Bus Stop Blues

Imagine running a business where the Government recommend your customers not use your services and then compensates you for your losses... this is the neo-normative fantasy world we live in now. These double-deckers can take over seventy passengers sitting and standing (at a warm fuggy squeeze) but are limited to no more than twenty face-masked and fear filled voyagers. I say twenty but the bus I was on into east Hull the other day had many more than that thankfully or folk would have been left behind. Even the worst laid schemes o' mice and men gang agley it seems.

The picture is Cottingham Green bus stop but in nearby Hull the bus lane scheme has been extended to run all daylight hours not to help buses, no, no, buses are bad, bad I tells you ... no it's to help cyclists who are supposed to take advantage of this benefice and fill the gap made by mad bucking of the market (let me check yes I did write bucking glad I got that right). Now of course cyclists won't suddenly appear; Hull is after all one the most obese, cigarette smoking places in the country (part of its lasting charm I suppose) ... instead the extra cars on the road carrying disgruntled bus passengers (now lost forever I assume) will be squeezed into even less space and Hull's familiar gridlock problem will no doubt return should the economy ever get back out of the deep hole it's in. 

A Movable Feast

The Christian festival of Easter was cancelled this year; that quasi-pagan celebration of Christ's victory over Death was put to one side because ... well no real good reason at all; Government fear of collapse of health services (that didn't happen) led to panic, scaremongering, a return to medieval thinking, mass hysteria, media bullshit reporting, misuse and abuse of statistics, you name it  and it happened this crazy year and to get out of the grave dug for us by stupid, vain politicians (who seem at least to have stopped digging) we linger in this not free transition with illiberal regulations for anti-social spacing, reservations for the pub (for Chrissake!) ... and (useless) face mask virtue signalling social tyranny. It's the control freaks' wet dream ... 

PS the church sign has been removed after so many weeks and there's talk of the place reopening with every soul isolated lest they should spread this 'germ' ... I won't ask who made this 'germ' since, well, we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of theodicy on a  cold, damp Thursday in July.

Poor Sam

Poor Sam.

There he was impaled on street railings outside a tall apartment block. The spikes clear through his bloody abdomen and penetrating an eye socket in a most distressing fashion. Poor Sam had died by falling off the roof, it was clear.
Yet in Sammy's right hand a cut throat razor and on his neck several shallow cuts and one huge slice across the arteries and wind pipe. Poor Sam had cut his throat, nay nearly sliced his head off and  then fallen off the roof.
Still and all next to poor Sam's corpse a broken glass and a bottle of wine with a strong smell of almonds. And Sam, well he stank of booze. His bloods, when they were eventually done, showed he'd have died of alcohol poisoning if the cyanide hadn't gotten to him first.
At the inquest the jury heard that the safety rail on the roof was faulty and  had given way and juries, it is well known,  hate to give a verdict of suicide so poor Sam was deemed to have met a death by misadventure.
But the coroner, who, like you, had listened to all this with an increasing sense of disbelief, and who was aware of increasing numbers of similar deaths in the area and that there was a rash of sudden railing impalings (but not in Sweden where railings were padded as a precaution) wasn't having any of it so he sent poor Sam back to the pathologist, a Dr Mallard, who told to me this sad tale, at great rambling length.
This time it was  found that lodged in poor Sam's mushed up brain were the remains of a .22 slug; from the kind of gun, it is said, that is favoured by a lady.
Soon after they arrested a Miss Otis, there was gunshot residue on her velvet gown, and so they took her away to the jail but an angry mobbed lynched her and hung from an old willow tree but that is by the way.
As for poor Sam ... well there was yet a further examination and it seems that on his way down from roof to earth Sam's last breath  took in a passing  virion, which lodged in his airway and was later mopped up by a swab and taken to a lab and expanded by magic into millions of strands of virus nucleic acid. Poor Sam, unlikely as it may seem, it turned out poor Sam died of Covid19, sure he did, it says so on his  death certificate.
He lies forgotten in an unmarked but much disturbed hole, a caution against straying down Lover's Lane, watching too many detectives on TV and jumping to the wrong surmise.

The New Walk

Early in the 18^th century someone had the bright idea to construct a walk or mall from the town eastwards across uncultivated, vacant and I'm guessing somewhat swampy land to the Guannock Gate then part of the town walls. It was hardly a long slog being just some three hundred or so yards long but then maybe folk had not made a fetish out of walking as essential to a healthy body and mind but as a means of getting from A to B if you didn't have a horse and cart to help you. Here if you had stuff to strut was where it could be strutted outwith the grime of the town, with ruined walls and meandering Gaywood River to view it was akin to a country park in an urban setting. Anyhow it was the start of something as the New Walk was improved, lined with fine trees, and later a second walk crossed it and then more walks were added as the thing spread out beyond the now demolished town walls. I write all this trivia because I wondered why the place wasn't called something like Le Strange Park or Losinga Gardens or after some other notable local bigwig, it's called the Walks because, though now it may look like a park and walk like a park it is, historically, a collection of walks. So now you know.
By way of comparison Hull when it finally spilled out of its walls in the late 18^th century it dug a big hole and filled it with water; it was the biggest dock in the country, the Queen's Dock. Hull did not get a public park until the 1860s courtesy of gun-running property developer Zach Pearson. However the Queen's Dock is now Queen's Gardens ... with walks.

The Walks are lined with lime trees and horse chestnuts. Somebody has carved this out of a dead one.

Somewhere like King's Lynn ...

Red Mount Chapel, The Walks, King's Lynn

A man that is tired of London, said some wag, is tired of life, to which I add that a man that is tired of Hull has come to his senses. Hull is a well known dump, the ultimate crap town (accept no substitutes), run by petty minded, petulant jumped up jack-in-offices. I hate the sodding place, I'm sick of it and its gridlocks, its failing services, it's depressing shitty little town centre, its pathetic attempt to be a city, nay a city of culture ... pah to hell with it all. I should leave (should have left years ago), go somewhere, anywhere that doesn't depress, irritate and bore me to death. Somewhere like King's Lynn, perhaps.

This little folly, the Guannock Gate,  has been carefully moved, rebuilt and plonked here as a feature in the Walks. In the city of culture a similar town gate is now a demolished, despoiled and despised hole in the ground, a place where litter and louts and their odious offspring accumulate.

Conisbrough

At fifty or so miles an hour this is about as much of Conisbrough as I manged to spot from the train on our way to Sheffield the other day. Still it's enough, I think. I've been trying to find out something about this place and well, here goes. The castle, you've noticed the castle I take it, big old Norman keep, recently reroofed and famed as the inspirational source for Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. He called the place Coningsburgh so no-one would know ... I admit I've never read the book, (who reads that stuff these days?) but as a child I was suitable appalled by Roger Moore's acting in the TV series ... 

Erm what else? Oh yes; Kilner jars originated here but went bust way back in 1937. There was an Earth Centre I recall it was some sort millennium thing (there was a great madness about the land at that time) consisting of a big hole in the ground or former colliery or former glass works (Kilner's Works? I dont know or care much. It's all a bad memory best forgotten)  into which money (>£41 million!! as I say madness was stalking the country) was poured à la Maynard Keynes. It had an ecological theme that, quite naturally, failed to appeal and no-one could be bothered to visit so it went bust and is now a housing estate I hear. There's also Archers Way which once had another, sillier name but you can search for that yourself. 

I'm sure Conisbrough is a nice place. It certainly has a very long history, the Old English Cyningesburh was recorded back in 1000, and if I had the time and inclination I could tell more ... it's just that we went through at fifty miles an hour and it's gone now...

The Fixer Upper

As promised  here are some shots from the innards of Castle Rising. We'll start at the ground level and work up, more tomorrow or whenever.

All's well that has a well, I suppose, though I would fancy drinking the stuff that came out of that hole.

An Englishman's Home ...

“It could be an almost heavenly development,giving scope for infinite variety and the opportunity to create a real community.”  Herbert Walford Anderson, Lord Mayor of Hull, 1967

In 1352 a certain John of Sutton was given permission to crenellate his building, Le hermitage, in a place called Braunceholm near the village of Swine in Holderness. This was after he'd been brought up by the justices for having built a castle without permission. The justices, from the nearby upstart new city of Kingston upon Hull had taken a dim view of castles being built in the neighbourhood and grassed the said John of Sutton up to the King, Edward III. John prayed pardon for the trespass and palmed the King 20 shillings for his troubles and King granted his pardon and the all important licence. (That was the way business was in those days and probably still is ...) Now John must have had a good reason to want protect himself and maybe he'd had a vision of what was to befall his lands in the centuries to come ... 

Fast forward, as they say in the movies, a few hundred years and John's castle is but a grassy mound beside a disused rail line but his precious Braunceholm is now home to thousands in one of the biggest housing estates in the country, behold, I give you Bransholme...

After the last war with half the population homeless and most of Hull's housing damaged and in need of knocking down (the slums that is) the Council and others had a wizard idea, why not build a new town, a model community, well outside of Hull to rehouse all these poor folk (and no-doubt pass what ever problems they might have on to the new town's council) ... well the new town idea didn't come off but land was bought to the north east of town and by the mid sixties everything was ready to rock (I know some twenty years after the end of the war, this is Hull everything takes time (and a little greasing of parts that needed greasing no doubt)) and in a decade Bransholme was built with ~20-30,000 inhabitants (I've read varying figures) a handful of schools, a shopping centre (that closes at 5.30-6.00 and then they throw you out!) and a few pubs. The place was and remains a vast, sprawling warren of meandering pointless roads that lead nowhere but back upon another meandering road. The houses, being built so quickly and so cheaply were as you might expect and within a decade or so demolition of some of the worst was under way, most notorious were the so called misery maisonettes or "alcatraz", a concrete man-made hell hole. The estate  is described as being a place of multiple deprivation with social problems that are common these days (drugs, petty crime, anti-social behaviour and so on) ....and still and yet folk who live there seem to love it ... or so some of them say in the local paper.
So what was I doing in this place? I was on my way home from the delightful Kingswood Shopping Centre on the 11a Simplibus service (simple fares, simple routes, simple times, simple numbers!) that takes what is possibly the most circuitous route from A to B;  it's basically the scenic route taking in the delights of Bransholme, Sutton and Holderness Road, just don't be in a hurry.

"Little boxes made of ticky-tacky ..."

"... little boxes, little boxes, and they all look just the same ..."

This odd looking building is a pub called the Nightjar and not, as we both thought, the Nightmare.


The weekend in black and white is here.

Moon Clocks and High Tides

High up on the southern tower of St Margaret's is this oddity; a moon phase and tide clock. The writing on the edge says Lynn High Tide, each letter representing an hour. The hour hand is a little green dragon with a cross in his mouth (a Lynn motif). The moon phase appears through a circular hole but as it was new moon on the day I arrived you can't actually see the moon . (But don't you take my word for it here's another view) The clock dates from 1681 and was the gift of one Thomas Tue, clockmaker, churchwarden and one time mayor of King's Lynn. Thank you Thomas.

St Margaret's has undergone much needed repairs and renovations this last year, so I've read. The porch needed fixing as bits might have fallen on someone's head. The new stone is a bit off putting but it'll weather and does show how bright the whole church would have looked when new just six or so hundred years ago. Must have been stunning. (Ignore the little red sign saying "Minster open"; St Margaret's was apparently turned into King's Lynn Minster some years back by the Bishop of Norwich, but, like Holy Trinity in Hull, also recently minsterised, no-one seriously uses the term. Seems you can't overturn centuries of use by episcopal degree)

King's Lynn, like Hull, is prone to flooding. The Wash is just up the river and beyond that the big old North Sea prone to tidal surging every now and then. At the entrance to the church these markers are reminders of high water levels over the years. The renovation has somewhat blurred them but the highest, at nearly four feet, was just back in 1978 but the worst by far for the whole east coast of England was in 1953 when hundreds died. There are lots more flood protection measures in place now and regular exercises to test them, so I've read, let's just hope they work when the next surge comes.

An Ugly Duckling

Well here's a rare sighting. What a mute swan? Rare? Well yes when it's in Pearson Park duck pond. In thirty odd years I've only seen about three swans in this postage stamp sized watering hole. I suppose all the trees and bushes must make landing and take off a difficulty plus I'm told it needs a good sixty yards to get really airborne and clear of obstacles. This one still had some brownish plumage suggesting it's a young bird and so was unaware of the perils of Pearson Park.

And while on an avian theme; the regular summer visiting swifts that should be here by now have failed to appear. Across England sightings are down by as much as 25%.  The globe, it seems, isn't working any more. The blue skies are a very dull and sterile place without them.

Another large bit of a mess

Had a short wander about town for first time in a while and came across the sorry state of the Hull Hole aka the Beverley Gate remains. You'll recall that after a plebiscite the council rearranged the excavation with new seating and so on.  Soon after it reopened the walls, perhaps predictably, became an adventure playground for young and not so young children who were clambering all over even riding bicycles and skateboarding on it. Parents of said children seemingly thinking it was a good idea and parents, as we know, are not allowed to say no any more for fear off being accused of abuse. Naturally the old walls or what's left of them did not take kindly to such misuse and damage was done. So in its infinite wisdom the Council had protective bricks put on top; using lime mortar and the employment of some local college brickwork students. (The Council may have been trying to do this work on the cheap; I couldn't possibly comment). Even as it was being done it was understood that it wouldn't stop idiots (there is no other word) from playing on the walls and so it proved. However the mortar used has also failed and the now the new bricks are falling off as well. And if I'm not mistaken the lime mortar is leaching onto to the ancient bricks making them white and unsightly. The place is now fenced off while yet another bright idea is sought. May I suggest getting in experts who know what they are doing when it comes to repairing ancient monuments not some enthusiastic trainees; oh and stiff fines for anyone climbing on the brickwork.  This is all a bit disappointing and worrying since the Beverley Gate is a scheduled monument of national interest and seems destined to be an even bigger ruin than it already is.

In case you're interested below is an old picture of how the Beverley Gate looked when it was less of a ruin than it is now. What you see above is the left hand base of the gate.

ATM x 4

I've never heard anyone IRL, as they say, call these ATMs maybe a hole-in-the-wall or cash machine but never ATM. Anyhow all these 800kg money boxes are (like me) still running Windows XP; it's nice to know your money is safe behind the latest technology innit?

Are you aware of Hull?

Does a creeping, cold sensation grab you by the sensitive parts as you gradually realise that you are being seized with the gruesome realisation that you are 'aware of Hull: UK City of Culture'? Fear not; you are not alone. According to the tiny Leader, some 53% of people have struggled to cope with this awareness problem, with even more suffering in the badlands of the "North". There is only one cure but it is drastic and may be fatal. Go, get you to the godforsaken hole and disabuse yourself of all that nonsense, once and for all. Then let us never mention it again...

Look what they done to the hole, Ma ...

Now I know you should not judge something before it's finished but this is not looking good. Regular readers will recall the Hull hole otherwise known as the Beverley Gate ruins or remains or whatever. It had become an uncared for, litter strewn place where youths gathered to do whatever youths do (skate boarding, drinking, smoking, in short all the fun things). The options were to fill it in or re-jig in some way to make it more amenable. A public vote decided on the latter option and we are where we are with this; well it's about half as big as it used to be, the lining seems to be horrid brownish beige 1970's concrete tiles that clash with the ancient brickwork, the steps are just ugly, it looks awful. Oh sure there's a lot of planting behind where I'm standing and the taxi rank has been moved (much to the annoyance of taxi drivers) but I don't see this as anything other than worse than before. And where are our discontented youths to go now? And who will pick up the litter? Maybe filling it up was the better option ... it's never too late.

... and still we wait

The promised fountains in Queen Victoria Square have yet to materialise. We are told by a Councillor that "The technology used to operate these features has not been used anywhere else," and "So in that sense they're unique. Issues around that technology are being addressed.". Now as far as I know fountains have been around for thousands of years; how difficult can it be? You have water, you squirt it through a hole, repeat process until bored... These however are fancy fountains with bells and whistles, well coloured lights anyway as you can see in this article from a well known local newspaper. If I were a gambling man I'd put a small wager on these things working on and off for a season or two then being quietly forgotten and paved over.

...and also outside the Holy Trinity Coffee Bar the so-called mystical mirror pools are also still not in place (surprise, surprise) and guess what the reason is? "I can safely say nothing like this has ever been seen before in this country, if not Europe. I prefer to call them glazed paving. They are going to be mystical, magical and I hope quite special...." says the guy who sold these puppies to Hull City Council and "They are definitely the first of their kind in the UK and they're here in Hull." Yeah right, puddles with knobs on, can't wait.

Take up our quarrel with the foe

 

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close

      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,

Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws

      Around my bed its lulling charities.

                                              John Keats

As cultured folk you'll be aware how for millennia the poppy has signified sleep and forgetfulness in European culture. From the poppy we get opium, morphine and all those other lovely "ines" that make us fall through a hole in the carpet when life becomes too much... 

Whoah! whoah! stop all this liberal thinking right now! For the Royal (& sycophantic) British Legion, for hosts of hoopleheads and fellow travellers, for the whole UK indeed (or so it seems) and even for level headed Canada or at least those parts that love to dwell on the horrors of the last century the poppy has become The Symbol Of Remembrance. Well ha! So much for culture. This craze started in the 1920's as a merchandising scam to sell cloth poppies to help 'rebuild war torn France' (a likely story) or perhaps it was inspired by that really bad and militaristic poem  "Flanders Field" (which at least had the idea of poppies meaning sleep). Whatever, it's too late and the genie is out of the proverbial glass container and you can't tell anyone that this is cultural illiteracy else they look at you as if you have two heads (which I suppose is two more than they have). 

So it comes about that, two years after the celebration (no better word) of the start of WW1, Hull gets a teeny portion of the crazy poppy themed thing that took over the Tower of London.  It's an unimpressive, tawdry splash of  red down the side of the Maritime Museum. Puts me in mind of a slit throat or perhaps a some overly enthusiastic menstrual flux. Certainly does not inspire any thoughts of 'remembrance' despite it being blessed by vicars and cooed over by the hoi polloi ("Oh isn't it beautiful!" 'it', by the way, is supposed to represent the deaths of thousands of men from high explosives, bullets, poison gas and general military incompetence so ... well I just give up!) and idiots in WW1 uniforms standing in front of it like dorks!

Still it attracts folks to town to take piccies (guilty as charged) and of course selfies. Oh the name of this thing? ... Weeping Window

The Public House

Next door to our greasy fingered barber is the Star of the West or rather the reinvented Star of the West. The original watering hole was on West Street (geddit!) and looked a lot like this. 

As I recall I went into the old place on my first Saturday afternoon in Hull some thirty five or more years ago and had a pint of uninspired beer and a memorably soggy and execrable steak pie. A fine welcome! The place remained a sleazy dive, frequented by Saturday night pub crawlers and reporters from the nearby Hull Daily Mail. I never went in again and can't really say I missed it when the old place was knocked down to make way for this. However in my assiduous research for this post I did come across a song about the Star of West, it's in the 'folk' style and clearly the writer was more impressed than I was.

'Ole in the ground, so big and sort o' round it was

After a vote of residents on what they wanted for the remains of the Beverley Gate (aka the Hull Hole) the Council, in its wisdom, decided not to cover up the few old bricks but instead create an even bigger hole with seating and landscaping and so on. Quite how this bigger, better hole won't end up the haunt of disaffected young folks and who will pick up the litter that will inevitably fall in I don't know. Still I'd better not make too many adverse comments or I might end up like the poor chap in this cautionary tale; enjoy:

When you're in a hole ...

Jameson Street is really under the knife as the makeover makes over.

The guys who are doing all this wonderful work have made a little video of the full extent of their efforts. It appeared in the local paper recently; I'm sure they wont mind too much if I share it here. If the video doesn't work here's a direct link.

The sunlight on the garden

Struggled to find a title for this post. Thought of "all that glisters" la-di-da but I've used that already, or maybe 'patent leather shine' but, nah, that's a bit naff. Margot, she with the English degree, thought Louis MacNeice's

"The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden. "

might be useful. So, as this was a new one for me, why not ?..., well, blame her...

The good news from Victoria Pier is that the hole caused by the tidal surge two and a bit years ago has finally been patched up but ( & there's always a but) for some reason the area is still fenced off.

Weekend Reflections are here.