November 19th – It didn’t feel icy. But it was cold, and I guess the first really winterish commute of the season. But this sign – a new appearance today at Moor Street Station – seems to indicate lawyers have been earning their corn somewhere. The language is mealy mouthed too. 

Oh well, it kept a sign maker busy somewhere…

andycolman:

Day 321 – Past It’s Prime – I must have ridden past this wonderful contraption dozens of times but it has never caught my eye until today. Having a poke around on the interweb, I discover that it’s a threshing machine. I have also seen much better photos of the exact same machine. In my defence, the farm it is on seems very securely cordoned off and I could only get this picture by holding the camera up over a wire fence.

This was taken with smallest and oldest of my regular cameras – a tiny Samsung Digimax from around 2005. It still somehow manages to take some nice pictures though.

Meerash Farm, Hammerwich. Lost horizons.

November 17th – Today was a carbon copy of yesterday, but warmer, and so the mist had risen a little. By the time I got out – again, as dusk fell – the air was clearing and a very quiet darkness settled upon Brownhills. I spun around, enjoying the unusual quiet; up the canal to the old cement works, then up the old railway line to Engine Lane, and back into Brownhills via the Hussey Estate and Holland Park. It’s taken a long time this year, but tonight, I was aware of being in love with the darkness again, or at the least, in love with the things it brings. Solitude, quiet, a new aspect to familiar places.

There’s the dark town, the darkness itself, and the fear of the darkness. At some point in the last 24hours, seasonal lines recrossed and I stopped fighting it. The fear is real: it’s not the menace, or the ghostliness as found here at Coppice Lane, but the fear of never seeing the summer again. I can’t hold on to the year passed,the warm days, long grass and flowers have withered and now, it’s winter. Come Christmas, everything will open out again. 

And in the meantime, evenings like this: quiet, dark and beautiful.

November 16th – I went up to Chasewater just to spin around the park. I haven’t done that for ages, but in the shorter, colder days of winter I’ll return to it more and more. Although it’s nice to see the lake busy in summer, like Cannock Chase, the magic comes when it’s deserted and few venture out. Apart from the odd dog walker and twitchers there to catch the Great Northern Diver that had been exciting local birders all week, I saw few folk, and as dark fell, I felt the familiar haunting feeling I get here… A mixture of enjoyment, desolation and sense of smallness in the great dark.

The lake seems to hover these days about a foot off full, and is functioning normally, with Fly Creek flowing well to keep it topped up. As I folded back over the causeway, the last bit of the sunset over Norton and Jeffrey’s Swag was quite nice, and in the dark from the Balcony Shore, it seemed the resurgent Water Sports Centre was getting ready for a party.

One of the few joys of the off season is returning to old haunts.

November 16th – I headed up to Chasewater late afternoon in bad light, as I hadn’t been for ages, and as usual I took the canal route. Nearing the paddock at Newtown that had been home to Big Tasties, who’ve since moved to Stonnall, I heard the oddest twanging noise. Not long after, I spotter her.

This huge, healthy sow seems to be on her own and have the entire space to herself. She had attracted my attention by repeatedly biting on the barbed wire fence at the towpath edge, barbs and all, tugging it out and twanging it like a guitar string. At first, I was very concerned she might hurt herself but that mouth seems very, very tough. She was very tame and allowed me to stroke her head.

November 15th – While capturing Morris, the lights of the former Brownhills Council House – The Parkview Centre – caught my eye. It was an interesting original building – not handsome or beautiful, but a tour-de-force of civic pride in a growing town made prosperous by coal and bricks. The brick legacy is reflected in the light terracotta masonry, and engaging detail around the windows, doors and eaves.

Sadly, up until recently, the hundred year old clock has neither been accurate nor reliable, and is affectionately known as the ‘three-faced liar’ to locals.

Recently, the timepiece has been refurbished following welcome work instigated by the Brownhills Local Committee, with new mechanisms and seems to be holding time well; it was a mere minute fast in this picture.

Unfortunately, the civic pride the building and clock conferred has been utterly destroyed by the hideous, architecturally lazy and cheap extensions added in the last decade to make this landmark suitable as a health centre and library.

A more botched, unsuitable conversion would be hard to find.

November 15th – It had been a long day, the energy was low, and I didn’t have much time. I spun up the High Street at teatime and rode the backstreets for a bit. Returning, I looked at something thats so familiar, I rarely pay it much attention: Morris, the Brownhills Miner. Much as I feel uncomfortable with the extravagance in a faltering town, I do love him. John McKenna’s work in drafting all those fragments, then welding them together in a finite-element model like this is stunning, and always has been. So much better than the laser cut by numbers tat in Walsall Wood, this took a really skilled artist a huge amount of time to design, facilitate and build. I just wish the blue lights didn’t make it look so cheap.

Morris is such an obvious and cliched subject, I’ve only rarely featured him here, but it’s worth it, once in a while, just to share him. The politics and cost aside, it’s a terrific thing.