Comin soo

They are building lots of hotels (at least two) in the C of C to meet demand; seems you couldn't get a bed in the whole of Hull last weekend. I'm sure this one will be much better than I'm making it out to be ... or maybe not.

Hurrah for Bluebells and Kopparberg!

To celebrate St George, the patron saint of England, Englishness and all that goes with it, what could be more fitting, I thought, than some nice Spanish bluebells and an empty bottle of Swedish cider (mixed fruit, of course!) ... there are always those who see this day as a chance to sit in the pub and drink ale, how very un-English!

Margot took the bluebell photo; she has a knack for finding litter lying around, well she found me....

Questions, questions

By the harbour side and no doubt as part of some tourist trail or other these two figures appear demanding answers. I'll start with the guy in the Arab head dress, T E Lawrence (of Arabia). It seems that after ruining the Middle East in WW1 he served in the RAF near Bridlington supervising the armour plating of power boats for target practice. I guess he was tired of all the heat and the camels. The other guy, well, that is Captain John Paul Jones of the Continental Navy. During what would nowadays be called 'hard Amexit' or some such aka the American War of Independence he took a small fleet across the pond and proceeded to cause a bit of mayhem in British waters. The Battle of Flamborough Head of 1779 rarely gets a mention these days especially now that the UK and US have a 'special relationship' and more especially since the British Royal Navy lost to a bunch of colonials so least said soonest mended.

A tale of two towers

I'm keeping out of the city of culture for a few days; they have taken to dancing in an old graveyard while stuffing their faces all the name of culture and it's not a pretty sight. So I return to Bridlington Priory and its two odd towers. It's looks on the face of it like it's the real deal; an old Gothic building with a perpendicular tower. Well partly. The church as it stands is the vestige of Bridlington monastery which would have looked a bit like this in the early 16th century. As you all know if you were still awake in history classes the monasteries in England were dissolved by HenryVIII. Now the Prior of this place decided to take part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rising in Yorkshire against Henry VIII which did not end well. The monastery quickly lost all its valuables and gradually fell into disrepair until only the nave remained standing and that in no good condition.  The pictures below show it in 1786 and 1842. Note there are no towers by the front entrance. So enter our old friend and saviour of fallen churches Sir Gilbert Scott and his passion for the Gothic revival and up rises one perpendicular Gothic tower in the 1870's and one stump of a tower as a permanent reminder not to trust planners ...

The rear view, those buttresses are all Victorian.

I came across this helpful little site on my travels

Bridlington Bayle's back door

Being too lazy to step back a bit in order to get the whole gateway in view I thought I'd just take half a dozen pictures and stitch them together with the rather skewed result you see. The bayle, as I mentioned ages ago, is the former gatehouse to Bridlington Priory. This is the back door, as it were, and it should look a bit like this.

A slight difference of opinion

I couldn't go to the seaside and not take a picture of seagulls, well actually Margot took this but that's just nit picking.

The parliament that England is the mother to has just voted for an election by 522 to 13. Now don't get me wrong I'm all in favour of elections, have one every year (a la Chartism) if you will. Vote early, vote often is my motto. No, what boils my renal filtrate is the continual news media banging on, speculating, asking the same old same old rubbish of the same old so-called experts and commentators over and over and over and over for six whole goddam weeks. (I know other places have it much, much worse but that's their problem) It should be the law that the news people announce the election and then STFU about it.

You might think that there is some subtle visual pun about the gullibility of the electorate in this picture, you might very well think that but I couldn't possibly comment.

Costa del Brid

You can achieve wonders by upping the saturation and artfully cropping out unwanted chip shop chimneys to give an almost Mediterranean look to a Bridlington snicket. 

There's going to be an election in June which apart from boring folk to death will return the present lot to government, destroy what's left of the Labour Party (not much), annoy the Scots and the Irish (no bad thing in itself) and solve no problem whatsoever. But then that's politics for you.