likely will never have to pay off  I would be on the train out of here quicker than you could spit ... and you can stuff your gym membership! Hull is all very nice in parts and no bad place to live but London it is not and it does not come close. I don't want to say this is no town for bright young people but it doesn't have anywhere near the offerings of big cities. Small town Hull will still be there and the cheaper gyms, should you ever want them, when the bright lights pall ...

There's a pink one ...

                      ...and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one

Coltman Street's Victorian villas have had a new coat of paint and were looking a bit special and not at all ticky-tacky though they do have a touch of sameness about them.
Note to avoid parking on a double-yellow line (an offence punishable by excommunication and forfeiture of  all lands and titles) it is considered perfectly OK to park your white van on the pavement.

A touch of the Dorics

I know it's difficult to believe but ... in the mid-1850s your well-to-do Hull folk were building their desirable residences on Coltman Street and whoever had this Victorian town house built clearly wanted to distinguish their little palace from the hoi-polloi of the hovels of the hinterland of Hessle Road with a little touch of classical elegance. The house like most of the street is now a HMO ( House of Multiple Occupancy; a delightful abbreviation for stuffing as many tenants in as the law will allow ) and comes with al fresco seating ... very classy!

I find upon a modest amount of research that the building was once a social club in the 1930s and also that it is Grade 2 listed and was designed by Benjamin Musgrave of Hull and built c1854. I told you it was classy.

The shop formerly known as Terry's

There aren't as many corner shops as there used to be, not that that is a bad thing it's just the way things work out. This one on Coltman Street/Gee Street has been over the past 120 or so years a laundry, a grocers and after changing hands many times recently it's now an off licence/convenience store and possibly still known by those who know of past things as Terry's.

All new, all singing, all dancing

And speaking of buses, as I was a few days back ... The blue bus company has got some brand new buses with some rinky dink new technology. Well actually it's just the old GPS talking voice thingy adapted to a bus and it tells you out loud (and I mean loud) in a machine generated voice that no human could ever match just what stop is coming up next. Albany Street came out as Al-Banny Street, for example, there were others that made us cringe and with  a dozen or more stops on a shortish hop well the old  Luddite tendencies were bubbling forth ... I can see how it might help those who can't see so well or maybe those who don't know the town so well but it was horribly grating to the ear and intrusive to conversation. We both agreed that it wouldn't last long (the drivers won't stand for it we said) and indeed the next time we got on a new blue bus it had rather unsurprisingly been muted and the driver had a wicked smile on his face ...

Seemed like a good idea at the time

Sometimes a good idea gets just a little out of hand ... this magnificent silver birch adorns, nay, dominates majestically the delight that is Coltman Street.

The weekend in black and white is here.

The Golden Eagle

I've shown the Eagle on the corner of Coltman Street and Anlaby Road a couple of times before (here and here). The place has long ago given up on being a pub like it once was and had fallen on hard times as they say. Well now it has been converted into flats, though I did hear a story that a small pub (with micro brewery?) might open on the ground floor. Whatever happens the place now looks a million dollars, with new windows and all painted up with the eagle (that they really couldn't remove, now could they?) given a fresh golden coating. It all looks really good. 

Yankee Meal

Here we are on Hessle Road the noted culinary centre of the City of Culture. To tempt your palette with some fine American fare there are pizzas of various hues, Donner kebab, Hamburger (with or without a scrumptious cheese topping) and Frankfurter ... all with French Fries to go. If all that seems just a little too American they do sell a spiced chicken dish described as "Southern Fried", must be some novel Home Counties recipe ...  

Seriously though the place has great reviews and if this is the kind of stuff you like then this is the kind of place you should try.

Delights of Dovedale

There I was idly going through the curate's egg that is Twitter when I came upon the postcard from the past (@PastPostcard) titled Delights of Dovedale. Dovedale? The name rang a bell, where had I heard it before? Turns out Dovedale is a National Trust owned valley in Derbyshire noted for its Peak District scenery and the hundreds of  thousands of tourists who flock there each year.  But that wasn't where I 'd seen the name ... Our delightful Dovedale is a not so pretty large barge that spends a great deal of time just tied up, slowly rusting on the Hull mud. As far as I know it's not noted for anything much other than being posted in this blog a while back. Maybe if it stays there long enough the National Trust will take it over.

Le Chat Noir

This little black cat turned up a couple of years ago and looked just like another little black cat that also roamed these parts a few years earlier who was called Nipper because he would be all smiles and purring then give you a nasty nip if you weren't lively enough to get out of his reach. So this guy became Nipper for lack of imagination. Nipper I hasten to add is not our cat; all our cats have died so he's spotted a gap in the market hasn't he? Nipper just appears and makes himself at home in the garden, on the back of the sofa or on the bed if you let him. Nipper never seems to go home save when it's raining. He may look sweet but he can catch birds, well one goldfinch will sing no more that much I know, and mice. If Nipper is your cat and you haven't seen him for a while he's probably asleep out the back behind the pumpkins.

Nipper is appreciating Black Cat Appreciation Day even if no-body else is.

The Prudential Memorial

I must have seen this plaque close by Queen Victoria Square hundreds of times, seen it, walked over it, gone about my life and then the other day finally I stopped to read it. Such a small thing, such a terrible story and, to me, a better memorial than the gaudy thing just along the street.

A Good Wall Spoiled

There's a craze to paint murals in this donkey's ass of a town. You've got a few square feet of blank  Victorian or Edwardian brickwork doing no harm to anyone and it just can't be left in peace; it has to be coated in some "artwork". We've seen it on Hessle Road and other places and it's creeping all over the place. There's even a plan to paint houses on Spring Bank in gaudy colours just because some layabouts want a grant from the Art Council or the stupid Council and they have nothing to offer the world but vandalism dressed as "community art". The themes in this case we are told were suggested by primary school children because, as is clear to any fool that has ever breathed, uneducated, uninformed 5 to 11 year old youngsters are a positive fountain of inspiration and objectivity. So the four corners of this unfortunate bridge on Chanterlands Avenue have the above garbage (Aim high, never give up, pshaw! How often young children come out with such phrases ...), a sporty theme featuring two unknown sporty people celebrating  sporty events from before many of the children born, a badly drawn collage of Hull images (including Larkin's Toad an image familiar to all Year One intake children at all primary schools) and a long "Eco" thing involving a whale, an octopus, a shark, a large green turtle, some penguins and a polar bear oh and some floating plastic bags to remind us all what sinners we are. (It seems youngsters have a very depressed view of the world and quite possibly think it is all doomed) Quite what all this has to do with Chants Avenue I haven't a clue. It's just plain old fashioned prattery. Worse though; it is condoned vandalism, a good wall spoiled.

This squat little building was once a gents' urinal now closed because of Council cuts ... which leads me to ask  who will pay to maintain this tosh because in a couple of years they'll all fade and date and you can never go back to the nice, cool red Victorian bricks that just did their job and harmed no-one.

And you can imagine the whimpers of condemnation when someone came along and put up their own shitty little "artwork"; without permission (shocking!) not at all in keeping with the theme (The horror, The horror!). I do not recall this bridge ever being 'tagged' like this before they decorated it with their murals ... Well, as ye sow, so ye shall reap

Everything comes to him who waits.

Have I mentioned that in this one-horse town there are two bus companies? Well the other day we had all-day-tickets-to-ride from one company, let's call them the red company. So  we sat down and waited the arrival of one of their nice red buses. After fifteen or more minutes I'd taken the above picture, we'd talked about the drunks and drop-outs that used to hang around this bus stop and the church opposite, about the guy who jumped off the roof of the building on the right and then we twiddled our thumbs and peered up the road to see where our bus could be ... but  nothing but blue buses arrived. I mean five blue buses arrived, like they were having some kind of blue bus joke. I was all for giving up and walking. We weren't going far, just four stops down the road but we had tickets, it was the principle of the thing ... So, anyway, we set off to walk and, well you know what comes next .... not fifty yards on a big red bus goes sailing by. 

The weekend in black and white will come if you wait long enough.

Talking of Michelangelo

Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?

                                                                                                 Friedrich Nietzsche

Anglican God Services Inc., have let it be known that they will be putting on a display of high definition photographs of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in their local office in town (whether they have paid for the rights to Papist God Inc. has not been disclosed.) It will, of course, feature this famous scene where Man creates God in his own image (if only he hadn't all would be well and all manner of things would be well). They haven't said whether Heston and Harrison will be on hand to sign autographs and maybe sing a duet or two, I know they're both dead but death shall have no dominion as we all know.

Entrance to the peep show is free but you will need to get a ticket ...

When I paint my masterpiece

But someday, everything is gonna be different
When I paint that masterpiece.

                                                                                             Bob Dylan

In clearing the site to make resting room for tired automobiles they finally tore down the tired weathered old boards that had lined the perimeter for as long as I can recall. This fencing was home to a mural of Mandela and more recently this little collection by the guy who styles himself as Preg ( I almost wrote prig can't think why ...) appeared.

These were on the High Street side of the site. The river side attracted a somewhat less figurative scrawler.

... and finally a simple message is often more effective. All gone now and not missed at all.

Billboard

This site that was to have had an eighteen or twenty-two storey hotel on it at one time, the plan described so accurately by a councillor as looking like a packet of cigarettes, has been cleared and rolled flat to be a car park. You wanna see the other side of this, I know you do ... here then in glorious technicolour.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.