We’ve been taking a closer look at Glasgow street art, from subtle graffiti, that pops up the more you look, like Venemouse’s pussies on junction boxes and shelters.
To the fluid free expression on the free wall by the embankment of the River Clyde which changes day by day, hour by hour. Artists adding their work with great respect for the skill and the importance of the message — the work, peer-reviewed to be best, being left the longest before being overpainted.
Like this, above, by Gordie Livingston.
Below is Grace, our guide to the city showing us the World’s Most Economical Taxi by Rogue One containing the artist’s self portrait as the driver and commissioned by the owner of the wall, a tribute to her husband, a cabby.
Larger works in the city are sponsored by business, local government or arts organisations, representing aspects of the city.
Glaswegians are very proud of Billy Connolly.
Here he is in youth on the left, after a painting by Jack Vettriano, in a massive mural by Rogue One and Artpistol. On the right, he is seen in later life.
Murals project the image of the university
And the community
This is the Keeper of the Light by Smug a huge photo-realistic representation of the diversity of 2025 Glasgow which reminded me of something we had seen the day before in the Burrell Art Gallery, Glasgow.
A statue of Guanyin (1100-1200), a Chinese Buddhist goddess of compassion and mercy with androgenous face and body, looking neither male nor female, celebrated as a Trans icon.
Although I’ve lived within 50 miles of this, the county town of Shropshire, for 20 years, I’ve never really had the time to look at it properly — always rushing for a hospital appointment, changing trains or dashing back for some imperative.
Last week we took my friend, Anne, to catch a train to Yorkshire — she had a tortuous journey ahead so, despite the traffic (we do not expect it in Wales), we opted to drop her at the historic railway station (above) where we ejected her unceremoniously and to much furious and unsympathetic honking. “No cars!” said the entrance to the carpark, “Bicycles only!” Nobody actually mowed us down as I hauled her luggage from the boot and we found the platform up 28 steps (lift out of order) taken at a trot with her heavy bags — fortunately the train was 3 minutes late and we had 15 seconds to spare.
Having found somewhere to leave the car legally, Bill had to buy a ticket which fortuitously brought him to the booking office where, having waved off my friend, I was wondering what to do next and where he might be — it seems for once the stars were aligning for a good day out!
Shrewsbury Prison is a smouldering presence above the carpark, built in 1793 by Telford, designed by local architect John Hiram Haycock and William Blackburn, advised by John Howard the famous prison reformer who looks down from his plinth above the gate. You can book a tour and even stay the night in a cell, “That’s an idea!” says I with my Granny hat on.
Here’s another famous citizen, Clive of India, getting more infamous by the day as we look at empire from a different angle now — still he hasn’t been toppled from his plinth yet.
The town is full of tantalising mediaeval alleyways– note how the common gutter has been replaced by festive commercial waste bins — I miss the piglets, dogs and red kites scavenging on the waste!
The marvellous market has moved indoors but still bristles with prime produce. As we amble around town the clouds are gathering and the tempting aromas start to emanate from the various eateries. Our noses led us to La Mer Rouge for delicious tapas and to watch the torrential rain in comfort. Behind the old market hall is the town museum and art gallery, irresistible!
Mermaids and dolphins vase, made by Walter Crane Maw and co, Broseley (Shropshire) c1889.
Also the findings from Wroxeter, the 4th largest city in Roman Britain (Vironium) just beyond the modern bypass — both to be explored in Granny hat.
Shrewsbury has been an important place ever since, at the gateway to Wales, a strategic and wool trading centre. Fortunes were made.
In Stuart times one of these rich wool traders, Thomas Jones, pictured below in 1615, married Sarah Ballard, the educated daughter of the Mayor of Chester. Thomas rose in the local hierarchy as an alderman, then Bailiff and finally Mayor in 1638.
At the beginning of the Civil War (1642-1651), one man, Francis Ottley, seen below with his family in 1636, was appointed Governor of Shrewsbury by Charles I, who called on him to form a regiment of foot. These were divisive times with mixed loyalties. He carried the town along the Royalist path. Francis was appointed Sheriff of Shropshire in 1644 and, as the tide turned, was involved in negotiating the surrender to the Parliamentarians in 1646 after which his estates were sequestrated. He paid a price for his loyalty to the Crown spending the rest of his life fighting to retrieve his estates at Pitchford. However, It seems he negotiated these treacherous times, relatively successfully as his family remained prominent after the war and for centuries thereafter.
It may be significant that Sir Francis Ottley had been criticised by Prince Rupert, when in power, for being too lenient with Parliamentarians — Perhaps that was his salvation… One never knows when the boot will be on the other foot! (personal note)
For all the above, the highlight of our visit was the discovery of the Castle Museum and the history of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, a magnificently curated museum deserving another visit and a blog of it’s own.
As Russia attacks Poland and Israel bombs Qatar, Bill goes to clean his teeth and shouts “there’s no water!”
“****!” says the householder, “the well must be dry!” Our well has never dried up but, I think to myself as I struggle into my waterproofs, it might have dropped below the outflow pipe.
“It is pouring with rain — it’s rained heavily all night.” says the man brandishing a dry toothbrush. “Surely it must be filling up fast.
“Airlock!” I shout, over my shoulder. Bill is busy filling buckets from the rainwater butts to flush the loos.
As I stride up the hill I think how low the reservoir was when we passed it yesterday. Here’s the track to our well, we cleared it in June but things grow rapidly here. In June, despite weeks of drought, the water was within 9 inches of the top.
Now I’m not even confident that I can find it — it has gone missing before. I flail my way through the bracken and brambles and here it is… and I have remembered to bring a screw driver to open the cover.
The level is a good 7 feet, 2 meters, down, but the outflow pipe is submerged, can you see it at the bottom of the loop of pipe? The rain is now torrential, I slide back down the steep slope to fetch the kit to clear the area so that I can find the pipe we put in to wash out the dastardly air that has been sucked into the pipe to break the siphon.
Some hours later… Soaked again
A couple of hours of hacking and chopping and the stop-cock and the priming pipe are revealed and their relationship to the well which I photograph to help find them next time. In fact, this whole narrative is about recording events for our successor or, to be truthful, as an aide memoir for ourselves. The stop-cock is down a dark deep hole, longer than my arm, I decide not to mess with it, even if that means all the water goes straight back into the well.
Back to the house for dry clothes and some toast and coffee. “The next phase should be easier as nowadays we can communicate using the mobile phones.” I say. Bill points out that we don’t actually have to open and shut taps to preserve water as we try to fill the half mile of butyl pipe between the well and the house, “it will fill the lavatory cisterns then stop.”
“Oh, I suppose it will.” I say, not convinced, “Still, I’ll take the phone anyway.
Now all that is required is a bucket on a long rope, a funnel and a shepherd’s crook to push the bucket under the water while not falling head first into the orange abyss. I switch on the phone to contact the controller in the house. Rain spots the screen, I wipe it, it goes off — I do this several times before realising that the battery is flat and that my pockets are filling up with water. I tie up the phone in a rubber glove.
Faced with another wet hike back to the house I decide to give it a try anyway. Buckets of water are hauled up, like pussy in the well, and poured into the funnel balanced in the open blue pipe without allowing further ingress of air, this involves nifty thumb work. After 3 buckets full, the funnel stops emptying and the pipe appears to be primed, I screw the cap on, without crossing the thread, difficult with my fingers crossed, and make haste, carefully, to the house, it is important not to break a hip while doing these things.
“The pipes have been gurgling,” says Bill.
Holding our breath, we turn on the kitchen tap… It splutters, it flows!
A friend of mine has just returned to the UK having lived for several years on the other side of the globe. She explains her disorientation in time and space on the disruption to her seasons (I have no excuse!). It’s mid-summer here and mid-winter in New Zealand, where those who suffer from European nostalgia have a pretend Christmas.
Here on our smallholding in Mid-Wales we do something similar — opening our gifts on one particular day. It’s exciting. It’s bird-ringing day! Not their necks so that we can roast them with pigs-in-blankets and plum pudding, but counting all the year’s baby birds, catching the fledgelings that are about to leave their nests and, in particular, those in our nest boxes and ringing them. A right of passage — a birdy Bar Mitzvah — we should have a party!
At a time when we feel we will be overwhelmed by the sheer fecundity of our temperate rain forest, it is good to have some positive feedback for our efforts for wildlife. We are engulfed in 8 foot bracken and torn at by wildly flailing tentacles of bramble that reach out across the tracks to grab us as the mower clogs and stalls yet again, which is just as well as it is overheating.
The cloud of buzzing flies that pursue us fails to reassure us that our local biosphere is healthy or that forswearing insecticides was a good idea. But counting birds does.
Jon and Jan
The stalwarts from the Habitat Protection group have made their annual visits and this year has been very good for blue tits — 52 chicks from 5 nest boxes. How’s’at for productivity! It represents a lot of caterpillars! Lots of work from this top-of -the-table, enterprising species.
A better year for our “target” species, the more endangered pied flycatcher. They produced 24 chicks from their 5 nests. Up 20% but one of their nests failed completely last year — we suspected a great spotted woodpecker. It’s harder for pied flycatchers as they are migrants and have to co-ordinate their arrival with the weather and the caterpillars, not to mention competing with the locals for nesting sites and finding each other again as the males arrive first.
Pied Flycatcher
There was only one nest of great tits but they produced 7 chicks.
Great tit fledgeling
Three of our 14 boxes were empty; today I noticed a great spotted woodpecker squarking a warning to its own fledgelings — wildlife is a balance.
They also ringed a treecreeper fledgling hopping about and keen to be included. They tend to nest in the holes between the roots of the oak trees and in the deep splits in trunks, we watched one earlier this year taking lots of spiders to a nest on the hill.
So, inspired by all this avian fertility, we bash on with re-establishing the tracks to maintain some sort of access to our wild areas and woodland and uncover the diversity that is appearing and a weighty crop of rowan berries and wild cherries that are already keeping the blackbirds and thrushes busy.
This is the time of the year when we regularly lose our well and it is quite important that we find it in its nest of horsetail ferns and overgrown by all this burgeoning diversity. Here it is and it’s full.
I am interested in history and architecture and we visit a lot of National Trust properties. I joined when my friend, Jane, pointed out that they have the best tea rooms and lavatories and are ideal places for a comfort break and a rest when travelling alone! I joined when I was widowed, Bill was already a member — now we do our best to get our money’s worth!
Last week we visited 3 but there was only one I’d care to live in.
Brockhampton house was built in the reign of Henry VI, about 1425 (before the Tudors), from timber that grew in the Hereford hills. It has settled very comfortably into its surroundings over the last 6 centuries. Sitting on a green island surrounded by lily pads and irises and overflown by swooping swallows and squadrons of house martins.
I love it’s relative humility! No mod-cons; an unapologetic mediaeval family house. But this family thrived on its productive farm (unlike so many of the erstwhile owners of our heritage houses — they did not gamble away their resources or run out of heiresses to marry). The family who owned this house moved out in Georgian times to a new grander manor house further up the estate and this old house was occupied by estate workers. By the Victorian era it was in a parlous state but thankfully was rescued, improved and sensitively restored, under the watchful eye of an admirer, retired architect JC Buckler.
The whole aura of the place seems unchanged; minimal modern intrusions, the coolness and quietness of the great hall on a brilliant summer’s day, the chattering of baby birds in nests under the eaves of the gate house on the bridge over the moat. A sparrow chick peeps out from a chink in the brickwork.
Gatehouse timbers.
Mediaeval Gatehouse
View over the moat to the ruins of the Norman chapel.
This cedar at Charlecote seemed particularly monumental, then I read about these trees in Mary Elizabeth Lucy’s autobiography. She lived there from 1823. The beauty of trees is that they have long memories.
and can remind you of days gone by. Like this chestnut tree at Hever Castle, home of Anne Bolyne
What tales it could tell; Henry VIII, cavorting in its shadow, but it is discrete, it looks away and stays mum, a survivor.
Here’s another survivor; a chestnut at Ightham mote, in Kent. You can tell its a sweet chestnut, even in winter, by its spiraling bark.
Here’s a relative youngster, not Bill, he’s there for scale — another chestnut, this time at Upton House. The heritage trees at National Trust Properties can be huge but don’t get the attention from visitors that they deserve. It’s usually on the way home that I wish I had brought my tape measure to record their girth and try to work out their age.
Monterey pines at Plas Newydd on the Anglesey bank of the Menai strait, only about the same age of me, but beautifully lopped by the tree surgeons of the National Trust, to grow straight and tall and strong.
So few of our trees have the room to reach their full potential — or our hedges, for that matter!
Here’s a hedge with attitude. Yew hedge at Powys Castle.
What better place to launch my new book than the Van Institute, with friends and family, food and drink and a bit of a get-together with those whose stories inspired the book.
Here I am, covered in an old white shirt to keep me clean while we set up. Very suitable venue:
Publisher and books all present and correct:
Frances has given everyone a drink and now they are sitting comfortably — mainly because I am on mute, then it all becomes very interactional…
Can you hear me?
No!
Can you hear me now?
No!
I thought they were all having me on, Can you hear me now? Yes,you can.
No!We can’t.
Then a lady jumped onto the stage, grabbed the mike and un-muted me. After that it all went very smoothly.
As a warm-up, the previous week, I gave a talk at Hay Castle — splendid venue!
I performed in the new bit — the Tudor mansion, the part with the roof!.
It is a magnificent community arts centre, and they made me very welcome and laughed a lot at my extracts which was gratifying.
Meanwhile Bill was unsupervised in the several wonderful second hand book shops for which Hay-on-Wye is famous. We returned home with the boot full of books.
The graffiti of the elderly — if not always created by old ladies, this new public art form always cheers up this old girl!
Postman Pat and his black and white cat in Hay on Wye — a suitably literary subject and a double whammy; the goldness of the letterbox commemorates an Olympic gold medal for the towns resident Josie Pearson. Wales is a sporting nation. The recent Six Nations Rugby tournament was celebrated in Trefeglwys with two of the national team, not sure which two.
Not to be outspun — Llanidloes postbox had a Welsh dragon
Yesterday (you may have noticed) was VE day…
All three branches of the armed services represented on Trefeglwys’s box topper — a stark contrast to Moscow’s victory parade — we do things differently!
I don’t know who did them, I suppose that is the point, but thank you!
dianaashworth 