Why not try teaching?

Alfred Gelder Street, Hull

This colourful bicycle advert is for teacher training in Hull (School Centred Initial Teacher Training!) and was one of several around town while the student degrees were being doled out the other week. I suppose if you can make it in Hull then you can make it anywhere. Teaching is not for everyone, and my experience, admittedly many years ago, is that really good teachers are rarer than hen's teeth. I know I couldn't do it, at least not without facing manslaughter charges after each lesson! Now I come to look at that bike again it does look a bit bloody ...

The lightbulb joke

No you won't find me making derogatory remarks about council workers changing lightbulbs, no sir, not me. Cheap shot. Beneath me. I'll simply ask why they came round at about seven in the evening to do this job, surely not on overtime by any chance ... Anyhow banished now are the orange glow neon lights of my lifetime, replaced by moonlight-white light emitting diode thingies that save electricity and leave drive ways unlit and gloomy. Still the stars shine brighter, there's lots of them, did you know?

And while on the subject is it lightbulb or light bulb? 

OK so you want lightbulb jokes, go knock yourself out here. 

It takes two people to make this blog post. Margot to take the photo and an idiot to write this drivel.

Cycle Park

Every year hundreds of bikes get stolen in Hull so any measure to provide a secure place to park your expensive multi-geared mountain climbing machine (how they sell these things in flat old Hull is a mystery to me) from the thieving toe-rags with bolt-cutters is welcome. This is the recently opened Hull Cycle Hub in what used to be the ticket office of Paragon Station. £1 a day will see your bike locked up and waiting for your return. And if you've got a flat tyre there's even a workshop for repairs. You can also hire a bike from the same place for £3.50 a day. There's more about all this here.

The bonny bunch of roses

Saturday's Post

You know those sisyphean tasks that this town gets itself into, bridges that take years to build, piers that are never mended, roads that will never be upgraded, derelict buildings that defy both the Council and gravity; the list goes on and on. Well now that silt you can see in the background, well there's now a plan to shift it and all the other sediments from all the way up to Beverley, some eight or nine miles away, out into the Humber to aid river flow. What's that the poet says about a man's reach ...?

The monochrome fun goes on at the weekend in black and white here.

Penguin prison window

Anyhow here I am pointing the camera outside the biggest fish tank in the country (possibly in the world, who cares?) to capture these well known Hull landmarks in reflection. This place hires a man with a hawk to scare off the pigeons that have every right to be there (well just wait 'til the seagulls find out about that! That'll be one dead hawk!) while incarcerating penguins from the South Atlantic. What a bunch of humbugs!  Oh yeah this place has blocked my account on Twitter ... alors tant pis! Ou tant mieux!

Weekend reflections are here.

Skip this if you like

I bet you didn't know that there are people out in the 'real' world who keep an eye on the number of skips being used. To put a skip out on the public highway you must have a skip licence from the council and councils having nothing better to do keep tallies on this. Just as there are weathermen who make forecasts based on seaweed and pine cones so there are economists who use skips as bell-weathers for the state of the construction industry. More skips means more little building projects on the go. And the latest figures I've seen show that skip use is increasing all over the country; happy days are here again. Truly this is a one nation skip-led recovery in which we will all, no doubt, end up in the skip together.