O Tessa, Tessa May ...

... They have taken her away 

and she'll never walk down Whitehall any more,

she was a bold deceiver

and lied to all the Leavers,

that scheming, lying, no good Tessa May!  ...

By the time I finish this we should know who is going to pretend to be in charge of this fine and noble country by donning the mantle of First Lord of the Treasury, Her Majesty's (very own) Prime Minister. The unloved Mrs May was swept into office, sine suffragio, by virtue of her opponent declining to stand; the thinking being that the premiership and Brexit was a poisoned chalice and so it turned out. In these days of acronyms, Mrs May's best offering was a conspiracy with the the EU, known as Brino; Brexit in name only: which achieved the difficult task of being utterly unacceptable to Leavers and Remainers alike. Her deal, thrice despised by Parliament, is well known but since saying she was quitting she has gone a bit demob happy and signed the UK up to becoming a net zero emitter of carbon by 2050. That is something that will no doubt disappear, quietly ... So the Conservative and Unionist Party has been involved in a interminable campaign to find someone, anyone, daft enough to want to be PM and it seems they have quite a deep seam of stupidity to choose from but narrowed it down to a Jeremy and a Boris (the bookies' favourite) ... a choice between a shrivelled dried dog turd and a steaming heap of fresh bullshit ...  Plus ça change, that famous 17^th century song of the Glorious Revolution, Lillibullero has it ... "Once an old prophecy found in a bog, we shall be ruled by an ass and a dog!"

The picture is a graffiti by someone who tags himself Preg; dozens of his tedious scribblings with a  somewhat obvious didactic lefty leaning are to be found all over the so-called Old Town. I might do a post of them if nowt else is going on.

The Coffee Pod

In the twelve or so years that St Stephens has been dominating the retail trade in this town it has had this bizarre wooden contraption (apparently known as the Pod, this is news to me) somewhat akin to a piece of gut suspended above the heads of customers. This has been home to a certain seller of diluted coffee extract. So, anyhow, the news is that this place will close soon. (indeed sooner than soon as I've just read it closed yesterday) ...and, if plans and rumours can be believed, the place will be disembowelled as t'were and St Steve's given a new look. Quite how they'll manage this while folk are wandering around underneath remains to be seen. Coffee aficionados will rightly be unconcerned but those who like this place's sloppy offerings (and there must be some) can be reassured that it is said to be moving to another unit in the shopping centre or they could wander over to the station where another of these places has recently opened.

Pile them high

Somehow in the rush to build new housing around Queen Street/Humber Street area the squat little building on the corner of Blanket Row has acquired three storeys of  new places to call home. The whole of Blanket Row, for so long just waste ground,  is now a big building site with execrable or is that executive (I tend to confuse the two) apartments springing up for folk to work off their mortgages on (or for property companies to buy up wholesale and rent out) and as the sign says this is city living at its best.

Scott's Square was once somewhere down there, a speculative venture (aka a slum) packing in as many properties as the law and the Council would allow. Plus ça change as they say in the city of culture.

Don't muck about with the moon

I love my dear Redeemer,
My Creator, too, as well,
And, oh, that filthy Devil
Should stay below in Hell.
I cry to Mr. Eisenhower,
Please grant me this great boon:
Don't muck about, don't muck about,
Don't muck about with the moon.

                                                 Brendan Behan

They have been gassing on in the media about how it's fifty years ago today since the USA spent its pocket money on sending two chaps to step out on the moon. It has reminded me of how boring and pointless it all was, the seemingly endless speculation before it happened, the endless repeats of that tedious phrase ("One small step for an space-suited American ...") the grainy images of the US flag gently fluttering in the breeze ... and how we, mankind that is, were supposed to have taken a giant leap ... It was all bollocks really, serving no purpose, an expensive wheeze, a diversion from the war in Vietnam that was dragging on and on and killing thousands of people, a gigantic middle finger to the Soviets ... as Kennedy said  "We choose to go the moon not because it is easy but because those commie bastards might get there first ..." 

Here's the auld quare fellow himself; enjoy.

The weekend in Black and White is here.

Somebody loves me, I wonder who ...

Maybe it's you ...

Makin' Pumpkins

I'm new to pumpkins, a bit of a pumpkin virgin, as it were  ... it was Margot's idea to grow some this year, it'll be a fun, she said, a bit of a laugh ... anyway through the cold of May nothing grew then in June a few leaves then turn July and  whoosh they filled the little plastic green house ... then tendrils? nobody told me about tendrils, nor the hairy almost spiky stems. Then the flower buds which were numerous but just sat there until yesterday when they turned a weird yellow then this morning I go down to find these ridiculous beauties ... but I read these are male flowers and these big bad boys need a female flower in order that things can progress, the technical term is 'fruit set' although you may call it something else ...  I'm told that the female flowers will definitely be along later but they only open early morning and close in the afternoon (bit like some shops I know) ... and hand pollination may be needed if the insects can't manage an early morning rendezvous ... and there, as it were, will go my pumpkin virginity.

Algal Pride

The Rosebowl fountain in Queens Gardens I've shown before. The recent weather being averagely warm and sunny meant it was spouting forth a stream of smelly green algal broth the other day, a sight that might turn a many queasy stomach. The sunlight caught the nauseating spray and created this little spectrum ... making it a colourful vile thing.