Stoneferry Blues

I posted about this bridge before (here) with an image that positively glowed with almost bucolic splendour. But this is a major river crossing with thousands of vehicles passing through this bottleneck each day so you know it's not really all sunshine and roses. In fact it's a little piece of hell if you happen to be on foot; noisy, polluted and impossible to cross over should you wish get to the other side of the road.

A green thought in a green shade

As I'm sitting here it's been raining more or less continuously for a day with another day's worth waiting to come in off the North Sea. Still if it didn't rain ever this place would soon disappear. The land around Driffield is pretty leaky with lots of springs where the rain that's percolated through the chalky Yorkshire Wolds spurts out. The Keld (from the Scandinavian/Viking for spring) is one such water hole that used to be part of a water powered mill. The whole area is now protected as part of the Millennium Greens project and is well worth searching out (it's not well sign posted).

Driffield Beck

"Lazing on a sunny afternoon ... "

A few years ago Charley abandoned his nice home and caring 'owners' two streets down to come and live in our garden and how could we refuse him? He's an expert ratter and catcher of mice but is prone to act the idiot at times hence his usual name of  Shanny (which means "daft as a brush" in Norfolk but check out the Urban dictionary definition here!).

Brunswick Avenue

Brunswick Avenue runs off Beverley Road and was built around 1880-1890 as Hull sprawled outwards. It was once a tree lined avenue with elm trees every ten or twelve feet. When I used to live round here about the mid 1980's there were just a dozen or so left, what demolition and rebuilding hadn't destroyed Dutch Elm disease was killing off one by one until now there are just four left outside the PDSA building on the left. 

I never really liked living in this place. The area around here is almost entirely council housing with attendant social (should that be anti-social?) problems and though an old neighbour who I met told me it was quiet and peaceful she added "You must never leave your windows open for fear of burglars sneaking in". The yellow skip disappearing into the distance is carrying off tons of fly-tipped rubbish dumped into a garden on the right that I have just had the pleasure of removing. Why, I ask myself, lift sofas and armchairs over a five foot fence when you could just leave them at the back with no trouble?

After a bit of searching around I found a drawing of Brunswick Avenue by Frederick Smith dated 1888, thanks to Hull City Museums.

Jacaranda

Taken by Margot K Juby

OK try not laugh. This is the only jacaranda tree I've seen in this country and it's a very straggly pale specimen. Since the jacaranda is really at home in tropical and sub-tropical regions of central America and the Caribbean I don't think it's a wonder it grows at all in the temperate, at times nithering, north of England. (but see here for what these beauties can do when they really get going) It's also been protected during the renovation of the Cleminson Hall site.

View from the boundary

As the snows and frosts of Winter fade to a distant memory it becomes time to dust down the old willow bat, rub in the linseed oil, whiten the pads, don the white flannels and peaked cap and stride out to face the bowling. Hah! as if! Even so many do play up and play the game, there are many local cricket leagues which are fiercely competitive especially in Yorkshire which likes to think itself home to the best (it's God's own county don't you know?). Here's Driffield's neat little ground where the groundsman had just finished preparing for a match, it's great ritual of cutting and rolling the pitch till it's just right, painting the creases and so on. I hope they managed to finish before the evening thunder storm rolled in and rain stopped play.

"He's fallen in da water ..."

Many years ago on the radio the Goon Show had a catch phrase or running joke, I suppose you might call it, where someone (little Jim?) would say (in a strange voice) "he's fallen in da water". This would for some reason have the audience in paroxysms of laughter. Ah those were the days, long ago, when there was probably some water to fall into at this point on the river, nowadays you'll most likely get a concussion from the mud and that's no joke.