November 23rd – telford, early. After a stressful train journey that involved missing my usual bacon roll, I diverted from my usual route to visit a cafe for a pause and something unhealthy to fill my belly.
It was a sunny, cold, bright morning, and in a factory yard hedge, by a seldom-walked main road, a beautiful display of what seems to be some kind of rose.
I have no idea, but it pulled me up short with the unexpected beauty.
September 8th – This is a relic of a different time, and most people never, ever notice it. This barcode sign, fixed to a lamp post on the Chester Road in Brownhills, just down from the Shire Oak, is a remnant of a system devised in the the eighties and implemented in the nineties for automatically assessing road maintenance. Surveying vehicles would drive the roads, checking the surface, just as they do now, but in the absence of cheap, accurate GPS, onboard systems looked for markers like this. Upon registering one, the recorder then reset a distance counter. The marker sign was read automatically, and the location of a defect being recorded by the distance from the last marker seen. Thus repair vehicles could locate faults the same way. Each sign gave a unique number. The whole network was obsolete in less than a decade, but the signs remain, puzzling anyone who notices them.
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