Never Fails to Disappoint

I knew that the light show in town was going to be a dull affair, I'd read what folk had said about it on social media. Still nothing could quite have prepared me for how truly insipid and utterly pointless the installation called Navigate would be. This was being put on by the Council to mark the start of the Hull town council's latest £24million trick to pull in punters by calling itself Yorkshire's Maritime City, frankly they need not have bothered... and if this is a measure of what we can expect then they should give up now and go lie down in a darkened room.

We'll start in Queen Victoria Square with something called Zenith, supposedly an "immersive sonic landscape of the sea". It was eight or so silly lights and some indistinct noise that might have been music or just random noises on a looped tape. It put me in mind of a dismal 1970's disco.

Next and not moving far at all is something called Meridian: four beams of light from the City hall. Wow! Just wow ... maybe a Gee! as well but mainly just wow ...

Oracle I posted before in its daytime slumber. It gets no better illuminated. It too had some rumbling noise to go with and the white light points to the direction of the wind. But as the Bard sang so many years ago you don't need a weatherman to know which way the money goes  ...

The crowning  inanity award has to go to this automated drum machine outside Holy Trinity church, going by the name of Pendopo. I read that its metallic percussion was inspired by east Asian drums and not by the thought of easy money from a Council lacking two brain cells to rub together.

The most impressive light show, however,  was nothing to do with this tawdry pathetic nonsense; the church behind was all lit up in varying hues but hardly anyone paid it or Andrew Marvell any mind. I'd like to see those lights from inside the building, through those massive windows, now that might be worth the bus fare ...

                                                   

Still it didn't take more than ten minutes to see what little there was to see and the trip wasn't a totally wasted journey as I managed to do my shopping in Tescos and get the things we could only get from town.

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.

It's beginning to look ...

... a lot like mid-November.

I don't know which is the more disappointing, misleading and tawdry. The tinselly fake-snow eight week build up to that stupid whilom Christian, whilom Pagan end-of-year exercise in conspicuous consumption and phoney bonhomie or the tinselly, fake, five week exercise in mendacity, vilification and knavery known as the UK general election. This year's offerings from the town that has the culture are particularly unimpressive, the town tree I'm told is much taller than the usual twig but someone hadn't turned the lights on so I couldn't see or maybe the helpful Grinch had stolen them (Hooray!).

Indeed there seemed to be no festering, sorry, festive lights at all in Queen Vic Square (Hooray! Hooray!). The only seasonal thing of any note was a gaudy illuminated  ginger bread house affair on King Edward Street. Council must have spent all their pennies on that and couldn't afford any more (Hip, Hip, Hooray!)

This looks impressive but it's all an illusion like everything these days.

Snooker Loopy

If you like seeing grown men putting their brightly coloured balls on a table and hitting them into pockets with the end of stick then snooker is your game of choice. If, like me, you think that when you've seen one game of snooker you've seen them all then maybe you should give this exhibition of geriatric ball potters a miss.

Snooker enjoyed a revival from its sleazy, smoke filled room, sign-of-a-misspent-youth decline back in the late 60s/70s simply because the one of the two TV companies available back then (the BBC) had introduced colour TV broadcasting and needed a program with coloured things in it. It was called "Pot Black" as I recall and led to one commentator making the memorable sentence " For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green". They certainly don't do TV like they used to.

The Prudential Memorial

I must have seen this plaque close by Queen Victoria Square hundreds of times, seen it, walked over it, gone about my life and then the other day finally I stopped to read it. Such a small thing, such a terrible story and, to me, a better memorial than the gaudy thing just along the street.

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

Flying the black flag of himself.

A town crow, blacker than ever, treats the Saturday afternoon shoppers and carousers with utter disdain before swooping down on a discarded morsel.

.... a long seat for several people, typically made of wood or stone

... otherwise known as a bench. This was taken last March when the new benches in Queen Victoria Square were all shades of yellowy-red through brown now they're a uniform silver-grey. Comfortable benches, good for sitting and whiling away the day.

The April Fool's theme for City Daily Photo is 'One Colour'.

What a performance!

As well as the morris dancers there were a few others putting on a show on Saturday afternoon. The Elvis look-alikey was, well I won't say good because he wasn't terribly, more persistent. He did put it out on a grand scale singing along to backing tracks complete with all the Elvis pelvic manoeuvres for well over an hour and a half to my knowledge. It was hard not to laugh ...

And not to be out done just along the street was this colourful display of South American (Peruvian?) native costume. Playing the pan pipes, of course, and again to backing tracks. I'll let you have a guess at what the tune was ... yes, yes, it was El Condor Pasa! ( well it just had to be! ).

On second thoughts

For the sake of civic virtue
They've got fountains there that squirt you...

Now that the summer is all but over and  the leaves are starting to think about submitting to gravity and there's a little bit of a chill in the air, the screaming kids have gone back to school and are no longer treating Queen Victoria Square as a public showering place and playground maybe now, on reconsideration, this fountain thing is not so bad after all.

(Margot played no small role in this picture in so far as she clicked the shutter, I took it upon myself to play with it thereafter.)
 
The weekend in black and white is here.

YOLO

I'm told it means You Only Live Once. It's how the youth of today communicate with one another. IKR too busy to use words, poor darlings. 

Today's first of the month City Daily Photo theme is 'Young at heart'

Margot took this. We are both still searching for our inner adult. TTFN as we used say back in the day.

The right to bare arms

"The police are the public and the public are the police ..."

                                                                                                             Sir Robert Peel

In this country, well in Hull anyway, the sight of armed police patrolling the streets was until recently thankfully extremely rare. We don't much want guns on show in public for obvious reasons. The Humberside force does hold the record for the highest use of tasers in the UK but that is another matter. After the Manchester attack in May this year, however, Humberside Police have been keen to show they are protecting the public with little displays of force like this in Queen Victoria square. I'm not quite sure what good they think are doing by standing around armed to the teeth like this. I've seen pictures in the paper of them posing with children and tourists in a blatant PR blitz. I suppose they get the chance to chew the cud with colleagues, stretch their legs and get some welcome sunshine on their arms. I have to say I didn't feel very protected but then I didn't feel very threatened either.

Lost in music

Here he sits picking out pleasant tunes on his guitar and being roundly ignored by all and sundry. I suspect he doesn't care. He seemed oblivious to all the commotion and screaming not fifty yards away.

Dealing with stuff

Here at the foot of the Queen Victoria statue are heaped flowers and balloons and toys and cardboard messages. It's part of that modern fashion for taking part in ceremonies or rites of remembrance and outpourings of sympathy and solidarity. I think I can date the start of this fashion at least in this country; 31 August 1997 or what we call in our house Princess Di Day. The weeks following that car crash were filled with outpourings of grief, giant heaps of flowers and dozens of books of condolences up and down the country (who read them?). I didn't know the woman, never met her but it seemed the whole country had lost a greatly loved family member; it was all totally surreal. So now with every natural disaster, road accident or passing terrorist attack (this one in Manchester the other week but it could be anywhere) we get this and more sometimes (Je suis Charlie was particularly grating). 

I have to say I prefer the old way of dealing with deaths and disasters; flags at half mast maybe, a few words of condemnation or commiseration, absolutely no interviews with survivors, family members, no coverage of police operations, no sensationalism and certainly no heaps of flowers, toys and so on and just move on. Deny your enemy the oxygen of publicity as Mrs Thatcher reportedly said, the bastards absolutely hate to be ignored or, as a columnist in the Guardian put it recently, "Publicity is terror’s “second wave”. Without publicity, terrorism is just dead bodies." But with 24 hour news coverage of everything they have to fill in the gaps with something even if it's only people putting flowers round Queen Victoria in Hull. I suppose I'll just have to deal with it.

Two Circles of Hull

So the promised fountains are in business. And instantly turned into some kind of amusement feature for screaming children to put on their cossies and splash around in the jets of foul smelling over chlorinated water. Cue jokes about the great unwashed of Hessle Road or East Hull (take your choice) getting their annual wash... Someday perhaps the novelty of these fountains will wear off but until then Queen Victoria Square, the centre of town, has been turned into a stinking nauseous pit of hell.

Finishing Touches

The public works were due to be finished today but to no-one's great surprise some bits and bobs are running a tad late. So we'll have to wait till mid-April for the fancy fountains in Queen Vicky Square; such a shame as I was really, really, really looking forward to them .......

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

Oh! we don't want to lose you but we think you ought to go

The thing that has been littering  Queen Victoria Square for the best part of three months is due to depart next weekend as the year of glorious culture completes its first quarter (how time flies when you're having fun, I mean, culture!). It is due to sneak its way back to east Hull some time on Sunday morning so I doubt I'll be around to see it go nor, to be honest, will I miss it much. This view down Paragon Street shows there's still work ongoing (hate that word) with plenty of our old friendly orange barriers in evidence and the place looking like a bomb has gone off.

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 ...

The elephant in the room

Hull was and still is to some extent noted for its fine Victorian and Edwardian architecture, though many buildings were demolished in the War and shortly after to make way for 1950's drabness. Some of the finest remaining buildings are here in Queen Victoria Square.