Do as the Doukhobors Do ...

If you wanted to take off all your clothes, paint yourself tourquoise and strut around Queen's Gardens in the name of 'culture' then you should have gotten your applications in by yesterday. Mr Tunick may be an "internationally renowned New York based artist" (many dispute this) but his repetitious displays of flesh are tedious in the extreme. (Oh look there's another pile of boobs and bottoms neatly arranged on the sidewalk, bridge, city hall, park, mountainside, glacier ... you name it, he's done it) Thankfully I'm not in charge of the Ferens Trust and I don't have to justify spending (no doubt large) sums of money on commissioning this kind of non-Art sensationalist event that is otherwise known as boring crap.

Milky Way

You can just picture the scene in the Council's road naming department after a new bit of road has been opened up ... at a loss for ideas, scratching their heads (and other bits) for hours until some bright spark pipes up with "Didn't there used to be a dairy nearby?". And so it came to pass.

The weekend in black and creamy white is over here.

Hanse Day

Hull likes to have a little party every now and again in and around High Street celebrating its past whether Georgian or in this case its links with the Hanseatic League back in the middle ages. Whatever is celebrated the result is folk dressing up in period costumes and lots of stalls selling mediaeval pancakes and so on. The guy above was telling a story, a fairy story about a girl spinning straw into gold who marries a king but who must guess the name of the imp who helped her else he'll take her first born child away....but you know how it is some people just can't keep their big mouths shut: "tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll go to the king's house, nobody knows my name, I'm called 'Rumpelstiltskin'" (and yes, we all what that means, thank you)

He was good at telling his tale but I guess the kiddies already knew the ending; they looked terribly bored ...

The apothecary's hat kept coming off in the wind.

A small replica of a trading boat.

Some Hanseatic high fashion.

Riverside rubble

I think we can say the old Clarence Mill is now gone, well it ain't coming back. But where did those nice trees spring from ...

Hung with bloom along the bough

Yes it's the annual A E Housman memorial post ...

Daisies and dandelions

Shhh! Don't let the Council know that it's forgotten to mow the verges for a while....

Liddell Street: then and now

Close to the burnt out school I showed the other day is a patch of grass with a few trees and bushes growing on it. They can't build houses on this land on account of the Cottingham Drain running right underneath it. Twenty or so years ago when I used to live in these parts the place was a scruffy dumping ground for fly-tippers and you'd see the occasional wino making his peace with the world. There was a strange bridge that didn't cross anything since the drain had been culverted decades earlier. There'd be weird tyre tracks where joy riders had obviously been having fun. Oh and every November fifth there'd be an almighty bonfire, often two or three leaving scorch marks that didn't really heal 'til the next November. Anyhow now it's become a play area with goalposts for football (that's posh!) and so on and proper seats for the winos and druggies so they don't get their trousers dirty .... and tolerated graffiti. The strange bridge has finally gone. The posts you can see are to stop twockers using the place as a short cut (spoilsports). Oh and the fly-tipping is still a local hazard.