Newfangled gadget

Being a very late adopter of technology I've just got myself an iPhone and have been playing with its camera. I find it a bit of a strange beast giving hit and miss results. I'm used to peering through an eyepiece, holding the camera in both hands and pressing a shutter button and not used to having to put on my spectacles and concentrate on a screen and dabbing ever so gently at a white button ... feels all wrong but I suppose I'll get used to it. These of Princes Quay shops and the Maritime Museum were the best of a blurry bunch.

The fountains in Queen Victoria Square seem to be a magnet for odd behaviour with screaming kiddies running in and out trying not to get wet (here's a hint: don't go near and you won't get wet). Some however think it a fine sport to deliberately get as soaked as possible and then complain that they're wet ... youth of today are simply beyond help.

The Lost Flip Flop

Another demonstration of the versatility of the Land Rover, stick a wooden hut on the back and hey presto (does any one say that any more?) instant coffee shop. Not that it sells instant coffee or anything like that; well, it might, I don't drink coffee so I wouldn't know ...  It's posted here because I just liked the name. 

There is a web thingy to go with, it's here

Gee but it's great to be back home

Maritime Museum

Right, so back in the city of culture a few buildings in the town appear to be illuminated in ever changing colours. This may have been a Xmas thing I wouldn't know; I haven't been back into town since a week or so before that damnable day. I shop out of town and fancy (and expensive, no doubt) lighting, expensive son et lumière shows (no matter how spectacular) and other fripperies aren't going to get me on the bus into town.

Unbelievable

A couple of Hully things cropped up in the news while I was away. First Hull was declared the second worst town in the UK. The source for this sensational news was a survey by some folk calling themselves LadBible ("Redefining Entertainment & News For a Social Generation", no, me neither!) clearly this is nonsense and caused uproar and upset in the City of Culture as a) Hull is not a crap town but a crap city (there's no shortage of parochial pedants in this place) and b) Hull is definitely the worst place in the UK, coming second is not an option.

The second incredible snippet of news was the estimate of 3.5 million people attending events during the Year of Culture. Given that this came from Hull City Council who could hardly be said to be impartial observers let alone capable of counting over twenty, this figure is open to some doubt. Still even if we take this figure and look at the break down for individual events say the fireworks on New Year's Eve, the Blade, the porcelain poppies and a handful of other shows soaked up well over 3 million visitors (allegedly). But, and here is yet another incredible (or amazing as they called everything last year, if it wasn't amazing it was stunning ...) fact, there were 2000 events put on over the year. I kid you not, 2000! So by the figures of Hull City Council the vast majority of these cultural events must have attracted two men and (perhaps) a dog. 

Now I'm a trusting sort of guy and if a statement is made to effect that nearly one million folk visited the Blade in its seventy day stay in Queen Vic Square I'm not going to do some back-of-a-fag-packet calculation that this means 600 per hour visited the colossal thing, 10 a minute or roughly the normal number of folk crossing the square at any one time... Also I passed under it dozens of times and must, I suppose, have been counted dozens of times... But I don't want to start off the new year in this suspicious mood. Hull City Council are fine and trustworthy folk as trusty as this picture of the Rose Bowl Gardens.

Sudden Elegancies

Hull has its own sudden elegancies.

Philip Larkin 

The fiddling around by the Council with Queen's Gardens does mean that there is this view of the Maritime Museum, the fountain and City Hall in the distance.

Domed, we're all domed ...

One of the first buildings I posted about was the Maritime Museum and over the years it has cropped up regularly (like a recurring toothache some may say). I admit it's one of my turn to subjects when the well of inspiration has run dry  and as it's been over six months since I last mentioned it here it is again... Here's the same dome from two sides (do domes have sides? ... ) in glorious monochrome and in colour, no expense spared. I'm spoiling you.

The weekend in black and white is here.

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

It's only money

I've shown the Maritime Museum more than enough times but not, I think^*, this façade above the entrance. The building was originally the offices of the Hull Dock Company and clearly money was not a problem at that time as we have a goodly supply of classical gods and goddesses adorning what I take to be Queen Victoria with her rhythm stick (I might be wrong) and a fine but somewhat faded plaque with the symbols of the then four countries of the United Kingdom. At the time of building (1870's) the Hull Dock Company had a monopoly but later competition forced down prices and profits and in hindsight spending £90,000 on Italianate offices may not seem like such a good use of resources. Still it makes for a grand museum.

And while I'm here I've just come across a new-to-me blog about Hull. 150 facts about Hull has been going for four years and has reached 89 facts, if you are into things of a Hully nature this may interest you.

* As I write this blog I often get the uneasy feeling that I'm repeating myself. So if any of this seems familiar it probably is. Indeed I may have mentioned this feeling before ...

As the evening sky grew dark

There you go; tree, lights and an illuminated fountain. Who says I don't do Xmas?

There's joy in repetition

City Daily Photo's start of the month theme is "My City's Skyline". I've done several skyline shots over the years and after looking through my extensive collection I still think this one is the best I've taken. Only thing is I posted it about six years ago, ah but you won't remember that now, will you?

Save our hole!

The perennial question of what to do with the remains of Hull's Beverley Gate has once again failed to be answered. The Council flush with money (£25 million found behind the back of the sofa) had planned to fill in the hole and then grass it over. So far so good, it has to be the least spectacular historic monument on the planet but nothing is ever so simple in this place.... Having thus erased the past it was planned to put up a humungous piece of pretentious twaddle called Word Gate. To give you a flavour of the nonsense there's this from the Council web site: "Word Gate conjures up a place at a moment in the past. The place was a gate that said no and stayed closed, a place now beckoning you to come close. Hull speaks through Word gate, a gate between land and sea, between Hull's heritage and Hull's future, the City of Culture". Cutting through this rhubarb what is proposed is a thirty or forty foot high piece of steel with words scratched on it, this will completely dominate the area, block the view down Princes Dock and after a few years will be pulled down after it becomes tarnished, dulled and covered in graffiti. You think I exaggerate take a peek at the nauseating blob in the artist's drawing below.

Well as I was saying that was the Council's plan until a petition to save the monument to the start of the English civil war (the English Fort Sumter if you will) gathered a few thousand signatures. The guy in charge now says other plans will be considered. Well when you're in a hole it's best to stop digging.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Hanging around

This poor girl has been hanging around with the blood going to her head for over a year now and by rights I should have posted this last year with all the others from the day given over to celebrate Hull's selection as the City of Culture (here). But I didn't and so luckily for me (and for you, my joyful reader!) I can post it for this month's collection of all things upside down by the people at City Daily Photo.

That place once again

I think they sell Apple computers ("More power behind every pixel" ??!!!) in this shop  but that doesn't stop there being a good reflection of the Maritime Museum.

Weekend Reflections are here.

and so it begins

Having been selected as the cultural omphalos for 2017 why not go the whole nine yards and spruce up the town as well with a £25 million rearrangement of the deck chairs? First for  'improvement' is Queen Victoria Square which is to get fountains in the pavement so your trousers get wet as you walk by. Still anything that gets rid of the acres of boring red brick paving can't be all bad. As in all campaigns you must first fortify your redoubt or the thieving natives will be off with your JCB before you can say City of Culture.

Private Seats

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, before the reinvention of coffee and the banning of smoking indoors, you could take a seat here and rest a while at no expense save to your backside. Now the only seats belong to the self-styled coffee houses that line the quay side selling ridiculous froth at even more ridiculous prices. They are living proof of Say's Law that there is a buyer for every product no matter how bad. So, with the collusion of the Council, they have had the public seats removed and simply taken over this once public space and now no-one can just sit and rest a while without they pay. The result is this line of ugly glass cages, yet another mess. 

Queen's Gardens: Back to the Future

I mentioned a few days ago that the collective insanity known as Hull City Council had proposed a series of makeovers for the city centre, at the time I said that I thought they weren't too bad. Well I think I spoke in haste because on closer examination some of the proposals are borderline bonkers. Take, for example, the proposal to reinstate Queen's Gardens as it was planned in the 1920's. Let's be clear this would be an act of pure vandalism. Queen's Gardens is now a place of mature trees and tranquil ponds with pleasing fountains. In the 30's the place looked like a desert with immature trees, boring planted borders and no ponds (see here and here). Is the Council really proposing to remove mature trees and fill in ponds? To top off this lunacy there's the creamy delish proposal to build a retractable stage over the duck pond at the far end, this is to stage 'events' and lies alongside yet another proposed stage to commemorate Mick Ronson, a guitarist with the eminently forgettable Spiders from Mars or so I'm told (this presumably would stage non-events). Very 1920's I must say! So there you have it, vandalism mixed with tawdry tackiness, about par for HCC.

Queen's Gardens is one of the few places in Hull that doesn't need fixing, so kindly leave it alone.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.
Weekend Reflections can be found here.

That big old "Thank You, Hull" party

They seemed to be packing a whole year's worth of 'culture' into one afternoon in Hull yesterday. The day started with the Lord mayor's parade complete with a fly past of some WW2 planes which I saw from two miles away while getting my newspapers, those three planes made one hell of a racket, no stealth bombers back then.

I wouldn't normally attend things like this but I had to go into town for stuff anyway so I had a little look-see. I only stayed for an hour and missed most of the goodies on offer including a "Larkin Toads performance" (I bet that was fun). Here in no particular order are some of the goings-on that I witnessed. 

Synchronised Lindy Hopping!

Where's the next act gone?

A robot that prints on the pavement

If you're wondering what the "thank you" is for it's a  City of Culture thing and if you're still wondering what a City of Culture thing is I suggest lying down in a cool dark room with soothing music. If these images aren't sufficient the local rag has more pictures here.

Thou shalt have a fishy on a little dishy ...

You turn your back for a moment and strange things pop up all over the place. I'd not been in town for a couple of weeks (yes it's possible to live without the delights of Hull) so it was a bit of surprise to find kitted fishes adorning the buildings and what can only be called woollen condoms for the Maritime Museum's guns. The reason for all this madness: 'Follow the Herring' celebrating the old east coast herring fishing industry. A major feature is the knitting of a 'coat for a boat' which you can see below, as I say they get up to all sorts when you're not looking ...

14th century font full of fish

Coat for a boat

Final countdown

I thought there would have been more of this football related nonsense about town given that the local club have reached the FA cup final for the first time. There are surprisingly few displays of flags and so on. Anyhow there were two or three touts trying their luck in town yesterday with very few takers. They've got scarves, tee shirts and flags, however, the truly dedicated aficionado can buy a toilet seat decorated in team colors with the face of the manager on the lid, I kid you not. I hear you ask who are the opposition in this contest? Some small time club by the name of Arsenal. Kickoff's 5pm tomorrow,  it'll be a walkover ...

Savile Street Skyline