Customer car park

Here's the car park underneath Tesco's supermarket in St Stephens. I took this while waiting for a taxi to take me and my shopping home. It's meant for customers of Tesco and it's free but don't stay more than two hours or they'll do you for £70! Last Xmas, the spirit of goodwill and peace to mankind was distinctly missing from this place with fisticuffs over parking places [ 1 ]. 

They're really spoiling us ...

Record crowds are flocking to the Ferens art gallery this year. First Warhol now Leonardo da Vinci, from the ridiculous to the sublime you might say. Before getting too carried away what we have here are 10 small (as in sometimes very small) drawings, extremely well executed as you might expect but somewhat dull and unexciting. The exhibition blurb tells us that the items "reflect the artist's use of different media and his extraordinary range of interests from painting and sculpture to engineering, botany, mapmaking, hydraulics, and anatomy". Two that stood out for me were a Heath-Robinson contraption for attaching  lances to a horse and a profile of an old man which I'm told is one of his last drawings. The drawings are part of the Royal Collection (thank you, your maj, Gor bless 'er!) and Hull rarely gets to see these things so go by all means. Oh and it's free!

Half a story

By the mouth of the river Hull these spiked fans are meant to keep the foolhardy from clambering about and falling in and meeting a watery end. A few weeks ago I was talking to someone on the bus into town and he mentioned that as a young boy in the 70's he'd found a dead body in the river, just stuck in the mud. Of course he reported it and received a reward of, I think he said, 50p for doing so. He told me there's apparently some mediaeval law that sets this reward and it was set when 50p was 10 shillings and a shilling was a lot of money. That's the story I was told it might be a load of  hooey for all I know.

Bit of birdwatching

This time of year East Park lake becomes the home for about twenty or so goosanders and every year I go along to take some pictures. And every year they stay just too far away for anything you might like to call a decent shot. (Yeah, I know, invest in a bigger lens ...) So I turn to the never knowingly shy black-headed gulls for my picture of the day. Below the best I could manage of those darn ducks.

Art Deceaux

JC Deceaux claim to be one of the world's leading outdoor advertising companies and with 1,013,500 advertising panels in more than 55 countries I couldn't possibly dispute that. In Hull the company has the exclusive contract to supply bus stops and also some "eye catching columns in the heart of the city's pedestrianised retail centre" (not my words!). Tesco, obviously think it's worth while to flaunt its wares for our delectation but then again that might have something to do with their profits falling for the first time in 18 years.

The old horse wash

This ramp down to the Humber was used to wash horses. Now you can see how rich and brown the Humber is so I wonder just how clean the horses were after their ablutions but maybe the idea was just to cool them off after their hard labour. I found an old image of the 'oss wash (as the natives call it) in action here. Seems to have been a fair number of gawpers in those days before daytime TV.

Red Fred

The lock-keeper's cottage at Hull Marina has been taken over by a design and marketing consultancy, well, ok, a PR firm called Fred, it's as good a name as any I suppose.