You are HSBC.

Ironically this corporate BS from HSBC (stuffed with idiotic clichés from the dark days of the City of Culture) is no more than seventy yards from the branch it closed down just a couple of years ago; and it is  not even in Hull ... and it's oh so tasteful; diving off the Humber Bridge has become a way out of Hull for a few desperate folks lately.

Similar diversions from the criminal nature of HSBC are being pasted all over the country with equally emetic, gobshite being proclaimed. They are said to be too big to fail and might be too big to jail but do we really have to put up with this patronising garbage? Can we not have a little truth? Maybe something like ...

More than just the local bank ... you are the rancid stench something far, far bigger. You are the go-to guys for the drug cartels, terrorists, murderers and embezzlers. You're not an island, you conspire globally in Ponzis, rigging markets, tax evasion, fraud, foreign exchange manipulation ...you "violated every goddamn law in the book". You are HSBC.

(The "violated every goddamn law ..." quote is from Jack Blum, attorney and former Senate investigator.)

Democracy in action

Voting yesterday for two local county councillors and two parish councillors. We get to do this every three or four years I'm not sure which. It really makes very little difference which monkey sits on the Council; I think the old Athenian sortition or selection by lot would do as well but in these enlightened times we must have universal suffrage so voting it is ... The result? Well, for the very few that care, the Tories won  (they always do) but Labour were wiped out completely for the first time ever (serves them right). 

In three weeks time we go at it again, this time for the European Parliament. You'll recall the result of the referendum on this tedious EU issue so the prospect voting for something the majority do not want to even be in has brought out the "Brexit Party" once again to "put the fear of God" into the mired political status quo. (I shall vote for them, there is no logical reason not to). Let the good times roll ... sorry, I meant to say let the people decide ...

Burnt 'umber

"This must be Thursday.  I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
                                      Douglas Adams  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Now here's an odd thing to do with memory and and all that jazz. I clearly remember coming home from school at lunchtime and listening to the Hitchhiker's Guide on the radio at home with my mother. But as it was first aired in 1978 and I was 21 and living in the Big Smoke by then this could not possibly have happened... I much prefer the memory to the fact ...

Honesty

Lunaria annua

Being the sort of gardener that likes to let things sort themselves out, (no point in fooling with Nature because, as someone once said, Nature cannot be fooled) I find a lot of these nice purple flowers cropping up in all sorts of places at this time of year. The well tempered cultivator might well call them weeds but I call them welcome additions to my small patch of land. You might not recognise the flowers but I'm pretty sure you'll have seen the transparent seed heads in floral displays. There's also a white variety and even a pinkish one but today, being the first of the month, is all about purple.

Honesty is the English name for this plant but other cultures have a more mercenary name, money plant, silver dollars, Judas coins and (my  favourite) La monnaie du pape being just a few choice alternatives. Botanists call it Lunaria annua despite it being a biennial ... whatever its name if you just leave it alone it'll settle in nicely, my kind of plant.

And honesty being best policy means that I must own that Margot Juby took these pictures.

Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit...

Here again , like a giant game of bar skittles, are more of the wind turbine towers  under construction over in the eastern docks. Last weekend (was it Easter weekend? I don't do religion or Bank Holidays ... anyhow it was warm and windy ...) this country burnt no coal to power the national grid for over 90 hours, coal being a big nasty smelly troll that kills future generations of pig-tailed Swedish children ... This achievement went practically unmentioned in the MSM while what can only be called a paid claque of middle class swivel eyed self-styled eco-protesters were gluing themselves to public transport and blocking off Westminster and the West End of London while the police colluded ( I almost wrote cuddled). I can report no MP was harmed in the making of this demonstration (Parliament was not sitting) though several made asses of themselves fawning over Pippi Longstocking and her doom saying utterances. The idiotic demands of these puritanical "activists" would push ordinary folk back to the stone age while they would just jet off to the next gig ... 

Meanwhile, in the real world, the world's largest off-shore wind farm quietly produced its first sparks of electricity in February all from this modest looking place in east Hull. Well done them!

Also, sans faire de bruit, I notice that Hull and Hereabouts has been going on about stuff for nine years ... what was I thinking?

The metaphysical bus company

To would-be passengers waiting in the bus station with no knowledge of the world outside (no doubt plugged into their phones for safe keeping from whatever reality might be) the arrival of their bus would appear an event occurring without any antecedent cause. "Oh look!", says Davey Hume, "There's my bus! See, I told you it was a logical possibility".

I believe Margot pressed the button on the camera which resulted in this image being formed by some process beyond my very limited ken.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Various Cranes

There are a few old warehouses left in the old town all converted into flats and/or restaurants/nightclubs and so on. These still have wall mounted cranes as a reminder that these buildings once had a different purpose. In my ignorance of things mechanical I was going to call these hoists but I find that a hoist just moves stuff up and down, while a crane moves the hoist around; but then you already knew that.
The robust no-nonsense one above is on 47 Queen Street and the light-weight fancy one below on the Posterngate warehouse I posted yesterday.

Those two are just puny tiddlers compared to this big red whopper close by the Museum Quarter.