Last night's toilet revelations must have put nationalism on my mind; everywhere I looked this evening, flags were.
Well, one flag - dominating the city centre above Lancaster Castle.
But not the sky. The sky always wins.
The cross. The crown. The flag. The castle:
All diminished.
Went looking for a city scene to shoot.
Caolan and Yasmin inspect the latest art under a bridge on Lancaster Canal. Luckily, phones have cameras these days.
Ok, so I've hiked up the vibrancy on this photo (if you look closely, the drain-pipe is a little too blue), and I might be accused of plagiarism if you know PJ's 'Daily Dublin Photo Blog' (check it out, it deserve more attention), but I still think there is something interesting about this subject.
The story behind this photo is that I walked down a quiet city centre side street - more of a lane actually - in order to get a photo of the fire brigade's practice tower which was peeping over the top of a wall adjacent to this gate. The gate sits alongside the back entrance to the Lancaster Fire & Rescue Service, which you can see in this photo. I guess the fire engines might occasionally be taken out through this back exit.
You don't know what a weind is, do you? It was a unknown word to me until yesterday.
It started at a shop in Garstang - a small market town near Lancaster -when we asked for directions to a local tea house:
Her: "Take the second weind on the left, and you'll find a good one."
Me : "What's a weind?!"
Her: "erm... I don't really know. It's just what we call them."
We decided not to ask the obvious question, but to find out for ourselves. Have you guessed it yet? I haven't tracked down the etymology of 'weind' or even the subtle details behind its meaning and use, but it seems a weind is a passageway of some description. And a Google search suggests the word is confined to this general area. They are mentioned here in a document titled A Short History of Garstang.
Postscript 1: The beauty of not being 'born and bred' in Lancashire is regularly coming across new words as well as places. One thing yesterday's discovery taught me was that there were obviously a lot of alleyways in this part of the medieval world. I base this assertion on only recently having added another new word to my linguistic repertoire for them - ginnel.
Postscript 2: Before anyone asks, I have no idea who Thomas was. Regrettfully, it didn't occur to me to ask someone at the time.
Last day of primary school today - time for lots of uninterrupted reading.
Photo taken outside at the end of June, a time when Lancaster had 'real' summer weather. Today it is raining.
So help work this out: Which flat numbers are not in this little compound on Lindow Street, Lancaster? Is it just me or do those squiggly lines* confuse the issue? And please, don't make a snap decision on this one. Look carefully, and then look again. Twice. It may not be infinite, but surely the possibilities expand on each reading?
But there is more to report than squiggly lines and numbers from this photo. Lindow House. Lindow Street. Lindow Square. Who or what was Lindow? An answer with accompanying photos in tomorrow's post.
* Squiggly lines: A linguistic term for lines that squiggle in a squiggly way, usually from left to right but occasionally from top to bottom. [ NB: These are not 'tildes' as Hyde DP reports in the first comment - I think he just invented the term because he was jealous ;) ]
Lancaster canal has cut through the city since the 1790's and boasts some fine scenery along its tow-paths: For now you'll have to make do with shots of a couple of its moored residents: a butterfly and a kingfisher.
Words on a red icon. A 'postie' collecting from a pillar box in a later post if I can capture it: Elusive creatures these Royal Mail employees.
Two Lancastrians reading the city centre after the shops have closed on a Sunday. The young boy I know but not the seated man. Whilst I was 'reading' them through my lens, I wondered whether either was aware he was sharing the activity with the other, let alone with the third participant.
