Whole trees in motion

For the past three or four days they've been at it again. Barely had one little storm faded away than they issue warning of impending doom with another approaching Atlantic depression. They've called this one Dennis and it promises the usual big blow and a whole ocean of wet stuff. Maybe a month's worth of rain in a day, there'll be flooding, there will be recriminations ... But as of now it's just a fresh breeze stirring up my neighbour's birch trees and a little drizzle, time to walk the dogs and get the shopping done or just put your feet up and forget about it.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Roses are red

Roses thrive on a rich well manured soil ...

For reasons that escape me our media follow closely the ins and outs of the quadrennial, seemingly perennial, US Presidential wooing game. For as long as I can recall they have bored us with it, as if it mattered more than Tesco not having any milk ... They gave us blow-by-blow reports of Iowa's arcane and somewhat sweet caucas process (that went well didn't it?), of the New Hampshire Democrats' desire to have their very own and original magic Grandpa as their choice and how Biden is vexed and Warren is, well let's not talk about Warren ... Commentators over here cannot decide how to pronounce "Buttigieg" (it's a name that gives those of us on this side of the great watery divide who have failed to find our inner adult the titters  but then we don't have a vote, no wonder he calls himself Pete; President Buttigieg!, nah can't see it ... but then there's been a Trump in orifice, sorry office, for the past four years  and we, well, we have our very own Johnson and his special friend Cummings ...). The wannabes are such a deep well of oddly 'talented' (by which I mean rich) folk all convinced that they have what it takes to be The Candidate; filled with the right amount of righteous indignation and large amounts of steaming hot  phony baloney ... it is, as I say, a mystery why we get such coverage when, from this distance, it is clear the short odds favourite will walk it with his hands in his very deep pockets. I can't say it worries me much: the current guy hasn't started any wars (yet) and the world is still spinning ... from what I see and hear he is far from ideal but as someone once said "The real American is all right: It is the ideal American who is all wrong."

A Darkness at Noon

A storm in February used to pass by unnoticed, it was the kind of thing you expect, happened every year, through out autumn and winter we'd have storm after storm. A few dustbins would get blown over, maybe a tree or two, a power outage ( to use the American term) was not unknown. But it was winter, you expected it and got on with stuff. Nowadays everything has to have some malign anthropogenic cause and we'd better beat ourselves with birches until we come to our senses and/or die and leave the planet to all those cuddly animals and nice trees and flowers and grasses ... The chiliastic numpties gather in their covens and murmur misanthropic millennial doom and say we must expect these "extreme weather events" even more frequently now that there's so many people on the earth all making nasty carbon dioxide. They are, as I've said before, quite mad and completely wrong: we have fewer storms these days ... but mere facts never faze a craze.

Also crazy is giving these passing Atlantic depressions names: today's puny effort has the name Ciara which means "dark haired"; apt given that it was getting quite pitchy at just gone noon when I took my photo coming back from Tesco.

My bin blew over (almost!) , we must expect more events like this ... We shall rebuild! I don't know if the trauma will ever  leave me.

Puddle Reflections

Between the western edge of Hull and the village of Cottingham there's a no-man's land of so-called green belt, rough unwanted grazing pasture, land really not fit for crops, land that regularly floods, a land fit for gulls, horses, dog walkers, grey-bearded loons and youngsters up to no-good, a land that is a site of special scientific interest. In short just the sort of land developers salivate over; they would love to drain the place and cover with as many units as they can. To add a layer of complication the land is in the East Riding of Yorkshire Council (ERYC) but much of it is owned by Hull City Council (don't ask how). So you can see how conflict between the neighbouring authorities might arise. Hull has filled its boundaries and has no more room, it would love to take over Cottingham, Anlaby, Willerby and the outlying villages and fill in the gaps in between and then spread out to Beverley. The good people of these villages voted overwhelmingly to tell Hull to get stuffed in a referendum a while back ... Thankfully ERYC usually denies permission for development, as it did for the creation of Hull's Cottingham cemetery, to get that built Hull had to go to a public inquiry (at ERYC's expense) ... I hear that the graves of Hull's dead still fill up with flood water and new drainage is being planned (at Hull's expense). 

The latest attempt is a desire by a charity to build a mini-village of 48 dwellings, huts, a cafe, parking, poly tunnels (?) with associated landscaping and infrastructure... you get the picture ... all for ex-army personnel, they call it a veterans village,  on land off Priory Road, close by this puddle. Quite whether Cottingham village and ERYC social services are up to dealing with the expense of dozens of so-called "heroes" has not been mentioned but it is obviously the thin end of a developer's wedge, cynically using a supposed "good cause" to create a precedent so more permissions will have to be granted. Then all our messy puddles will be gone and the incurable, suppurating pestilence that is Hull will be upon the land that no-man wants.

Uniform Rip Off

A strange thing today on the local TV news; a Labour MP calling for more competition and openness in business: the business, that is, of selling school uniforms. A fine scam this; where a school is legally allowed to demand its pupils wear the school uniform (I'm not happy about even this but there's more...) and then demand that the uniform is bought from a particular shop or supplier. The school having a deal with said shop is, of course, profiting from its own regulations... Naturally such a practice, enforced monopoly, acts to no-one's benefit but the school and the shop. Many poor parents are finding uniforms prohibitively expensive (for each child between £255 for primary school and £340 for secondary school; that's per year ...I'm sure you'll agree this is  absolutely ridiculous! ) and this restricts their children attending the appropriate school. Simply buying a cheap uniform and stitching the school badge (as my mother did for me way back when I went to school) is not good enough for the money grubbing school who now require the school logo on socks! on blazers, on trousers! probably on the underpants ...

By way of a reaction to these scandalous practices and high prices a system of recycling uniforms (called Re: Uniform) has sprung up centred here at the Methodist Church on Cottingham Road/Newland Avenue. 

So a bill is being presented today in Parliament, the Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill, I think every parent in the land will be wishing it to pass ...

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.

Streetscape

I go along this street, Strathcona Avenue¹, every day to pick up the newspapers, a pint of milk and a loaf of bread. The street dates from the early 1930s and was built on the fields of the old West Bulls farm around what is now Bricknell Avenue. It is very typical of the housing built at that time, boring three bedroom bay-windowed terraces with small gardens front and rear. Most of the outer western edge of the town is filled with stuff like this, not exactly made of ticky-tacky but they all look just the same.
Over the fifteen or so years I've been around here what has changed most markedly is the disappearance of front gardens and their conversion into parking spaces. The street on a weekend is packed with parked cars as many houses have two or more vehicles each so off-road parking is considered a must-have... This means less space for blackbirds, dunnocks and thrushes to rummage around and their numbers have declined, though house sparrows seem to have made a bit of a come back in the past two years. The street is one of those that has it's feet in Hull and its head in Cottingham meaning two councils run the place.

Streetscape is the theme for the first day of the glorious month of February. Go see other much more interesting streets from much more interesting places here.

¹The street takes its name from Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona, a Scottish-born Canadian businessman who made his millions from other people's work and then gave some of it away so becoming a philanthropist and not just a common bum. I think I mentioned a while back the tale I heard of how he wanted to be known as Lord Glencoe but the murderous connotations of that place (a bloody massacre in case you've forgotten) meant a change and the invention of the Strathcona name. I admit I'd never heard of him until I moved here; I guess he's better known in Canada as he ran the Hudson Bay Company for seventy five years and many institutions and places are named in honour of his big beard and gratitude to his bounteousness.