A road by any other name ...

You know how towns like to honour folk by naming streets after them: so this town has a Larkin Close; an appropriately dull cul-de-sac, Alfred Gelder Street, Jameson Street, and Ferensway , of course; that local turncoat John Hotham from the civil war times gets a road along with Sir Thomas, Lord Fairfax who gets an avenue; there must be dozens more: Raich Carter Way, Blundell's Corner spring to mind as I write... just outside Hull, across the road from me, there's a short avenue named after a guy who wanted to be Lord Glencoe but somehow the connotations of bloody massacre made him change to Lord Strathcona ... so, anyway,  the other year they decided to rename Garrison Road as Roger Millward Way. I'm not sure that this is any kind of honour since Garrison Road as was is really just an extension of the dreaded A63/Castle Street, the bane of motorists' lives and a right pain in the nethers to cross at times... and I wonder how many even know about this or whether the name will catch on ... when they finally get home, will the motorists of this fair town put their feet up, wrap their hands round a well deserved hot brew and say "oh that *beeeep* traffic on Roger Millward Way was such a *beeeep* disgrace" ... nah not going to happen, ever.
I won't pretend to know anything about who or what Roger Millward was, some sporty bloke, so I've heard,  rugby league, really, really not my scene ...

I mentioned today and several times before that this road is  a pain to cross and that young men have been seen to turn into grey beard loons waiting, funeral directors have been spotted lurking for falling stock ... well some concerned person has put up a plaque to let the world know that those who wait may be gone but are not forgotten, not lost just gone before ...

It's a kind of madness

I suppose my favourite view of Hull is one where I can't see it all, out across the Humber, where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet as some baldy bloke once wrote so many years ago. I was gazing across the wondrous brown ooze the other day when I spied out to the east something on the horizon that was new to me, so pushing the camera's zoomy potential to the limit I took a picture with no hope of it showing anything much. When I got home and looked at the hazy image above I thought what on earth is that ... turns out it's the biomass storage silos at Immingham docks some nine miles away as the seagull flies. It's all part of the current vogue for saving the world by  burning trees to make electricity. Instead of digging up coal from under the ground in Yorkshire (like they did for centuries) they now import wood (9 million tons per year) from across the world (America and China) in very large oil burning ships that dock at Immingham, discharge their biomass into these silos from whence it's taken by oil burning train to the Drax power station, in Yorkshire. I'm sure this salves the conscience of those who worry about the amount of atmospheric CO₂ produced by mankind (estimated at ~5%) compared to that produced by "nature" (~95%). I'm also sure they do not worry that burning wood makes more CO₂ per KW of electricity generated (50-85% more than coal and nearly 300% more than gas!) as wood burns less efficiently than coal (which is why our ancestors went to the trouble of digging out coal in the first place). Acres of forest are chopped down daily to turn on the lights in Yorkshire and hereabouts; it takes a mere fifty years for it to regrow. I've read that  4,600 square miles of forest are needed for this one power station alone, I find that an absolutely staggering figure if true. Chopping down young trees grown for this madness seemingly releases lots of  CO₂ from the forest which takes years to be reabsorbed by new growth, so harvesting biomass process actually increases atmospheric CO₂. 
This is , of course, not cheap, it is much more expensive to produce sparks this way than by traditional coal burning so we find biomass burning plants are closing all across the world, they simply can't compete. However Government policy (made law this week without any discussion or vote in Parliament but simply by ministerial decree, so much for democracy) is to increase the price of energy for everyone, sorry,  I should say to reduce emissions and make the UK Carbon neutral by 2050 (whatever that means) ...  It is obvious that burning biomass is far from being a sustainable, renewable, "carbon neutral" process . But there you go; the greeny squeaky wokey folk and HM Government will have it that there is a problem with our atmosphere and that this is a solution; they are, of course, all completely mad.

Holy Mackerel

It's been a while since I posted anything piscine related to the Hull Fish Trail. To rectify that omission and as it's Friday here's part of a small shoal of mackerel lurking for a passing sprat no doubt. You can find them at the eastern end of Holy Trinity church where Lowgate turns imperceptibly into Market Place. They're carved out of sandstone and have been in the pavement and walked over by the passing throng since 1992 or thereabouts and are getting a bit worn out and easily missed.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

“Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?”

A few years ago I noticed that the two elm trees on Nelson Street were going a bit patchy in the foliage ... oh no, I thought at the time, not the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease again ... still hope for the best I said to myself with no real expectation ... so it came as no great shock or surprise to find that they've recently been removed. Just two more casualties in the long running decimation of millions of these trees across this country and indeed the world.

Here's one of the beautiful beasts back in 2016 just starting to show signs of distress recorded, as it were, for posterity.

Elms produce hundreds of thousands of these 'seeds' every year from what I heard and read not one of them is fertile ... all English Elms are genetically identical clones (brought here by the Romans along with rabbits and pheasants, gratias vobis ago), which doesn't help things if you are looking for a disease resistant variety.

OK I admit I enlarged and fiddled with contrast on this to see how many rings I could count; somewhere around 170 was my best guess which puts our young elm here around 1850ish which would fit in nicely with the opening of the Corporation Pier for the ferry to Lincolnshire.

Where there's muck ...

I'm much too young to have any knowledge of the great smogs of London but I am old enough to remember when each house in the land burnt coal and the fuss and bother of the clean air legislation that meant we had to change to smokeless fuels: coke at first (which was a bit like having a mini blast furnace in the living room) and then later converting to good old North Sea Gas. I think all towns and cities in the in the UK are now smokeless zones however East Riding of Yorkshire has no smokeless zones at all so in Cottingham there are still the odd one or two coal burning houses pumping out the vile reeking smoke. It's amazing the intolerable, acrid, throat stinging stench from one coal fire and yet I don't recall this from thousands of coal hearths when I was a young lad; that was just how things were then. So no, I don't miss the old ways, the days starting cold and freezing as the fire obviously had gone out over night and wouldn't "catch" unless a sheet of newspaper was held over it to pull a draught up the chimney, the ashes needing carrying out, the regular delivery from the coal merchants, the sweeping of the chimney every so often to stop it catching fire (that was fun though, for a young'un, watching the brush poke out of the chimney with a cloud of soot), really cold bedrooms with ice on the window in winter, no central heating, no double glazing, no instant hot water, the singular joy of a frozen toilet and so on... I'm feeling a cold shudder just writing about it (but that could be because it's only 14C outside) ... give me a nice, efficient, clean gas boiler with instant central heating any day. But I digress ...

It was not just the bronchi of every living soul that were covered in a patina of soot and tar but the buildings were coated in grime, some with centuries of soot, as well. You might imagine that after nigh on fifty years of clean air these buildings would all be sparkling and for the most part you'd be right but ... well there's always one isn't there? This reminder of how things used to be is 46 Whitefriargate. It was originally a bank built in 1904 and despite, or maybe because of, its sooty grime it is Grade 2 listed. Now imagine, if you can, every building in every town similarly coated, ... no wonder old films were black and white ...

Well, you know what thought did?

...Followed a muck cart and thought it was a wedding.

I seemed to have timed my arrival in town on Saturday for the ceremony of the emptying of bins, an event designed to draw in crowds and reassure folk that the City of Culture will not be overwhelmed by litter. So it was that I followed this muck cart , sorry, stately urban refuge collection and recycling vehicle, up the sunny delight that is Jameson Street where it posed  in front of the now empty BHS store, an almost iconic Hull combination.

À propos  the empty store the council , last I heard, had asked for tenders and plans for demolition. Whether those plans have to include keeping the mural I  know not; the council has said it is its intention to keep it. I won't tell you what I'm thinking because you know what thought did ...

"Your patience and cooperation is appreciated."

"This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide."

                                                                                        Her Majesty's Government

Leather, I read, is the appropriate gift for a three year anniversary and a good strong leather tawsing would sort out our dozy elected representatives fine and good. Three years of prevarication, horse trading, Parliamentary shenanigans that I've never seen the like of before and still somehow, to no-one's real surprise, the UK is still in the EU. The record from the illiberal, antidemocratic Remainers is stuck, "Leaving without a deal" would be a catastrophe, the world would stop spinning and the sky fall in ...but of course there is no deal that they could accept not even the watered garbage offered by Mrs May. The record of our so-called "Brexit means Brexit" government is one of supine surrender to the stubborn mules of the EU. So the delay saw the farce of this country participating in the EU Parliamentary elections where the Bexit Party, a mere couple of months in the making, got twice as many votes as the next two parties put together. (Somehow this was seen as a tremendous victory for the Liberal Democrats who, it goes without saying, are neither liberal nor democratic.) 

Now two Prime Ministers have been consumed by Brexit and a third is about to be chosen in an arcane process involving only members of the Conservative and Unionist Party. This appears to be accompanied by  merry and bloody hatchet jobs in all the media on the leading contender's private life, make stuff up, report scurrilous lies, you name it, it's open season on Boris Johnson (I could almost feel sorry for the overweight old Etonian sybarite, almost...) He just so happens to 'promise' to leave the EU, come what may, on October 31; ah promises, promises ...

The other guy, Jeremy Hunt, or Mrs May in trousers, campaigned to remain in the EU and now mealy mouths vaguely about leaving, hints at a second referendum (by all means bring it on!) and has a surname that is often the subject of Freudian slips ...

Three years ago today the people of this country, participating in the largest democratic exercise in the history of this country, voted by a clear majority to leave the EU. The government said, in a pamphlet delivered to every house in the land, "This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide." So, as the old song says, "Why are we waiting? Why, why, oh why?".


A Pedant's PS shouldn't that be "Your patience and cooperation are appreciated." ?