Salisbury and Park

Here's the intersection of Salisbury Street and Park Avenue showing the somewhat quaint Queen Anne style fronts designed by George Gilbert Scott. Did the Council really have to put that road sign just there; I mean it wasn't there a few years back. Are drivers really so thick they need to be told to go round a roundabout? (Don't answer that.) There are mermaids too but doesn't every street have mermaids?

I had to change the title of this post as I had the avenue  before the street and that is a big no-no with our American friends who tell us how to live, who we should get our technology from, who our friends should be, who should be our Prime Minister, how we should write our own language, and which way we should pee in the morning (For this relief much thanks ...) We're touched by your presence, no really, we are, touched.

A tired old tart

I've told before how gun-running local entrepreneur cum property developer Zaccharia Pearson 'donated' a piece of land to the west of the then expanding Victorian city of Hull so that the local council could have a public park (around which desirable space Zacc built and sold many large town villas). Anyhow past speculations and malfeasance aside the place was a Victorian promenading success with a bandstand and a lake and a little bridge and a glass conservatory. But we no longer live in the era of middle class well-to-dos taking the air in a town park and so  over the years the bandstand went, the bridge went and the conservatory became shabby and run down. The park in recent years has a reputation for not being at all pleasant or indeed safe. Still, undaunted by the flow of history, the Pearson Park fan club and the council and (I think) lottery funding of nearly £4 million have put back a little bridge and a bandstand and rebuilt a conservatory. Oh and repaired the ornate gateway as I mentioned some months back. (Must get a picture of that delight some time)

As you know I'm a great believer that bandstands are quite possibly the most stupid invention even more than face masks in public spaces. Here's a little beauty, already the haunt of local youth and destined to feature in so many stories of vandalism, drug abuse and violence in the local rag. If there were awards for pointless constructions well this is surely a contender. The only reason I can find for it being here is that there used to be one so there has to be one now, stands to reason.

I did like the weather vane on the conservatory though the building itself looks hideous and out-of-place. I believe it has already been vandalised several times in the short time it has been built; with any luck they'll destroy it completely.

So there you go, several million pounds in the pockets of the renovators and we have a park that has a pointless bandstand, a reinstalled but unnecessary bridge and a crappy glasshouse and a repainted cast iron gate posts for a gate that is never closed. I think this was a massive wasted opportunity to spend money wisely on something new, innovative and imaginative. This is supposed, somehow, to make Pearson Park attractive, "like new". It fails. It might have worked a hundred and fifty years ago but not now. Now it looks like a tired old tart with way too much make-up and hideous lippy hiding the cracks and pretending she can still pull the punters, not quite ugly but giving off a stench of desperation.

The bloom of death

¡No te dejes morir lentamente!

¡No te impidas de ser feliz!

Last year we bought a couple of pots of House Leeks or Sempervivum as you may know them. I just  left them to do their thing didn't even pot them on; you can still see the price £3.99 ...  and so as the year slowly spun into summer a majestic phallic obscenity arose with these blooms on top. I can't (and don't) claim any credit for this, I'm very hands off and let things die of their own free will as I'm told they will after blooming, an orgy of monocarpic delight.

The weekend in black and white (like death and taxes) will be with us sooner or later here.

Bus Stop Blues

Imagine running a business where the Government recommend your customers not use your services and then compensates you for your losses... this is the neo-normative fantasy world we live in now. These double-deckers can take over seventy passengers sitting and standing (at a warm fuggy squeeze) but are limited to no more than twenty face-masked and fear filled voyagers. I say twenty but the bus I was on into east Hull the other day had many more than that thankfully or folk would have been left behind. Even the worst laid schemes o' mice and men gang agley it seems.

The picture is Cottingham Green bus stop but in nearby Hull the bus lane scheme has been extended to run all daylight hours not to help buses, no, no, buses are bad, bad I tells you ... no it's to help cyclists who are supposed to take advantage of this benefice and fill the gap made by mad bucking of the market (let me check yes I did write bucking glad I got that right). Now of course cyclists won't suddenly appear; Hull is after all one the most obese, cigarette smoking places in the country (part of its lasting charm I suppose) ... instead the extra cars on the road carrying disgruntled bus passengers (now lost forever I assume) will be squeezed into even less space and Hull's familiar gridlock problem will no doubt return should the economy ever get back out of the deep hole it's in. 

A Movable Feast

The Christian festival of Easter was cancelled this year; that quasi-pagan celebration of Christ's victory over Death was put to one side because ... well no real good reason at all; Government fear of collapse of health services (that didn't happen) led to panic, scaremongering, a return to medieval thinking, mass hysteria, media bullshit reporting, misuse and abuse of statistics, you name it  and it happened this crazy year and to get out of the grave dug for us by stupid, vain politicians (who seem at least to have stopped digging) we linger in this not free transition with illiberal regulations for anti-social spacing, reservations for the pub (for Chrissake!) ... and (useless) face mask virtue signalling social tyranny. It's the control freaks' wet dream ... 

PS the church sign has been removed after so many weeks and there's talk of the place reopening with every soul isolated lest they should spread this 'germ' ... I won't ask who made this 'germ' since, well, we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of theodicy on a  cold, damp Thursday in July.

Derelict Doodles

At some time in the down days of this year someone with way too much time on their hands found a way to brighten up the walls of this empty old bank on Beverley Road. Well done them.

A cooling dollop of scepticism

But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time

And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home ...

Long, long ago when that was but little tiny lad I started a course in biochemistry, at Liverpool University if you're interested which I'm sure you're not, anyhow the course involved much practical work in laboratories doing protein assays, carbohydrate assays, lipid assays, mineral assays. Measuring stuff, in short, answering that perennial question how much of what you claim to be there is actually there. Common to all these assays was preparing a calibration curve using purified protein or glucose, vitamin C, starch, NADH or whatever was on the mind of the lecturer that week. We always started with a bottle of known and measured our sample of unknown against that. It became ingrained, dinned into us: start with what you know and compare that against what you have in your hot little hand.
I relate this because it seems to me that a lot of so-called science, as reported today, skips that part of dealing with what is real and known and reaches for the computer model of how it is supposed to be, dogma has replaced experiment. This might not have been so important, reality will eventually catch up and bite these dreamers, except they have immunised themselves against reality by a wall of self-righteous indignation that reaches all the way up to and including the top levels of political and business power. The model is now emperor of all he surveys (not actually surveys since that would entail taking measurements and stuff, facts and data only get in the way)  and his clothes are a glorious array of flim-flammery and untested theory.
So with so-called man made climate change (seemingly now a way of browbeating folk into accepting expensive, windy, sunny, watery, willowy woody power generating schemes when nuclear is clearly the way to go and there's centuries' worth of nice coal under our feet) and so, more to the point with coronavirus testing.
When I read the protocol for this test back in March first thing I asked myself was where is the metaphorical bottle of purified virus that they are using for comparison, well it didn't exist then and, you know, it still doesn't these months and several million tests later. You might think that something as important as this test would at least have a so-called gold standard behind it. You'd be wrong. It has less behind it than the Wizard of Oz, it's basically an act of faith, believe in the dogma behind all this, believe in the method, in short believe in the very existence of Sars-Cov-2 or what? What is there left to believe in? It simply has to be true. This is the 'truth', the only possible 'truth' and nothing but the 'truth'.
Belief is, of course, basic to science but it has to be based on evidence, on repeatable demonstrable experience that can be refuted by experiment. In short it is based on a "bottle of known stuff" not on fanciful dogmatic delusion as seems to be the style these days.
So if you see me wandering around, too close for comfort, breaking that anti-social distancing claptrap, not wearing a silly face-nappy and laughing at poor saps who worry that their world is being ruined by alleged nanoscopic pieces of lipo-protein wrapped RNA ("that come all the way from China") that may or may not exist well now you know why. Three years of scientific training and three more years of postgraduate research (or paid fun as I recall) and years of watching that old handcart roll on down the path to who knows where have left me deeply scarred with what are now old man's doubts.