Are you ready for Brexit?

 J. Heebink is a Dutch transport firm with bases in Manchester and MIlton Keynes. Their bright orange lorries are a common sight on Castle Street as they head to and from the port. They've been in business for decades and with a bit of  common sense from all parties, will keep on trucking for many decades to come.

The theme for this month is orange. 

At the end of this month, if certain folk are to be believed and the UK does finally leave the protection racket known as the European Union, the sky will fall in, this country will run out of medicines, food, fuel, folk will be put out of work and we will collapse into a state of complete paralysis with lorries unable to transport goods to and from the EU. This will only happen if the EU chooses to make it happen, let us be clear, it will be their choice to mess with trade; someone, somewhere will have to choose to block or delay the transport of vital medicines...  thus showing what inhuman bastards they have been all along.
It's poppycock (a fine Dutch word), of course, but that is how these scaremongering idiots work. I've given up on the political machinations going on in Parliament, plots here, plots there, plots against plots, court cases to reverse the PM's actions, plots to change the PM, rumours of plots, denials of rumours and you think it and it is happening (possibly, who knows? who cares any longer?) ... all keep the BBC (the biased broadcasting conspiracy) salivating. This parliament is simply not working, the government cannot govern, the supposedly neutral Speaker is in cahoots and conspiring with the Opposition, ... The people cannot have an election because the Opposition is rightly scared of the result and won't let them, so much for democracy. It all boils to one thing: are they, a few hundred MPs, really going to overturn the votes of 17.4 million people and block Brexit completely? Do they think they can get away with it? Well the answer to that is, suck it and see: Oh the Great Reckoning there will be!
Meanwhile the Government is putting out adverts with the question: "Are you ready for Brexit?" to which my answer (and I guess a lot of others) is "Just get a bloody move on ..."

Morrisons, King's Lynn

I've been in several Morrisons stores in my time but none have anything like this stained glass window. With my limited local knowledge I spot a reference to the tidal clock on St Margarets, are those the sails of old fishing boats? There's probably other things hidden in there that I'm missing. Tucked away is the word Lenne, from the old latin name  Lenne Episcopi (Bishop's Lynn) as it was before it became Lenne Regis ...

Apart from the stained glass the store is just like every other Morrisons, a large dull box, but full marks for this little decoration.

I realise now all the lettering is back to front; maybe if I spin it by magic ...

The Red Mount Chapel

Taken by Margot K Juby

On our way to Morrisons for some late night shopping we passed this little beauty in the Walks. I won't bore you with the history of this place just say it's an amazing survivor through some turbulent times and has been recently restored and is open to the public though obviously not at nine o'clock on a September evening. Hopefully we'll be back for a better look round sometime.

Out to the Wash

Here we are again down the Fisher Fleet; this time with a bit of day light. If you carry on past the fishing boats you eventually fetch up at the river, the Great Ouse, which flows out into the Wash. The river no longer flows in its own free way but in a man made channel, dead straight. King's Lynn used to be much nearer the sea but land reclamation, drainage and such things means it's now a few miles inland.

The weekend in black and white is here.

The Fisher Fleet

The Fisher Fleet just after sunset with a bit of a tide to reflect the lights and ghostly almost invisible ducks quacking to themselves is an experience not to be missed. Sure it involves a wee bit of trespass on port authority land but no one will mind too much and even if  they do they can only politely advise you to leave.

Folk have been setting off from here to scour the Wash and North Sea for fish and such like for centuries, these days it's mainly shrimps that provide a living for dozens in King's Lynn.

The Fleet now lies strictly controlled with embankments between two docks and surrounded only by light industry. A painting from the 19th century shows a more rustic, even bucolic, place with folk having a nice family day out by the banks of the stream. I can't see that happening these days. I found a couple of other old paintings here.

Margot Juby took this

Just ignore this sign ...

MargotJuby  took this

And if you are a tad confused over the word fleet, here it means a creek not a collection of boats. In fact the Fisher Fleet is the mouth of the Gaywood river which flows with no great urgency for a few miles and empties into the Great Ouse here. So there you go, it's clear as mud ... There are other 'fleets' in and around Lynn, Millfleet and the Purfleet spring to mind.

Fleeting

Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry
And always remember: The longer you live
The sooner you'll bloody-well die...

To King's Lynn for a funeral, at very nearly 90 years of age Fred Juby, Margot's old dad, just died while reading an Ian Rankin novel so he didn't miss much ... The service was a strange thing, though quite common these days, I'm told: a non religious event that nevertheless kept to the forms and structures of a religious service. So instead of hymns we had Glenn Miller's foot-tapping In the Mood, John Lennon's Imagine, instead of a prayer a poem (of excruciating banality) instead of a priest a 'humanist' person reading an obituary. I suppose we should mark these passages from life in some way but give me a good old burial in the deep clay complete, if need be, with "Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery...He cometh up and is cut down like a flower ..." or better still just feed me to the crows rather than being shuffled off behind a purple curtain while Bud Flanagan sings the Dad's Army theme tune.

So any way it was a good day especially as it wasn't my funeral and we got this grand old double rainbow stretching right across the town.

The Railway

This pub  in Cottingham has been closed since January and was only open for a few weeks over Xmas before that, the seasonal decorations are still up... Basically it's on its uppers and whoever owns it has decided enough is enough and has put in plans to erect "10 dwellings with associated access, parking, landscaping and infrastructure following demolition of hotel". You last saw this place way back in 2012 when it was positively blooming.