Author: BrownhillsBob

I told the truth - but told it bent. Wandering around bemused and ranty since 2007.

April 12th – Victoria Park in Darlaston was looking moody and dramatic as I passed back through, and I still adore the mystic bridge. 

This park isn’t doing so well for the flowers this year, sadly; the old cutting is usually a riot but there was hardly anything, mainly I think to over-enthusiastic grass cutting. 

Sad really. Darlaston does have some excellent parks and open spaces.

April 12th – another wet, grey and frankly unlovely day. Where is the sun? The warmth on my back? The neighbourhood cats I’m normally welcoming back on warm evenings as I cruise jacket less through the suburbia of Walsall?

I watch, I wait, I plough on in the murk and damp.

Meanwhile, the damp, raindrop bejewelled Kings Hill Park continues to entertain with a variety of flows and planty of spring promise.

Soon. It’ll be soon. You’ll see.

April 11th – Over in Telford on a misty grey and damp morning, crossing the motorway on the cycleway bridge I noticed that the blackthorn blossom was in full swing.

One of the earlier tree blossoms of spring, it’s usually a pointer to better weather. Often mistaken for hawthorn, it turns hedgerows and copses white for a time, but before the leaves are fully out.

It shows it’s real beauty on a sunny day. Ah well, better luck next time.

April 10th – My respect and thanks are due to Walsall Council, who in very short time indeed have assessed the weather decay of parts of Green Lane between Walsalll Wood and Shelfield, and resurfaced completely a couple of stretches.

The bit here, resurfaced during the day  whilst I was at work, was bloody awful on a bike. It’s way better now.

Thank you.

April 10th – This looks like some pretty revolting flotsam and jetsam, but it’s actually an important and encouraging sign of spring.

These knobbly, odd looking root growths are the rhizomes of the water lilies so common here on the local canals in high summer, and this is the first stage of their… seasonal deployment.

When the season ends, water lilies decay, and the stalk and root mass they grow from sinks to the canal bottom where the excess growth rots off and the stalks over winter in the mud where the water stays warmer, fragmenting as they do so.

When the waters warm in spring, renewed cell growth in the fragmented stocks gives buoyancy once more and they rise to the surface, moving freely in the wind currents and boat wash. 

In time, new growth will sprout and they anchor, growing the familiar leaves and flowers we know so well.

It’s a wonderful, and very successful natural mechanism, and a sign of an oncoming summer…

April 10th – Always good to spot workboat Essington about on the local canals, even on a grey damp morning like today. Essington is the boat used by the mainly volunteer litter picking crews from the Canal and River Trust, who patrol stretches of local canal cleaning up the banks and water.

Today, the boat was moored in Pleck.

And after recent weather here, by heck we need it with the washed-in trash that’s everywhere at the moment.

The crew were clearly on their break – but my best wishes, and thanks go out to them for making the canals nicer for all of us. Bravo!

April 9th – I’ve been passing this rather beautiful white shrub for a week or more now and have absolutely no idea what it is. It’s growing in a clump of cotoneaster in an industrial estate flower bed in Wednesbury. 

In the damp beauty of a misty morning it was absolutely gorgeous. Anyone know what it is?

April 8th – I’ve been trying to get a decent version of this photo for ages. For two winters, in fact. What usually spoils it is traffic on the bridge and ripples on the surface of the canal. At Anchor Bridge tonight though, there were little of either when I flowed along here liquid back into Brownhills High Street – the reflection of the canal wasn’t bad and the Anchor’s lights looked welcoming and warm in the dark.

Sometimes, with some photos, its just a matter of patience.