Random Bloggages

Thursday Evening

2012-02-17T02:45:00.000Z

Outside, the sea roars.
Inside: food, warmth and friendship.
A year of promise.

3.29 AM

2011-12-31T03:29:00.002Z

Wind blowing,
House creaking,
Lights shining,
Sleep hiding.

Christmas is Coming...

2011-11-21T23:59:00.005Z

Bath, 21 November 2011

2011-11-21T23:59:00.004Z

The perfect end to a perfect evening.

Blueberry Cheesecake

2011-11-12T23:59:00.003Z

Blueberry cheesecake at Cafe Retro in Bath.

Bath

2011-11-12T23:59:00.001Z

Today we went to Bath and saw some stuff.

Things in my Garden

2011-08-14T23:59:00.008+01:00

A Minor Mystery in Stone Solved

2011-07-03T23:50:00.000+01:00

It's nearly a year since I wrote a post about some rocks that seemed to have been abandoned in the woods at Worlebury.

Today I was pleased to discover that they were indeed backing slabs for information boards which have now been set up in the woods; I found two of them and I suspect that there are more.

Which only goes to show that sometimes it pays to await developments.

A Moth

2011-07-03T23:16:00.000+01:00

It's the time of year when the six-spot burnets (Zygaena filipendulae) arrive in large numbers at Sand Bay.

I don't know how many arrived this year, but the grass verges have been mowed earlier than usual, and most of them must have moved on, leaving only this one and one or two others behind.

Bayside Hotel

2011-06-27T23:22:00.029+01:00

After the destruction of the Royal Pier Hotel last year, the Bayside Hotel has been badly damaged by fire over the weekend.

I've no idea whether it will be possible to rebuild it, or if there is any commercial reason to do so. If not, it's a fairly safe bet that we shall see another block of expensive flats in its place.

Unofficial Countryside

2011-06-23T23:06:00.001+01:00

Unofficial countryside on the streets of Weston-super-Mare.

Monday Night

2011-06-20T21:36:00.000+01:00

Stillness. Wet leaves. Calm.
Darkness falls. A blackbird sings.
The solstice beckons.

Monday Afternoon

2011-06-20T17:23:00.000+01:00

Sunflowers weep, heads bowed.
Warm rain falls and warm wind blows.
Summer sleeps today.

Monday Morning

2011-06-20T10:18:00.000+01:00

Swifts fly low, screaming,
Under grey, metallic skies.
Summer hides from us.

Summer

2011-06-16T21:35:00.000+01:00

I Found Some Art Today

2011-06-16T20:06:00.000+01:00

Kiwi Fruit

2011-06-05T23:18:00.000+01:00

My kiwi fruit plant is flowering.

Although it's about twenty years old, it only flowered for the first time about five years ago, and didn't produce much fruit until last year, when there were sixty or so. The only problem was that they were as hard as bullets until the bad weather hit us in December and destroyed them.

It looks as if the plant may be equally productive this year, so I'm going to have to do some research on how to ripen the fruit, because the thought of all that free food going to waste is worrying to someone as mean as me.

Damien Hirst at the RWA

2011-06-03T22:43:00.001+01:00

Greenhouse: Day 28

2011-05-29T19:24:00.001+01:00

A month on and things are coming along well.

I've planted out some more tomatoes (Andine cornue) and peppers (Anaheim and Jalapeño), and the first fruit have set on the Sungold tomatoes. In all, I've got four tomato plants and nine pepper plants (all chillies), with some more still sitting on the windowsill in the house. I think I may have overdone things a bit.

The Andine cornue tomatoes are something of an experiment; I've never grown them before although I've had the seed for several years. The fruit are supposed to be large and suitable for cooking, which I don't do enough of, so the experiment may continue in the kitchen.

Also something of an experiment is the green polythene bag full of coir compost in which I've planted a Fresno pepper. It's clearly not doing as well as its twin in the pot immediately to the right in the picture, which is planted in compost taken from a growbag. The coir bag also cost nearly twice as much as a conventional peat-based growbag.

I'm also fighting for space with about a dozen sunflowers in pots which ought to go outside, but can't until The Wind from Nowhere dies down, and there's not much sign of that happening yet.

Pictures of a Pool

2011-05-26T20:10:00.000+01:00

Over the past few days I've been researching the history of the Pool at Weston-super-Mare. It's involved looking through the official guide books that were published by Weston-super-Mare Borough Council, and I've been struck by some of the imagery used on the covers, which often featured the Pool.

1938

1939

1953

1955

1957

Although the style of the artwork is reminiscent of the sort of thing that appeared on the covers of the Enid Blyton books that were so familiar to anyone born in the 1950s, its message is clear: Weston-super-Mare is a healthy place, full of healthy, happy people.

The Pool was an object of considerable civic pride: it was advertised as modern, safe, and one of the best pools in Europe, if not in the world. It's also clear that it was seen as a major tourist attraction and an important selling point for the town.

Then everything changed. In 1983 the Pool became the Tropicana and its main purpose was now seen as entertainment rather than swimming.

And then the Tropicana closed.

It seems strange that, in a major seaside resort like Weston-super-Mare, it's only possible to swim for the few hours every day when the sea visits us and that nobody seems to be prepared to consider the possibility that a lido might be a tourist attraction.

All that civic pride seems to have died, and I'm not sure if it will ever be possible to bring it back to life.

Beach Huts

2011-05-26T16:55:00.000+01:00

I've always wondered why we don't have beach huts in Weston-super-Mare, but it seems that in 1939 we did.

According to this advertisement from the 1939 guide to the town, they were pretty luxurious ones too, with running water and showers, although I can't help thinking that, with rents of up to 25/- a week, they were aimed primarily at middle-class visitors.

Muybridgizer in the Woods

2011-05-22T20:54:00.000+01:00

Greenhouse: Day 1

2011-05-01T22:06:00.001+01:00

For the last five or six years I haven't grown anything in my greenhouse. Instead it's been used as storage space for all the junk that was going to go into a skip one day, if only I could find the time to hire one.

No more.

Today I've burned all the old furniture and filled three sacks with all sorts of plastic pots, trays and propagators that have sat in the sun for too long and are now ready to shatter into a million pieces if you look at them too closely.

In their place are tomatoes (Sungold) and peppers (Anaheim, Fresno and Jalapeño), with more to come when the seedlings are big enough to plant out.

I've neglected the garden for so long that I'd forgotten just how therapeutic working with plants can be. I find it a perfect remedy for stress and I'd recommend it to anyone. And, of course, you get the satisfaction of eating something that you grew yourself.

Tadpoles

2011-04-25T18:32:00.000+01:00

Seen today in a rhyne at Kewstoke, Somerset.

Harlequin?

2011-04-21T17:44:00.010+01:00

It looks like 2011 might be a good year for ladybirds. There are more in my garden than I've seen for several years, which is good news for gardeners, but bad news for aphids.

Although there are quite a few different species to be seen, my ladybird-recognition skills aren't very good, so I'm not sure what they are. I photographed these two today, and I suspect that they may be harlequins (Harmonia axyridis), rather than any native variety. Can anyone tell me if I'm right?

Dog's Dibble

2011-04-19T17:06:00.000+01:00

Still Lives: Robert Lenkiewicz in Bristol

2011-04-18T21:53:00.000+01:00

The first thing that strikes you is the scale of the pictures.

The gallery is large, with high ceilings, and is illuminated by skylights. From the entrance you can see to the far end of the second room, to a wall on which hangs a single picture.

The Burial of John Kynance shows a group of twelve figures, all larger than life, on a canvas that is almost seventeen feet wide and seven feet high. Most of them are vagrants, members of a community that Lenkiewicz was closely associated with for many years, but Death is there as well, dressed as a jester, mocking them, or us, or possibly life itself.

Some of the pictures seem to be unfinished, as perhaps they are, for Robert Lenkiewicz, although a prolific artist, was a man with much to say, and he was probably well aware of how little time he had to say it.

Lenkiewicz described his work as a form of sociological enquiry, and many of the themes which concerned him are represented here: death, sexuality, obsession, old age, vagrancy, disability, love, addiction.

The majority of the paintings hang in four large rooms, but in a fifth, much smaller room, is Edwin Mackenzie, better known as Diogenes, a long-time associate of Lenkiewicz and a frequent sitter for him. His embalmed corpse lies in a glass-topped box, visible only to those standing close to it. On the walls are portraits of Diogenes and a video is playing in which Lenkiewicz talks about their relationship.

The events which followed the death of Diogenes in 1984 were the cause of considerable controversy, but it is difficult to see why. The strongest message conveyed by this final room is that we have nothing to fear from the dead.

Although born in London, Lenkiewicz spent most of his life in Plymouth and, since his death in 2002, most of the paintings that have escaped from Devon seem to have disappeared into private collections. In this exhibition of seventy-one works at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, therefore, we have a rare opportunity to gain some insight into the man and his work.

It is difficult to describe Robert Lenkiewicz's work to those who are not familiar with it and I do not feel qualified to do so. This exhibition cries out to be photographed, but that is not possible, so you must see it for yourself.

Great Tit

2011-04-07T21:08:00.000+01:00

Listen!

Foxglove Tree

2011-04-07T20:40:00.000+01:00

A foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa) in Weston-super-Mare. In 2009 and 2010 this tree did not flower until May.

Yellow

2011-04-06T21:22:00.000+01:00

A Walk in the Woods

2011-03-27T23:16:00.000+01:00

This Blog is Six Years Old Today

2011-02-15T23:59:00.003Z

That's six whole years of irrelevant randomness!

Phenology: Frogs

2011-02-11T23:59:00.003Z

I saw another frog today, but this one was alive and I managed to get a photograph.

Better still, it was in my garden, which gives me the perfect excuse not to cut down any of the long grass from last year.

Phenology: Frogs and Peonies

2011-02-09T18:25:00.002Z

I saw the first frog of the year today, although it had been run over and was very dead.

Last year I saw some frogspawn on 20 February, and in 2009 I found another squashed frog in the road at Kewstoke on 19 February, but I don't think I've ever seen a frog out and about at this time of year, so maybe it's a sign of an early spring.

On the other hand, I've only noticed the first signs of growth on my Steep Holm peonies (Paeonia mascula) this week. In the past two years I saw the first shoots on 9 December 2008 and 29 October 2009, so they're very late this year.

Maybe that's a sign of a late spring.

Time will tell.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

2011-01-24T22:14:00.001Z

Fresh Sea Food

2011-01-21T23:06:00.001Z

New Year, New Life

2011-01-16T20:29:00.000Z

It seems that spring many not be that far away.

And My Eyes Danced: A Comment

2010-11-16T19:38:00.001Z

Shelter Piece: A Comment

2010-11-16T19:25:00.004Z

The Wonders of Weston

2010-10-30T23:59:00.003+01:00

The Wonders of Weston launched yesterday.

What next?

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post about the future of the town, although at the time I wasn't really sure about the questions I was asking, let alone what the answers might be, but perhaps the Wonders of Weston could be part of what I was looking for.

The Sea Change project, which funded the Wonders of Weston, was intended to promote the regeneration of seaside towns by investment in cultural projects. The artists involved, Ruth Claxton, Tim Etchells, Lara Favaretto, Tania Kovats, raumlaborberlin and Wrights & Sites have set us a challenge. They've laid a foundation that we can build on, but how we go about it is up to us, and much will depend on public reactions to their work.

What do you think?

Where do we go from here?

Cross-posted at The Weston Wonderers

The View from the Pier

2010-10-23T19:46:00.004+01:00

Another One

2010-10-22T23:59:00.000+01:00

The Sloe Train

2010-10-17T23:59:00.000+01:00

The middle of October, a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and I've been looking for sloes.

I'm not quite sure whose idea it was, but a group of us, plus assorted children, bikes and scooters (and a ladder), met at Yatton station and set off down the Strawberry Line towards Congresbury. In the days before Doctor Beeching this was the railway line running from Clevedon to Cranmore via Yatton, Cheddar, Wells and Shepton Mallet, but now it's being converted into a path for walkers and cyclists, although only the section from Yatton to Cheddar is fully open at the moment.

The path is lined with high hedges, the bushes and trees bearing all kinds of fruit, although the biggest and best always seem to be just out of reach. Despite that, we managed to collect plenty of fruit, mostly sloes. The next problem is deciding what to do with them. Sloe gin?

The essential handbook for anyone who's interested in wild food is Food for Free by Richard Mabey. His recipe for sloe gin suggests adding four ounces of sugar to every pound of sloes, half-filling a bottle with this mixture, and then topping up with gin. People always seem to disagree about whether you need to prick the skins of the sloes before adding the gin; Mabey says that you don't if they've had a frost on them; mine are in the freezer, so I hope that will have the same effect. If you do this now, the sloe gin will be ready to drink at Christmas, and don't forget to eat the fruit which will have soaked up a lot of the gin; in one of his other books, Flora Britannica, Mabey suggests that they're rather good dipped in melted chocolate.

As a historian, I have to point out that we're not the first ones to appreciate sloes, and Mabey mentions that large quantities of sloe stones were found when the Neolithic lake village near Glastonbury was excavated.

It was a really good day. It's the first time I've been scrambling about in hedges and ditches like that since I was a kid, but these days the nettles don't sting as badly as they did, the thorns of the blackthorn are nothing to be afraid of and the sloes don't taste impossibly sharp.

Can we go again please?

Soon?

Did somebody mention apples?

Oh yes, and please can I have a scooter for Christmas?

Royal Pier Hotel

2010-10-02T19:34:00.004+01:00

Demolishing the Royal Pier Hotel.

Royal Pier Hotel

2010-09-30T19:26:00.011+01:00

The Royal Pier Hotel, Weston-super-Mare after the fire.

Worlebury Camp

2010-09-26T19:20:00.002+01:00

Hidden Meanings

2010-09-25T00:56:00.001+01:00

On Tuesday 7 February 1882 this notice appeared on the front page of The Times:-

"What you said Sunday. If you knew all the circumstances, you might perhaps be sorry, and at least would not blame me. I wish I could tell you all about it. Meantime, will you so far trust me as to think the best?"

It's impossible to read that notice without wondering who wrote it and what led him or her to do so. I also suspect that there are very few of us who haven't been in circumstances where we have wanted, or needed, to say something like that to someone.

Wooden Horse

2010-09-19T19:17:00.000+01:00

Watching

2010-09-18T19:14:00.000+01:00

Clouds

2010-09-18T19:12:00.001+01:00

Art, Audience and Uncertainty

2010-09-16T01:46:00.002+01:00

The reactions to my post about the future of Weston-super-Mare were interesting, although I'm still trying to work out exactly what they mean. If and when I manage to reach a conclusion about that, I'll let you know.

One thing that has been brought home to me since I published that post is the amount of work going on in just about every field of the arts in the town.

As an aside, what is the difference between "art" and "the arts"? I'm assuming that art refers to the obvious: drawing, painting, sculpture and suchlike, the sort of stuff that you find in galleries. The arts, presumably, include all that, as well as literature, music, drama, film, performance and many other kinds of products of original creative energy. I've got a feeling that I may have opened a can of worms by saying that, but I'm going to plead ignorance as my defence.

There does seem to be a great deal of creative energy being converted from one form to another in Weston-super-Mare. Trawling through Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, I keep on finding local artists and writers that I didn't know about, and I'm sure that there are many more out there, let alone the ones who are invisible because they aren't on the net. Perhaps what we need is some kind of online hub to act as an arts information exchange, but please don't ask me to run it.

I'm also sure that there are some who like to keep a low profile and don't want an audience. I can understand that, because, although I've been writing and taking photographs for many years, it's only quite recently that I've felt ready to show any of my work to anyone, and I doubt that I would have done so at all without the net. Even today I only show the work that I take most seriously to those who might be in a position to publish it; if it gets past them, then it's ready to be seen by a wider audience.

Which brings me to the question I set out to ask when I started these disjointed ramblings: does art need an audience? Regardless of the quality of a piece of work, does the existence, or non-existence of an audience affect its validity in any way? Does it affect the the way in which we react to the work?

There's an obvious paradox here: how can we judge the affect which the existence of an audience has on our reaction to a piece of art, since in the absence of an audience there can be no such reaction?

I seem to be straying dangerously close to David Bohm's theories about the relationship between art and science¹ and my understanding of them is far from complete, so this would probably be a good place to stop asking stupid questions, for the moment at least.

¹ David Bohm (ed Lee Nichol), On Creativity (London: Routledge, 1998)

Adam Mclevey

2010-09-10T23:35:00.000+01:00

Adam Mclevey at work on a painting in Dolphin Square, Weston-super-Mare today. Probably not the easiest place to work, with a stiff breeze and plenty of low-flying crap to interfere with things.

If you're interested in his work you can find out more about it and him at http://www.mclevey.com/

Have I ever mentioned how much I envy people who can take a blank sheet of paper or canvas and turn it into something that means something? I have? OK then.

Public Art in Weston-super-Mare

2010-09-07T23:17:00.000+01:00

At the weekend I was talking to someone about the Wonders of Weston and we were wondering how people will react to it.

This reminded me of an earlier public art project in Weston which placed a series of wooden sculptures around the Marine Lake and Anchor Head.

They're still there, and they seem to have become an accepted part of the landscape, but I can't remember anything about them, apart from the fact that they've been there since the mid-1990s.

Who was the artist? Do they have titles? How did people react to them at the time?

Is the fact that I can't remember any of this significant?

Monday Morning, 4AM

2010-09-06T05:11:00.006+01:00

Monday morning, 4AM. Sleep won't come.
Outside, wind-blown trees scrape against the eaves.
Time flows, too fast, ticking my life away.
A stream of thoughts falls freely through my mind.
Those thoughts, these thoughts, are not entirely mine.
Put here by everyone I ever met.
Stolen from every book I ever read.
Caffeine and lack of sleep confuse me now.
Is this creative thought or random noise?
Monday morning, 5AM. Sleep won't come.

Just What is the Future of Weston-super-Mare?

2010-09-03T00:04:00.004+01:00

This is Weston-super-Mare.

I live here and I love the place, but it's a town with problems, and now, thanks to this report from Time, the whole world knows about some of them. On top of everything that Time reported, the front page of today's Weston Mercury carried the news that the roof of the Grand Pier's new pavilion has leaked, causing serious damage to some of the rides that have already been installed. Nobody seems to be sure how long it will take to repair the damage or how much it will cost.

The reconstruction of the Grand Pier has been a sorry tale of delays, doubts and despair. Many people seem to think that the pier is vital to the economic future of the town, but I don't agree with them; the writing has been on the wall for Weston-super-Mare for many years, but nobody seems to want to read the message.

The holiday trade that Weston has always relied on has been in a long, slow decline since foreign travel became relatively cheap during the 1960s and 1970s. Over the years many hotels have closed or fallen victim to one of a number of waves of conversions, firstly to holiday flats, then to residential and nursing homes, and, most recently and controversially, to drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics.

I don't believe that tourism is essential to the success of the town's economy any more. Certainly, the owners of the Grand Pier will become richer if and when it reopens, and I'm sure it will be good for trade for the hotel, restaurant and cafe owners, but what about the rest of us? Most of us don't work in the tourist industry. We do any and every sort of job you can think of, the sort of jobs that people do right across the country, even in places that hardly ever see a tourist and I'm not at all sure what benefit we get from all this.

The town is conservative and Conservative, resistant to change. Many people seem to think that all we need is more of the same, and that everything will be all right in the end, but it won't. What the town needs is something to stir it out of its complacency, to shake it up, to make it think, to make it question what it is and what it wants to be. I don't know how to do this, but I'm reasonably certain that we can't rely on politicians or the mainstream media to help us.

The job of challenging accepted norms usually falls to writers and artists, so perhaps it's time for the creative community in Weston-super-Mare to... do what exactly? I was going to say "take the lead", but there's far too much leadership about at the moment, and what we need is something much more free-form and spontaneous. What we need is... I don't know. Tell me.

I do know that we need something innovative and experimental. It could be one thing or a thousand things. We might fail, but we mustn't be afraid of that. We must try. If we make people think we'll have achieved something.

Weston-super-Mare needs to change. We need to change. We're stuck in a world that doesn't exist any more. There's no future for the town unless it reinvents itself and looks to new areas. It'll never be Brighton, but it could be so much better than it is.

Just get out there and do something, whatever it is.

Wings

2010-08-29T19:07:00.001+01:00

Green Man

2010-08-28T18:53:00.000+01:00

Full Moon!

2010-08-24T23:18:00.001+01:00

Self-Portrait

2010-08-24T18:44:00.001+01:00

An Afternoon by the Sea

2010-08-22T22:00:00.000+01:00

Mud

Redundant

Pillboxes

Gate

Bay

Sinking

Wood

Gone?

Hands in the Street

2010-08-21T21:56:00.001+01:00

Click it for the best view!

Art from the New World

2010-08-21T21:20:00.024+01:00

My other reason for going to Bristol today was to take a look at the exhibition Art from the New World at the City Museum and Art Gallery.

If you want to see the exhibition you'll need to be quick, as it closes tomorrow. Please also bear in mind that, although I wrote the previous sentence on Saturday. I didn't write this one, or edit the photos, until Tuesday. Time is an elastic concept around here.

Fundraising for Falmouth

2010-08-21T21:06:00.003+01:00

Camilla Stacey has been running the Bath Spa Gallery at Weston College's University Campus for several years, but soon she's off to Falmouth to start an MA in Curatorial Practice.

To help fund this she's selling off various bits and pieces from her personal collection and today it was all on display at Here Shop and Gallery in Bristol, so I went along to take a look at what was on offer.

Camilla, assisted by Alex, was offering a bewildering collection of stuff for sale, and I can only really try to give a brief impression of the range available.

As well as the sale, Camilla's running a raffle, with a selection of original works by a number of artists as prizes.

The draw is on September 11 and you can buy tickets using PayPal, so you've got no excuse not to get some.

Holes

2010-08-17T23:06:00.000+01:00

The undergrowth that hides some of the pits that are dotted around the interior of the hillfort at Worlebury has been trimmed. Is some archaeology in the offing?

No Trains to Glastonbury

2010-08-01T18:43:00.000+01:00

Death's Little Mysteries

2010-08-01T18:39:00.001+01:00

This afternoon I went for a wander around in the graveyard of the old church at Uphill in Somerset. Several of the gravestones caught my eye and, as usual, I can't help wondering about the stories behind them.

The View from the Hill

2010-08-01T18:30:00.003+01:00

Old Holes

2010-08-01T00:59:00.000+01:00

In Weston-super-Mare.

There may be 10,000, but I haven't counted them...

What? When?

2010-07-29T22:17:00.000+01:00

This notice has just appeared at the entrance to the woods at Worlebury. At least I think it has, because I haven't up been there for ages, so it could have been on that lamppost for months. Of course, it doesn't look like it's been there all that long, but you never know.

I think that means that it may already be too late to respond to this which would be a pity, because it's probably quite important. Anyway, I've emailed them.

A Minor Mystery in Stone

2010-07-25T20:28:00.003+01:00

Today I went for a walk through the woods at Worlebury. More or less in the middle of the woods is a compound containing a reservoir and a water tower, and in front of the gates are some rocks which have presumably been placed there to protect them.

They've obviously been made for some unfulfilled purpose, and dumped here to act as a barrier, and they look very much like the backing slabs for the information boards that were installed at Sand Bay in March last year.

If that's what they are, where were they originally intended to be placed, and why are they here and not there? I suspect spending cuts may be behind this, but it must have been fairly expensive to produce them, so would it have cost that much more to place them in their true homes?

If I read the Weston Mercury more thoroughly I might know the answer.

Bacon in the Park, Park Gates in a Tree...

2010-07-19T18:07:00.008+01:00

I went back to have another look at that bust in Grove Park today and, under different light conditions, I'm reasonably certain that the inscription reads "Lord Bacon", which tends to suggest that it is one of the busts that came from Strawberry Hill.

The inscription was clearer when seen with the naked eye, but it's just about possible to read it in the photograph.

After my post about the bust, I got a message which directed me to Parks and Gardens UK, an online database of historic parks and gardens throughout the UK which I hadn't heard of before.

The entry for Grove Park claims that two of the Strawberry Hill busts stand beside the pond, which I think I remember, but where's the other one gone?

It also mentions the park railings which were blown into the top of a tree at the south-west corner of the park by a bomb during World War II and are still there. I mentioned this to a friend some time ago and I'm sure she thought I was mad, but now I've got proof! In fact, with the photograph I took today I've got double proof.

Festival of Archaeology

2010-07-17T23:11:00.015+01:00

Today I've been to the Festival of Archaeology at the Old Town Quarry in Weston-super-Mare.

For those of you who don't know Weston, it stands on and around a limestone ridge, and the quarry was the source for much of the stone that was used to build the town. It's been disused for many years and back in 1961 there were plans to build a twelve-storey block of 100 luxury flats there, complete with swimming pool and tennis courts. I don't actually know who would have wanted to live in a large hole in the ground, but thankfully nothing came of those plans, and today the quarry is a nature reserve and home to a group of artists and craftsmen.

Although I've lived in the town for thirty-five years and have known about the quarry for most of that time, I didn't get round to visiting it until January this year, largely due to a friend's enthusiastic descriptions of what she's seen there. It's a difficult place to describe but, hidden away beneath the woods that cover the Iron Age hillfort of Worlebury, and only a few minutes walk from the centre of town, it's a very peaceful place, and one that I come back to again and again.

The Festival of Archaeology was part of the nationwide Festival of British Archaeology (more details on their website and Facebook page) which runs from today until 1 August. For me it was an ideal opportunity to meet local historians and archaeologists, many of whom I've exchanged emails with, but never actually met in the real world. For an event in Weston-super-Mare, it was reasonably well-attended, but it would have been good to see more people there.

Perhaps more importantly, it's reawakened my interest in archaeology. That interest dates back to, I think, 1961, when my father took me to look at an excavation being carried out in the woods behind my grandmother's house in Billericay, Essex. To a curious four-year-old, the realisation that the ground was full of things left behind by people who lived a very long time ago was something of a life-changing experience, and it created an interest which has waxed and waned over the years, but has never died.

For some reason the trench from that excavation was never filled in and, once I was old enough to go into the woods by myself, I would often go and retrieve some of the bits of Roman pottery that seemed to be so common there. Somewhere or other there's a biscuit tin full of those potsherds, and one of them is sitting on my keyboard as I type this.

That was the extent of my practical experience of archaeology. Yesterday, however, I picked up a leaflet at the local library advertising a modular degree-level course in archaeology at the local college, and today I've been offered the chance to help a local archaeology group with some basic surveying. It probably wouldn't be a very wise move to get involved with either of these projects, as time and money are both in very short supply, but I'm tempted. At the very least I must find out more.

Of course, there's more to life, and the quarry, than archaeology, and some time ago I blogged about the weighbridge there. For some reason, things like this fascinate me, so I was interested to see that an excavation was taking place beside the weighbridge today. The reasons for this were twofold; firstly, and obviously, to investigate what was under the ground, and secondly to try to find the drain from the pit under the weighbridge, which is blocked. It soon became obvious from the amount of builder's rubble that was found that the area had been used as a rubbish dump quite recently, a fact which was confirmed when one of the spectators said that he had actually been involved in the dumping, so there was nothing terribly interesting there. They didn't find the drain either.

When I posted that blog entry back in January, somebody (you know who you are) told me that I ought to go back and get some pictures of the mechanism inside the shed. It's only taken me six months to get round to doing something about it, but here are the results.

Now who's going to explain it all to me?

Strawberry Hill, Weston-super-Mare

2010-07-16T18:52:00.014+01:00

Rummaging about in the library today, I came across a copy of Ernest Baker's book The Village of Weston-super-Mare, Historical Notes, published in 1928. One of those notes concerns some busts on pedestals that J H Smyth Pigott bought at the Strawberry Hill sale in 1842.

This immediately caught my attention, because the sale referred to was an attempt by the Earl Waldegrave to clear his debts by selling off the contents of Horace Walpole's Gothic mansion, which he had inherited from his father, and the Earl's wife, Frances, is the subject of my still-unfinished PhD thesis.

The busts, of Shakespeare, Bacon, Locke, Hannah Moore, Newton, Voltaire and others were first displayed at Brockley Hall, before being placed around the pond in the Prince Consort Gardens. Sadly, vandalising sculpture seems to be an established tradition in Weston-super-Mare, as the bust of Hannah Moore lost its nose whilst it was there.

In 1882 they were moved to the Grove, but, by the time it became a public park, Shakespeare and Voltaire had been broken up and others had disappeared, leaving four survivors.

The catalogue of the Strawberry Hill sale is available from Google Books. A bust of Voltaire is on page 130 and one of Newton on page 189, but I can't find the others and, of course, Baker's descriptions could be wrong anyway.

So, is this one of the busts that he mentions? I'd like to think so, but who is it? Looking at the ruff around his neck, my guess would be that it's Francis Bacon.

There does seem to have been an inscription on the pedestal, but it's so badly eroded that I can't read it.

My next question has to be: where are the others? Are they hidden away in some corner of the park that I've never explored, or are they languishing in a council store somewhere? More intriguingly, have they been spirited away at some stage to lurk unrecognised in someone's garden? If you know, please tell me.

Now, does anybody know anything about all that stonework in the Italian Gardens?

A Modest Proposal

2010-07-15T23:50:00.002+01:00

I saw this sign in Bristol today. Perhaps we could do with something similar in Weston-super-Mare.

Vandals 1, Public Art Nil

2010-07-14T18:30:00.003+01:00

Remember the donkeys that I blogged about last week? It seems that they lasted all of six days before they had to be taken down because of problems with vandalism.

This is Weston-super-Mare.

I live here.

Why Did You Do This?

2010-07-11T10:51:00.000+01:00

If you've got a dog, and you're prepared to go to the effort of clearing up after it, why don't you dispose of the bags properly instead of dumping them in the street? I don't understand

Donkeys

2010-07-08T23:14:00.008+01:00

London did it with elephants, Bath had lions, and in Weston-super-Mare we really had to go for donkeys, didn't we?

This one, Weston Maid, is by Karen Blake.

Please Don't Hurt the Foxglove Tree

2010-07-04T16:14:00.006+01:00

This is the foxglove tree that stands by the side of the road near my house.

If you've never seen a foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa), it's difficult to describe, but it has large purple flowers that appear in the spring, before the leaves and it's a beautiful sight.

This one has stood here for over thirty years, but I never really paid any attention to it until it flowered for the first time about six or seven years ago, but now I love it and, for a week or two every year, it brightens my life up.

A day or two ago someone decided to swing on one of the branches until it snapped off. I don't know why you did it, but please don't kill our tree.

Pink and Green

2010-07-03T09:37:00.000+01:00

Old Town Quarry

2010-06-12T23:59:00.000+01:00

Changes in the Face of Weston-super-Mare

2010-06-12T23:04:00.007+01:00

Looking south from Knightstone: the reconstruction of the Grand Pier, following the fire which destroyed much of it two years ago, is nearing completion. The only thing missing is the planned observation tower; the foundations can be seen just off the end of the pier, but problems have meant that its construction has been postponed.

Looking north from Knightstone: more of a mixed picture. From left to right: the Old Pier, which is finally to be renovated after being closed for many years; the Royal Pier Hotel, which is awaiting demolition after being damaged by fire; the Dorville Hotel, which has been closed for some time, its future apparently uncertain; Rozel House, the block of flats built following the demolition of the Rozel Hotel. In the foreground is the Marine Lake, which has had to be drained as it has sprung a leak.

The British seaside isn't what it was; its past is in danger of disappearing and its future is uncertain. I'm not sure where we go from here.

Digital History: Opportunities and Barriers

2010-06-07T18:41:00.001+01:00

One of the first things that strikes you when you leave university, whether you were a student or a member of staff, is that you don’t have access to the library any more. Public libraries are marvellous places, but they are designed to do a different job from university libraries and they don’t have all those obscure (and expensive) books, journals and suchlike that historians and other eccentrics need to do their work.

It’s nearly a year since I finally emerged from university after a sixteen-year career involving undergraduate and postgraduate study as well as working as a research assistant and visiting lecturer and doing anything else that they’d pay me for, and less than a fortnight since I decided that I had to rejoin the library.

Like many universities, mine allows alumni to use the library after paying an annual subscription, so I paid up and went to have a look round to see if anything had changed.

The first thing that struck me was that most of the shelves housing the back runs of journals had disappeared, to be replaced by online versions. This is something of a disaster, because the university’s licence restricts access to students and staff and leaves external users like me out in the cold. Of course, most journals make their contents available online, but they usually demand a hefty fee for access and I’m not prepared to pay something in the region of £20 to read a single article.

It’s worth adding that finding articles in journals is something of a problem in itself. There are various databases that you can search, but once again, the university’s licence is for students and staff only. One very useful exception was the Royal Historical Society Bibliography which was freely available to anyone with internet access, but sadly that has now retreated behind a paywall and even members of the society have to take out a subscription to use it.

Other online resources present a similar problem. My local public library, like many others, provides access to the Times Digital Archive, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the British Library’s collection of nineteenth-century British newspapers, but not the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

The absence of the latter is a particularly sore point. Parliamentary papers, and especially those from the nineteenth century, are a rich source of data on all aspects of life in Britain. From industry to education, poor relief to public health, the Victorian passion for statistics demanded the collection and publication of a bewildering variety of information. Despite their potential, they are a little-known and under-used resource, even, it must be said, amongst many academics.

Until recently the easiest way of finding out what Parliamentary papers are available, and what they contain was to search the various printed indexes and then to consult the microfiche copies of the papers that most university libraries hold. Now, however, there is an online version of the nineteenth and twentieth-century papers which makes it possible to search some 9,700,000 pages of text for keywords and then to download a pdf copy of the original document. The snag, of course, is that you need access to a university library to use the online edition, and that the licence restrictions are similar to those for journals and databases.

This raises several interesting questions. Firstly, is it morally justifiable (rather than legally permissable, since much of the material concerned is now out of copyright) for a commercial organisation to digitise a major source of data about the history of Britain that was originally collected and published using public funds and then to impose access conditions which effectively prevent most of the British public from viewing that data? Secondly, there is the wider issue of access to university libraries; considering the amount of public funding that they have received over the years, should they not be open to all, rather than just to an academic elite?

Electronic resources represent a great opportunity for historians. Many archives are making documents available in machine-readable formats, whilst Google is busy digitising the contents of a series of major libraries, yet, as the examples above show, there are also serious barriers to access to much valuable material.

It is possible that some of these problems may be solved by the arrival on the market of devices such as Apple’s iPad which, by making electronic documents easier to read, will create a demand for more material at a reasonable price that publishers will ignore at their peril.

The problem of public access to university libraries is, of course, another matter entirely, and one to which I suspect there is no easy solution.

This is a Public Service Announcement

2010-05-27T21:10:00.007+01:00

This may be of some use to you if you've ever thought that you might like to wash your hands one day

I'm not sure whether it's more worrying that the Health and Safety Executive felt that it needed to issue posters telling us how to wash our hands, or that I found one hanging on the wall in a university.

Pond Life

2010-05-25T18:11:00.006+01:00

Life in, on and around a pond in Grove Park, Weston-super-Mare on two days in May.

Black-and-White Cat

2010-05-24T00:15:00.004+01:00

I don't think this cat likes me.

He (or she) seems to spend more time asleep in my garden than he (or she) does at home. Whenever I try to get close enough to him (or her) to say hello, he (or she) runs away. What does he (or she) know that I don't?

Foxglove Tree

2010-05-08T14:52:00.003+01:00

Foxglove tree (Paulonia tomentosa) in Weston-super-Mare.

Swallows

2010-04-22T19:41:00.006+01:00

As I think I've mentioned here before, my bird recognition skills aren't too good when it comes to deciding whether I'm looking at a swallow or a swift. Having said that, however, I'm reasonably certain that the birds that I saw flying low over the dunes at Sand Bay today were the first swallows of the year.

Pigeon

2010-04-17T18:19:00.001+01:00

Buzzards

2010-04-11T18:11:00.005+01:00

This morning I saw a pair of buzzards (Buteo buteo) flying back and forth over the hillside behind my house.

Buzzards have become quite common around here over the past twenty years or so, and I can't help wondering whether these two were looking for somewhere to nest. The hillside is steep, with cliffs and disused quarries, so it seems an ideal site; I shall keep an eye on the area to see if they return.

I have to admit that I'm not particularly happy with the photographs. They were taken with a 90-300m lens which I find particularly difficult to hold without camera shake, and on top of that I think I can see some dust spots. Overall, they're just about acceptable, but no more.

Alien Big Cats in North Somerset?

2010-04-07T18:09:00.009+01:00

I was standing in the queue for the checkout at Marks and Sparks in Weston-super-Mare earlier today, not really paying attention to anything much, and wondering whether I could actually afford the stuff in my basket, when I realised that the two women in front of me were talking about alien big cats.

Before I go any further, I probably ought to explain that when I say "alien big cat" I just mean an animal that doesn't belong in this country; the term has no extraterrestrial or supernatural implications.

Both women claimed to have seen "black panthers" and one of them was quite certain that what she had seen were animals that had been kept as pets and then released into the wild. I should have asked them for more details, but, by the time I'd paid for my shopping, they'd gone.

I spent my childhood in Essex, and well remember a farmer near Billericay, Billy Foyle, who used to keep lions in cages on his farm, so I've thought for many years that the release of illegally-owned pets was probably behind many of the reports of big cats that crop up so often in the British press.

But what about North Somerset? Has anyone else seen a big cat in the Weston-super-Mare area? Please tell me, because I need to know.

New Statesman: The 50 greatest political photographs?

2010-04-05T17:37:00.001+01:00

The latest issue of the New Statesman includes a supplement with the somewhat ambitious title of "The 50 greatest political photographs".

There's very little that I can say about this, except to note that a very high percentage of the photographs included show scenes of war and its consequences. Of course, war is an aspect of politics, or rather of the failure of politics, but surely it would be more relevant for the NS to compile a list of fifty photographs that illustrate the political process itself, rather than the violence which sometimes results from it.

Ken Russell: Filmmaker, Photographer

2010-03-28T15:12:00.001+01:00

Like most people, I know Ken Russell as the director of films like Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, as well as television documentaries like Dance of the Seven Veils. His work has been of variable quality and often controversial, but always worth watching.

It came of something of a surprise to me to read a recent article in The Observer which dealt with his earlier career as a photographer during the 1950s, when his work appeared in magazines such as Illustrated and Picture Post. The article is accompanied by an online gallery showing a few of his pictures.

The photographs provide a window onto 1950s Britain, a mixture of the everyday and, as might be expected from Russell, the outlandish. As far as is possible to judge from the online images, the technical quality of his work seems to be good, as it should be, apparently having been produced using a Rolleicord.

There's an exhibition, Ken Russell: Filmmaker, Photographer at the Lucy Bell Gallery in St Leonards until 30th April, and then at the TopFoto Gallery in Edenbridge from 1st May until 27th May. TopFoto also has some prints for sale.

What's clear from all this is that Russell was a competent photographer and I'd really like to see more of his work. Is there any chance that we might be able to see this exhibition in Bristol or Bath?

Things I've Found in Secondhand Books.

2010-03-18T19:35:00.006Z

This was in a copy of How to Look at Old Churches by H Spencer Stowell (Methuen, 1945).

Building A Big Wheel

2010-03-16T19:13:00.002Z

Ice Cream for Gull...

2010-03-16T18:35:00.002Z

...but only because crow wasn't available.

Building a Big Wheel

2010-03-14T18:02:00.002Z

Rebuilding the Grand Pier

2010-03-13T18:05:00.004Z

Building a Big Wheel...

2010-03-13T15:33:00.000Z

...in Weston-super-Mare.

Phenology: Red Admiral

2010-03-04T20:27:00.004Z

I saw this rather ragged and faded red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) in Weston-super-Mare today.

It must have just awoken from hibernation, and it's lucky to have survived the cold weather of the past couple of months.

Today at the Seaside

2010-03-04T19:39:00.003Z