January 25th – This had turned into Lloyd Cole’s lost weekend. Little was going right and I’d spent hours trying to battle with technology, and achieved little.
I escaped in the evening, into a desolate, somnambulant Brownhills, and cruised around the town centre happily lost in my search for a picture.
Sometimes, it’s good just to put the stuff down, get on the bike, start pedalling and stop thinking.
January 24th – Despite the gradual shift to white LED lights, the colour of the urban night here is still sodium orange. It makes for interesting, haunted townscapes and renders corners of the town eerie in the monochromic light.
Here at Holland Park, normally a busy, bright, pleasant place, it looked empty, haunted and unsettling. It’s fascinating once you get used to it.
January 24th – A lost day to technical battles with the computer and other silliness. I got out late and shot over to Chasewater in the dark hoping for a decent moonlit night – but it wasn’t to be. All I got was light pollution, but it made for an interesting shot, anyway.
The lake is refilling well now, and I was intrigued to note all the separate swan families and their cygnets now dwelling on the lake had congregated together by the dam bridge. Not sure why.
Safety in numbers, perhaps? But from what?
January 23rd – A warning to fellow cyclists and walkers on the canal near Clayhanger Bridge in Brownhills. Some kind of work has been undertaken on the sluice set into the towpath, and the sheet steel covers now are proud with a void around the edges.
It’s a real trip hazard, and I can’t imagine what the people who left it like this were thinking.
Take care.
January 23rd – on a grey, murky afternoon I cycled down the canal from Aldridge. I’d headed for the canal as I often do to escape the traffic, which seemed overly aggressive as I’d hit it during the school run.
Passing the Weinerburger Brick marl pit at Stubbers Green, I took a look into the void through the fence. It doesn’t get deeper, but it grows steadily, by gradual removal, dumper after dumper of red marl heading to the moulds and then the kilns.
That’s a lot of bricks come out of there. And what a huge scar on the landscape. But the one ever-present thing here – the familiar, warm smell of bricks being fired – is, like Burntwood’s permanent smell of vinegar – one of the ways I know I’m near home.
January 22nd – I returned from Walsall early evening, in a better frame of mind. It was cold, for sure, but it wasn’t a bad night overall. Station Street and it’s taxi rank always looks good at night, with surprisingly good architecture if one looks closely.
The Square outside the crossing at St Paul’s is also good in the dark, the lights of the bank and The Imperial Pub look welcoming and warm.
January 21st – On a grey, depressing day, I stopped to check out the new magic bicycle symbols added to the footpath in Pleck just by the motorway Bridge on the Darlaston Road. I guess this is part of the commitment to safer cycling routes with the road improvement scheme here. It’s dismal.
A bit of tactile paving, blacktop some verges and a splurge of magic paint. A grim, shared use path hazardous for pedestrians and cyclists, along the front of a factory gates with little visibility.
The people who design and implement this rubbish aren’t cyclists. They aren’t thinking about cyclists. They’re ticking boxes on a form to satisfy a requirement.
This is why we can’t have nice things, people…
January 20th – Another gorgeous but brittle cold morning commute. The ice and a very, very light dusting of snow were evident on the canal as I cycled up to Bentley Bridge, but the canal itself looked superb in the hazy sun.
Further on, the mystic curved bridge at Victoria Park looked stunning, too. In recent winters, we haven’t had many days like this. This year is really making up for the deficit.
January 19th – Again, apologies for the long-range, poor photos, but I spotted this charming chap on Jockey Meadows. He was embarrassed as I caught him going about his ablutions, but he mooched around the meadow a little before sloping off into the hedgerow. Such a fit, lithe-looking chap; there are few animals more impressive in the English countryside than a fox in his prime.
A great sight on a nippy morning.
January 19th – A cold commute on a sunny morning, and lots of little delights; the mist off the canal, wildlife and plumes of steam and smoke drifting in mercifully still air. On Green Lane, Walsall Wood, road spray from the pooling water there had coated the adjacent hawthorn hedge and encased it in ice.
Beautiful and haunting.
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