Boiler House

This strange looking place is the boiler house of  Hull Royal Infirmary which, as you might expect, needs lots of hot water for heating and cleaning. Nowadays it's powered by gas but when first built, in the early 60's, it ran on coal stored in that massive hopper on the right.

The weekend in black and white is here.

New kid in town

Nature abhorring a vacuum as it does means that the space left by the sad demise of poor Charley earlier this year has been quickly taken over by this smug little thing. We're not going to give him a name and we're not going to get attached; he's somebody else's problem. 

I'm glad that's the neighbour's fence and not mine.

Pictures are by Margot K Juby and while I'm about here's a link to her blog on the innocence of Gilles de Rais.

Oh and finally the year of culture program was announced today but you don't want to know about that.

Tattoo's (sic)

Ah well nobodys perfect.

Hull Arena

The only good use I can think for ice is to chill a strong gin and tonic but it seems there are folk who like to arm their feet with skates and sally forth on ice rinks. This is the place just for those poor souls. I believe there is also a passing interest in playing hockey on a frozen surface and that perversion is also catered for here. Hull Arena was built in the mid-1980's and had an indoor bowling rink at that time but I can find no mention of that now. The place also hosts concerts (apparently there's seating for 3,750) and boxing matches for the sort of people who like to see people hitting each other as well. Such a useful place really; containing all those wonderful odd-ball pursuits in one box as it were and in an out-of-the-way place where little harm can be done to others.

Any Colour You Like

Clear Guidelines

Those thoughtful people who gave us the generous expansive footpath that I posted the other day just can't seem to control their urge to keep us yellow stick figures within our limits. These, though rather cute and silly, are not the daftest markings I've spotted in this town; that honour goes to this piece of barminess.

A red dot in a sea of blue

Ah the pleasures and agonies of rearranging the electoral boundaries! This week has seen proposals to cut fifty seats from the House of Commons, that's MPs voting for fifty redundancies ... well I'll wait while you get over your sniggering fit. 

As far as I'm concerned if it goes ahead Cottingham and a few other outlying villages move from the safe, nay possibly the safest, Tory seat in the country to a proposed marginal seat of West Hull and Haltemprice (where or what is a Haltemprice? I've no idea!) West Hull at present is a totally safe Labour fiefdom (you see the method behind this, create a marginal, lose a safe Labour seat but keep the remains of a safe Tory seat, most excellent!). It also means that Hull may become a smaller red dot in a sea of blue which may be no bad thing. There are the delicious howlings of the self-serving gerrymandered and hopefully soon to be out-of-a-job politicos. I'm not that bothered really they can try living on the pittance of unemployment benefit they voted for, except they'll all have cushy little consultancy positions waiting for them. Does my contempt for politics and all politicians look big in this? 

A small concern is it could be the first move to take over the outlying villages and plonk them in with Hull City Council (just for neatness dontcha know) something that 96% voted against only two years ago.