Tag: urban

March 2nd – Two very poor photos of Walsall Wood in a downpour. I was late back from work. It had rained most of the way home. It was cold, and the wind was brutal. I was dry under the waterproofs, though, and I just made a place I had to visit on the way back, so it wasn’t all bad.

Walsall Wood has a sort of soft, beautiful quality in the rain of a dark night. Villagey, yet urban. Energy and motion in the traffic, unstoppable, relentless, with somewhere to be, that isn’t here; yet it’s contrasted with the static streetlights, shop and pub glow and the son sheen of wet tarmac. 

I’d rather be at home. I’m still troubled by low energy, short breath and sinus hassle, but that’s improving; but the night was hostile and I’d rather be in the warm and dry.

So I ploughed home.

February 11th – Heading over Catshill Junction to slide down the High Street, I still can’t get over the lights and reflections of the new build, and the way it affects what was a formerly barren spot at night.

Combined with he LED streetlights from Chandlers Keep, it feels quite awake there these days, no longer lonely and isolated at all.

February 9th – Sad to note that at the south end of Victoria Park in Darlaston, beyond the railway bridge, flytippers have been at work. What is normally an fairly clean marshy area beloved of birds and bugs, a quantity of tyres have been dumped, clearly thrown down the embankment from the car-park above.

Only the lowest of the low do this. Scum.

February 8th – This was supposed to be a photo of the statue of Sister Dorothy Pattison, heroine of Walsall and a great personal hero of mine, moodily lit in a windswept town at closing time.

On that score it failed miserably. The old girl is out of focus, and the light doesn’t do her justice at all, which is sad. She was the mother of modern healthcare in Walsall and gave her heart, soul and life to caring for the Victorian sick, injured and infirm.

It does, however, show the atmosphere on The Bridge as I passed through. I’d had a dreadful commute again – driving rain and a headwind ion the way in that morning, and on the way back, the tailwind, although decent, wasn’t the engine-substitute I’d laboured against earlier.

A nasty gale was whipping up though, and there was a sense of increasing desertion and of collar-up, head down scurrying home.

It was fascinating and I wish I’d hung around a bit longer.

February 3rd – That moment when you reach out for the camera to grab a picture at the lights and they change. Nothing for it but to stash the camera back as it’s still turning off and haul away sharpish.

Normally judge it better than that, but the lights of Rushall were very beautiful tonight. A least I caught an instant in time.

January 30th – Further up the canal on the Aldridge/Walsall Wood border, the canal was also looking good from Northwood Bridge, over the marina there, and in the other direction, up past the brickworks at Stubbers Green. 

The canal here looks so serene and peaceful, that only a vague chemical smell in the air and low background susurration would tell you that nearby there was a toxic waste handling facility, a large landfall, marl pits and two brickworks.

Impressions can be deceptive sometimes.

January 26th – Ah, hello rain, you’re back.

Passing through Walsall to make a call on my commute home, the heavens opened. For what seemed like the thousandth time this year, I got wet. But the rain was warm and the wind was behind me, and it didn’t last too long.

However, I did catch it whilst in Park Street, in the town centre. Something about the light and surfaces combined. I though it was rather beautiful.

January 26th – Jasper Carrot fans will know the familiar comedic cry of ‘I got this mole!’ but for the past week or two, a grass verge in Darlaston has had a fairly industrious chap digging beneath it, and he’s making me curious.

The verge is isolated by roads, a wall and a factory yard. Yet on this 100 square meter green oasis in a sea of hardstanding, a mole throws up fresh molehills every night. Nothing unusual in that, you might think; lots of places have moles. That’s very true – but how did he or she get here?

Do they travel over the surface to find new territories? Do predators perhaps carry them away, and the lucky ones make an escape? How did my worm-munching mate get onto this little patch of grass?

Suggestions welcome.

January 21st – Taking a shortcut home through The Butts in Walsall,I was struct by the beauty of the car-lined street of terraces under the ghostly white LED streetlights. I don’t often come this way as I find the traffic down here a nightmare, but it’s a lovely place; by day, busy and occupied but by night, almost somnambulant.

A snatched photo taken just because the scene charmed me.