Back when your granny was a wee lass, there was a small railway station at Ashley Hill in Bristol, just where Ashley Down meets Purdown, and in the shadow of the Muller orphanages. It looked like this:


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My brother came down to Bristol for the weekend so that he could join me in St Paul's for the first carnival since I moved here in 2020. It didn't disappoint. Although it got unfeasibly crowded later, wandering the local streets just before things really got going was a lot of fun ( Read more... )

Walking home from Temple Meads today, I saw that Easton has given its own verdict on the proclamation.


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This morning I should have been travelling to Heathrow, there to board a plane that would have taken me to Tokyo for the next six weeks. It would have been my first taste of autumn in Japan, a season that's normally inaccessible because of my teaching duties, but which a semester's research leave had prised opened like an oyster. Alas, in the words ( Read more... )

Someone at the local shopping centre has done these rather cool pictures, that pop into 3-D if (and only if) you stand in the right place and take a photo. From the side:


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"You have cute elbows," said a small piece of graffiti that I passed this morning ( Read more... )

The moss-covered trees are now flourishing in my bedroom!


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Today I go to pick up the goose that was to have fed me, Haruka, my brother and his partner on Christmas day. Of course, that's no longer going to happen. Theoretically it might be possible to travel from Brighton to Bristol and back in a day, in accordance with Johnson's latest panicked edict, but it hardly sounds fun, especially as everyone else ( Read more... )

In January my friend Haruka won the lottery for a 2-year working/holiday visa to the UK, at maybe the sixth attempt (they hold it every six months). She was delighted, but then of course Coronavirus hit, which made her delay somewhat. The visa clock started ticking in October, and last week she finally came over, in the hope of finding work here. ( Read more... )

I've lost count of how many streets claim to be Britain's steepest, but Vale St in Bristol is one of them - and that's the setting of Banksy's latest masterwork (photo courtesy of Ayako, who lives nearby).


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