Keighley's Aylesburys

One lovely Sunday morning, I set off to find a brace of Aylesburys.

The journey was relatively uneventful. The soundtrack of Foo Fighters, Faithless and Pendulum provided speed and swiftness to the day.

Approaching Keighley, my Sat Nav took me down a steep, narrow, cobbled lane. Which was a bit of a surprise.

Aylesbury Street and Back Aylesbury Street, are parallel roads, one with some houses, which can be accessed from the front or back, depending which street you approach the houses.

The collection of road names around Aylesbury give some clues as to it's origin. Eaton, Hemsby, Caister have several possible links. Names of people, possibly. Names of places, especially country houses or castles. One man's house is his castle, but in Keighley, his road is his castle too.

I then headed to Cliffe Castle Museum. Full of fun exhibits and furniture, rocks, taxidermy, art, a great variety of stuff.

-->

Overall a pleasant day out.

Milk and Alco-Hull

One fine Sunday morning, I set off to Hull to see it's incumbent Aylesbury. The car had been freshly fixed from a coolant leak and I was keen to give it some miles and a chance to settle in, or at worst develop a fault for a trip which wasn't time critical.

The weather was good and the sun was out, which made a pleasant drive towards Hull from Nottingham, made even better by listening to a Dr Feelgood Greatest Hits, which hit the last track as I was pulling into Hull's Aylesbury Grove.

In the Sunshine I had a bit of a wonder up and down the road. 1920's housing, terraced mostly, kept in reasonably good nick.

Some boys were playing a game, which I will call hoofball, and it needs a bit of describing, another word would be foottennis. The boys were standing in two gardens separated by a fence. They passed a ball back and forth over the fence until the other could not return it, or the ball went 'out'. Thus a point was scored, and the game restarted. I have fond memories of playing this game, in a tennis court in a small French village with my cousins.

Hull, being UK city of culture this year, I ventured down into the city centre to have a look and see what was cultural. Apart from the usual ScoobyDoo type high street and surrounding areas with repeating shops that you find in any city centre, there was very little. Perhaps the culture was roosting. Perhaps it had gone partying in an exclusive bijou island, or perhaps Sunday mornings aren't the time to be cultural. More set the washing machine, mow the lawn, head to church, read the paper, drain the swamp type times.

Culture looked upon by community police officers and some members of the public.

I wandered around the Ferens museum, which was pleasant, I was especially impressed with the Spencer Tunick works. Well the works didn't impress me most. The video of how it was done gives such an insight into the psychology of the people who participated in it. How they coped with possibly embarrassment of public nudity, stopped being too cold and even how they made sure they were fully covered in 'blue'. Following wondering around the museum, I had a nice bap/cob/wig/barm/bun/sarnie/nudger/stotty/blaa with some chicken, coriander, chilli, lemon and salad. Then headed back to the car and back to Nottingham in the oncoming rain, adding an extra element of the sublime, driving under the Humber Bridge.

Other names for this story:

The incredible Hull

Will you Hull'd my hand

Highway to Hull

To Hull and back

I'm sHull shocked

-->

Hull'door

Burnley Aylesbury Walk

One fine May afternoon, I was making my way south from the Old Port town of Irvine on the West Scottish coast. I was heading back to Nottingham, so Burnley was an enroute, well, sort of destination to head to.

Irvine is a fine Scottish town, with such highlights as the Scottish Maritime Museum, open, The Big Idea, a semi buried museum about inspiration, closed, beautiful views of the ocean, remnants of Alfred Nobel's dynamite factory. I was there for work, so mostly, I was working off the mobile phone and tethered laptop.

The journey down from Scotland was scenic and spectacular. Lush green valleys, soaring hills, large arcing bends and majestic wind turbines, towering over the landscape. I stopped at a service station overlooking Killington reservoir and sat in the sunny spring afternoon, looking down on canoeists and rabbits. Taking the opportunity to rest before another couple of hours drive.

The approach to Burnley is no less spectacular, with the hills of Lancashire, the tightly packed rows of industrial mass housing and the post industrial towns of the north. Burnley sits squeezed between Barley Moor and Worsthorne Moor.

Bringing us to Aylesbury Walk, sitting coquetishly on a steep slope looking out over the valley. The road and paths clearly have seen better days. Its state is tatty, poorly maintained and the houses, most have seen better days.

The local pub has been turned into a local shop. Nevertheless it looked like a good active street with several local traders, self employed, small businesses and being the time of day I visited, groups of kids hanging out. Two young girls rode their stabilized bicycles down the steep path between the backs of gardens, clearly enjoying themselves.

Burnley looks to be suffering from the post industrial boom and many parts look quite run down. It is hard to see what could be done for towns in the North such as this. I can only think that keeping the emphasis on buying local, supporting local trades, local farmers, local crafts will allow the economy to recover over time. So the large international industry which once buoyed this area along can be replaced by local success stories and locals supporting each other. The government seems to be helping with aid and supporting the excellent aerospace supply industries around it. So Burnley like Aylesbury Walk, although looking like it has seen better days, has a good future and a good growth potential, with excellent spirits.

Liverpool Aylesburys

One fine February morning, Richard, Bethany and myself set off from their home in Wrexham to search for three more Aylesburys on the Birkenhead peninsula.

The trip was not entirely coincidental. We were slightly at a loss at what to do on a Saturday, neither Richard or Bethany had visited an Aylesbury before, save Aylesbury Prime. A term they both used as if it was the common name for the one, original town in Buckinghamshire. Happy with a piece of impromptu nomenclature I ran with it, we all knew what we meant.

I felt slightly guilty, it was only Bethany who had been at work on Friday and indeed all of the week. Rich and I had taken delivery of a new washing machine and generally messed around the rest of the day. Now I was taking her on a jaunt of possibly questionable interest, for her, on one of two of her valuable days off. However she was happy and excited to be part of the venture, if not almost permanently cold throughout. Despite my car's ridiculous air heating capabilities able to reach “midday Sahara” if required, I felt slightly guilty.

After a good breakfast of a childish cereal and some coffee, tea and fruit juice (Me, Bethany and Rich respectively) we set off. First to pick up petrol, then to drive the distance up to the first Aylesbury of the day, and for Richard and Bethany, ever, except for Aylesbury Prime.

Well, let me tell you, it was a beauty. A lovely little cul-de-sac (lit. bottom of the bag, or Bag End for Tolkien wordplay fans). 9 houses of generous proportions, well kempt (for the younger English audience “kempt” meant something like “peng” around 1570 and makes about as much sense. For the Chinese audience, peng in English doesn't mean a large, possibly semi mythological bird, but, “really nice looking” or “good weed” if you are reggae singer Frankie Paul, which I guess the London and more universally UK “peng” term came from in Jamaican patois. In a misheard lyric incident, I thought Frankie's song “pass the Kushem peng” the lyric was “good champagne” in possibly one of the most middle class misappropriations of Jamaican culture around) anyway I digress and will never use the term “peng” personally, except perhaps about really good champagne to confuse everyone concerned.

The place looked sleepy in the Saturday morning February light, duly photos were taken of the nice street, no wonder Rich and Bethany look so excited in the photo.

Efficiently we left and moved straight onto number two roughly 20 minutes away. This one was a little less well kempt (see above), but still had a charm. A 1960's housing street. Not a lot of note, except the rather interesting location of a good number of snails hibernating over winter and a golf ball. Which I hope was deposited there by a freak shot from a fairway somewhere nearby.

As we were passing with Bethany in the car, we took a number of photos of Bethany Chapel, finding everything rather incidentally fun.

We headed to the head of the head, New Brighton, the location of our final Aylesbury. New Brighton has an air of a “British Seaside Town”. Funfair, Check, Rock and Fudge shop, Check, Promenade, check, crazy golf course, check, unhealthy food cafe, check.

We parked up in a supermarket carpark and headed off for some lunch, ravenous after two Aylesburys. We ended up in sort of Mexican food purveyors, Chimichangas. With a panoramic view of Liverpool's dock district and the windy February day's rapid cloud procession added a sublime backdrop for lunch.

Post lunch we wandered up the sea front and visited a book fayre in the even more panoramic, and scarily named Floral Pavilion Theatre.

Then round onto the banks of the Mersey, past some well designed flats with glass shields on their balconies and up the promenade.

There, on the beach, was a beauty of a public interactive sculpture of a pirate ship. A mix of driftwood and reclaimed industrial wood, fairy lights, voodoo faces, false canons, it was a true success of public sculpture and much appreciated.

We passed the Perch Rock Fort which never really got going as a fort, given that the Irish never were pursuaded by anyone else that the English were worth invading. The following extract from the website http://www.fortperchrock.org/Fort_Perch_Rock/Home.html shows why it was a superfluous addition to the UK's defences.

“The guns at Fort Perch Rock were fired only twice in anger. The first occasion occurred during the First World War. A Norwegian sailing ship came up the Rock Channel that had been declared closed at the start of the war. Unfortunately the gunners had the wrong elevation on their gun and the shell flew over the ship and landed in Hightown on the other side of the Mersey. Apparently an irate householder collected the shell, put it in a bucket and took it to the Merseyside Defence HQ and demanded some kind of explanation! The captain of the Norwegian vessel when eventually challenged about his ship’s use of the closed channel replied that he did not know that a war had started!”... luckily no one was hurt.

... No mention of the second incident is mentioned, clearly more embarrassing that the first's ineptitude.

Aylesbury Road was a fin-de-siecle roughly 1890's housing street. Red brick standard layout houses, which I hope are preserved in style until their original build rationale is defunct, all is demolished and started again. If the owners in this street, and/or their regional authority, agree on maintaining or sympathising with the window frames, bricks, roofs, soffits, guttering and general architecture of the houses externally, then there will be a triumph for decades to come.

Brick work on newer residential houses is usually a horrible utilitarian abomination. The cheapest price wins, or the cheapest design wins. Thus I have a natural aversion to bricks in general. However in this street, flourishes, additions, details are all in brick and they are beautiful. Collectively they provide an aesthetic momentum that provides the illusion of walking though the street as it might have been in the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries. All this could be shattered because of an owner inadvertently 'doing their own thing'.

We headed back to Wrexham to deliver Bethany and Rich home, but not after a bit of in depth Aylesbury analysis. I drank Chai tea, - 2 sugars and milk.

We discussed the importance of place, belonging and the seemingly random place name generator that UK authorities have in creating “location”. I made my way back to Nottingham, receiving a panicky message on Whatsapp a number of hours later enquiring of my health, that I hadn't died in a crash en-route. A crucial faux-pas (if we are going to have cul-de-sac, we can have faux pas, or lit. bad step, someone in France falling over) mistake on my part, of entering the door, then promptly sitting down on the settee, setting my otherwise dead phone charging and falling asleep after a wonderfully exciting triplet, tripod, triple, Peng day.

A new Aylesbury is born

In history, things change. Things wax and wane, in trends, they flip, they synthesise, they revolt and they delight. Aylesburys do the same. Occasionally new ones are born and once born they are constructed. A physical manifestation of a marketable commodity to please an average, unoriginal lazy bloated middle, of middle class, middle England, middle managers mediocrity.

One of these Aylesburys is just north of Nottingham and I visited it when quite new, newly constucted houses, newly constructed sewers newly constructed electrical cables, a newly constructed sales narrative served by yet to be constructed roads,. Is this progress? I doubt it. Yes, the houses built now will use less energy to run than if they were developed 10 years ago. This is driven by the government, rather than forward looking developers.

The unremarkable nature of the development can only be summed up in the sales sign at the entrance describing the development as “exciting”. Even there the sales person could not bring itself to use original, energy efficient, far seeing, high quality, cozy, solid, safe, or anything else normal people would look for in a house. Excitement is such a euphemistic word, a rock concert is exciting, sky diving is exciting, neither are things that you would want to go home to after a hard days work every evening. 

Their looks? Well they have no attachment to the traditional houses around the development. Their meadering drive way with few parking spaces on road parking, showing a pitiful amount of land used. Each shoe box house has its own postage stamp of a garden.

Why Aylesbury in this part of the world. No idea, although the duck link remain with other water fowl roads to follow. Also by poor planning or deliberate association, The Grange, is a comprehensive school in Aylesbury, and also is the name of the new development.

So overall, unremarkable architecture in an unremarkable part of town. Neither will last that long. Only the name of Aylesbury will endure from this place.

Portsmouth and Bournemouth Aylesburys

OK so I haven't been to any Aylesburys for a while now, so I decided to knock two relatively close together locations off the list. So off I went. It was a relatively straightforward drive down to Portsmouth with the pleasant autumn sunshine giving way to clouds and a bit of rain. Portsmouth's Aylesbury is in the middle of one of Portsmouth's islands and is very unremarkable, unless you really want a carpet, then the Portsmouth Carpet Specialist will be able to sort you out.

I moved swiftly over to Bournemouth which is equally uninspiring and uninteresting as an Aylesbury and is in a particularly grotty state. It seems to have several letting agents letting houses on the road and like most landlords, they do not care about the state of the houses and let the bare minimum of maintenance happen to maximise their profits. This is counterproductive as lower quality properties will attract lower rents, or people who receive lower incomes or are in less stable jobs. This means that there is less revenue from the properties and potentially more problems with rent collection, exacerbating a problem, rather than solving it.

Corfe Castle is definitely worth a visit and thats where I visited after these two Aylesburys.

 

Deadly Dublin

Having been given a few days off from work for good behaviour and not being allowed to transfer them, I was scraping around for something to do for a bit when I arrived at the idea of going to Dublin for a short trip to cover the Aylesburys there. I looked around for someone to go with, thinking that a Dublin trip might be an attractive proposition for someone with a love of beer and up for a good time, but this proved to be not a good time so I headed across the sea alone.

Travel to Dublin proved to be uneventful as BMI and BAA did their jobs well and I even got to sit in business class as there were so many spare seats in the plane. Arriving at Dublin airport was easy and having no luggage to collect I strolled out of the airport and onto a coach that went down to O Connell Street in the centre of Dublin where I was staying. Having sorted out my room from a disinterested hotel staff member, who I later discovered was the manager, I wandered down O Connell street and into the Temple bar district for a pint and some food and get my bearings.

Having wondered around the hectic city centre totally lost and quite tired I found a good chip shop called Malones and a lively Irish pub called 4 Dame Lane to have a pint and a chat to some businessmen out for a Christmas Drink.

Lots of places give you free maps in Dublin, they are all of the town centre and don’t include the important places of Dublin, so I wandered over to the tourist information centre to buy a proper map complete with Aylesburys and set off on a walk out of the town centre and out to the Aylesbury district of Dublin. On the way I passed this rather worrying coffee shop with some interesting characteristics and a statue of Oscar Wilde sitting on a rock.

He once said, “Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.” I wondered how noble this quest for Aylesburys was as it certainly was a truly stupid quest. How Oscar Wilde would view this journey I think it would be with disdain and tell me to find something productive to do.

After a swift walk, I ended up in the Ailesbury district which is a very nice well to do area with lots of embassies and nice houses. The embassies seem to tell a tale of how rocky the home country’s relationship is with the Irish. For example the UK’s embassy is behind blast walls with security cameras and a military style gateway, given the way that the UK has acted in Ireland in the past, this is not surprising. The Norwegian embassy is totally open with almost an invitation to wander round and bounce on the sofas. Most weirdly, the US embassy, home of the Americans, best friends of the Irish, have a Martello tower type blast wall concrete bunker, cowering against all newcomers.

Amongst this embassy district are a number of streets names after British lords, lord Pembroke, and Lord Ailesbury. The first Ailesbury I arrived at was Bothar Aelsbaire or Ailesbury Road.

This has the Spanish embassy at the end and is a lovely street with large houses of well to do people and embassies all over.

Also on the right was the Ailesbury Clinic, a private clinic for well to do people and embassies.

I strolled down the street and passed Aylesbury Villa, home to the Pakistan embassy and on to Ailesbury Way so, a gated road, a bit strange, given that the houses behind the gate were much less extravagant than those out on the ungated Ailesbury Road. I turned right down past Ailesbury house and to Ailesbury Park, knocking off Aylesburys left right and centre, you have got to love unoriginal place naming from developers.



Ailesbury Gardens next to the tram stop soon followed, and I was off to find Ailesbury Mews soon after, getting thoroughly lost and ending up on the sea front before back tracking and returning to Ailesbury Mews another way.




I headed back down Ailesbury Road and past Ailesbury Oaks and Ailesbury Wood, more embassies and nice houses, Ailesbury Grove and Ailesbury Drive were perpendicular to each other and I strolled back down and along to Ailesbury Court, home to the Austrian Embassy and then off to find some lunch, a morning’s stroll successfully completed.










I wandered off to St Patrick’s cathedral in the afternoon and was especially taken with the history of Jonathan Swift and his religious and political writings. Then off to a comedy night at The International Bar called the Comedy Cellar. It is held in a room above the bar which is comically bad in design and facilities but was a great atmosphere. I found an IT programmer who had a girlfriend in Barton, not more than a mile to where I lived, an Argentinean Harry Potter fan and an American whose surname was Jameson, which provided some comedy ammunition for the comedians. I did not fit the comedy stereotype of an English tourist as I was not there on a stag night, had not flown Ryan Air and had not visited the Guiness Brewery at St James’s gate. They were left making general anti English jokes and left it at that. Everyone in the bar was very friendly and I had a great night.

The next morning I was off up the airport road to another Ailesbury, this time in a much less nice part of town, rather, I had to go through a much less pleasant part of Dublin to get to it, so I made sure I knew where I was going and kept my head down and walked up the road, past the anti British slogans and the pub celebrating the IRA heroes, hoping to avoid trouble. It was a pleasant walk and didn’t take much time to arrive the area this Ailesbury was in was nice enough but I didn’t want to linger too long and headed back down in to Dublin for the rest of the holiday, mission complete.

Manchester's Aylesburys 1 and 2

Manchester, not a place I have ever been to much, mainly as it is four hours drive from Aylesbury and that’s a long way to go in a day, its an even longer way to go there and back in a day, unless you have a very good reason. Well I had a good reason, my thesis into radiator positioning and heating efficiency is really a non starter unless I can get some financial aid from various people and one of them lives in Manchester, so that’s where I headed.Lots of exciting chat, lots of ideas exchanged. We shook on a deal. All good, headed off to my first Aylesbury of the day near the Trafford Centre, a nice area, presumably ideal for shopping. One of the great things about Manchester is the motorway ring road, which when not blocked, one can traverse the city at speed.So the 1st Manchester Aylesbury complete, I realised I had left my laptop at the company and so sheepishly drove all the way back to fetch it, hoping I didn’t look too much like an idiot.
This meant that my trip took a little longer than expected and so I only managed one other Aylesbury that day. Drove back to Aylesbury and had a lovely curry with some mates.

Doncaster, Macclesfield and Stoke on Trent

An army marches on its feet and a good trip always starts off with preparing good food to tide oneself through the day. Monday was no exception with a beautiful brawn and tomato sandwich with mustard. How brawn has dropped out of fashion is beyond me, it is a tastier option to the watery mushy excuse we have for ham nowadays and often cheaper.

I set off ready to hit the next batch of Aylesburys on the way and on the way back from my friends wedding reception. Basically a wonderful social event celebrating their marriage with lots of booze and a good time was had by all. Aiming to get to Sheffield before rush hour kicked in, I aimed for Doncaster for around 2ish and although hindered by the M1 widening road works, the journey was mostly clear. I benefited from a device which allows me to play my iPod through the car stereo so the music for the day was splendid.
Doncaster, place of the famous dome is a nice town and Aylesbury Road in Doncaster has clearly seen better days, looking as if it is made of 1930’s prefabs and refurbished housing, not looking particularly warm on the day I visited. Why is this Aylesbury here? Well I can’t really work it out. My 1st thoughts were that the nearby roads are names of famous Lords, however that would not explain the nearby Crecy drive. My best guess has to be famous castles, of which Aylesbury at one point may have had a castle, or a wooden defence line. It certainly doesn’t have one any more and the only linguistic remains of one currently known is the ubiquitously named Castle Street in Aylesbury, which for all we know could be a corruption of the name Cattle Street, an equally likely name for it given that Aylesbury is a market town.


After visiting I turned back down the M1 and returned to Sheffield, a place I have not been to in 2 years. It has changed a lot, some of it unrecognisable. On the way I passed this excellently named off licence which sold records, two great lines of business.

The nightclub Kingdom has been renamed Empire possibly after going though a relaunch. Be warned when that happens, look what happened to Julius Caesar. Arriving in Sheffield was fun and having avoided most of the rush hour traffic I made it up one of the large hills to where my old university friend was staying in an apartment on Daniel Hill.

The wedding reception was a nice one especially as it gave me the chance to catch up with old friends and see how everyone was doing and wish the bride and groom well.
The after party carried on till very early and so a lot of the next day was spent feeling extremely tired.
I did manage to catch up with another few old friends including a friend from Aylesbury, Will, who seemed impressed with the photos, no-one else ever does. I also saw a friend Jacqueline and we went to a restaurant called Bungalows and Bears which seemed bizarre at the least with kitsch tat everywhere but in a supposed cool style. Very strange, but nice in a chilled out way.
On the way home I heard a band playing in the West Street Live bar and went in to have a look. The bar was empty and as I walked in, the band stopped. I went to the bar, expecting to hear a bit more of the band, and if any good, would buy a drink. However they remained stopped, so I left. Not a great business model.

The next day I made my way across the peak district though Hope and the Devils Arse, still covered in snow to Macclesfield where another Aylesbury Road awaited. A really nice drive in the morning sunshine with great open spaces and no one else around. Macclesfield is a smallish town wish Aylesbury Close on the outskirts. One slightly interesting part are the stacked garages at the far end which are terraced down a slope, so that access to one is the roof of another in three layers. However, the vital flaw in these garages is that the roofs of these garages can’t support a weight of a car, leaving them as unstable buildings, risky to get in or out of. This development has clearly taken its name from the towns of Buckinghamshire with the next door road being Amersham Close, no controversy there.

Driving to Stoke on Trent next I was listening to the radio to hear that the Jamaicans had sent a relief boat to the earthquake hit island of Haiti. I can imagine the Jamaicans arrived at the Haitan relief effort bringing large home made pots of goat curry and crates of Red Stripe beer. There will be a more relaxed attitude to the rescue effort now and the Jamaican aid secretary has stated, “Don’t worry, about a thing, cause every little thing, it’s gonna be alright”

Stoke on Trent’s Aylesbury Road is a nice road where people have made the best out of a bad set of housing and have done up some of their houses to look quite nice. It is a skinny road and parking anywhere except straddling the pavement would make it difficult for others to pass by. I assume that this Aylesbury is just named after towns in the south of England, that’s the only link I can see from the names so far.

After all that and 3 days of fun I went home back to the normality of life.

Solihull and Plymouth

OK, so I haven't written these up. But similar story to before. Up to CAT stop off in Solihull, one of the most difficult places to get to off a motorway but worth it when I got there as the double header of Aylesburys gave me great pleasure. This sun was the only sun I had that week, despite studying solar thermal technology all week. The experiments were atrocious and the results appalling. But top marks to Chris Laughton, the tutor for the comedy dancing and outrageous costume.





As the week ended, I headed south through brilliant sunshine and driving rain. That being heavy rain, not rain that is convenient to drive in. There are crashes and lots of country lane driving, but eventually I hit Plymouth and found this Aylesbury perched on a hill with marvellous views, that my camera really doesn't begin to capture. Never mind. Followed that was a brilliant holiday with the guys and girls, absolutely fantastic.

Bristol

This weekend was a most interesting weekend, full of fun, culture and family. It began several months earlier when we were working out dates for our cousins to meet up. We set this weekend and a good job we did. The weekend started off for me driving to Swindon to pick up my brother Steve from the train station. Note: Aylesbury Road by Swindon train station, or No. 11 if you are counting. The soundtrack was courtesy of Pete Tong, radio 1, ‘starting the weekend’, a good clear journey.

Steve was let down by the trains and arrived an hour late.

We set off for Bristol and arrived within the hour at cousin Mary’s house, chilled out and had a beer. Cousin Paul joined us from Brighton and the party was complete, the weekend could begin.
Next morning, we legged it across town to the Bristol Museum to see banksy v.s. Bristol Museum. Banksy is a graffiti artist who delivers high quality graffiti to middle class people. A lot of the art is subversive in a delicate way, not too offensive or challenging and clever in a simple way. So walking around the exhibition is like going to see a stand up comedian whose act is a series of gags; There are lots of small jokes, they make you chuckle, you have got the point of the art, then you move on, it doesn’t test you too much and you don’t need an art degree to understand it. Because of this reason, plus banksy is famously notorious, and mainly the exhibition is free, we queued for a bit to get in.
Highlights of the exhibition for me was the girl in the blow up bullet proof jacket, as it showed genuine vulnerability emphasised by the stylized abstraction of the stencilling. Also the virtues were very good, hedonism and consumerism were put on plinths ready to join justice, prudence, fate and temperance.





Both were of course plaster and plastic, not set in the stone of the others. The best bit of the exhibition was the fact that people had to go in search of other banksy works in the rest of the museum, giving people a chance to see some of the other marvellous exhibits and be surprised and enriched at what they saw. So as a typical middle class person into pop culture and stand up comedy, I loved it.
Pop culture makes you hungry so we headed to a Moroccan stall in Bristol’s covered market and had a good lunch of Moroccan lamb and couscous. I hope this stall recognises its success in recreating the Moroccan street market feel and doesn’t go up market to a building and a restaurant, it would be a shame, losing some of the experience of eating in a market stall in Bristol. Suitably nourished, we headed over to St Pauls and the street carnival there.
I didn’t know what to expect from this carnival, never having heard of it before the Friday night. It was brilliant. The music was fantastic and the floats and procession was great, it really matched the weather and everyone was there for fun. We watched the parade of the various groups, taking in the various cultures and tapping our feet to the music, then set off for the centre stage and soaked up the sun, Red Stripe, music and rum punches.
Round dinner time we were feeling peckish so headed home had a shower some pasta and went out again to the Apple, a cider bar on the Severn, a great place. Good ciders, can’t remember what the perry I was drinking was, but it was good. We finished the evening with some cake I had made, which went down well.
After a great night we had a lie in and woke up round 9:30, got up and headed to the home of Champion the Wonder Horse, Weston Super Mare. It was a long and circuitous route through various jolly industrial estates and wonderfully landscaped retail parks to the sea front, which turned out to be not much better. We had a look at the sea, miles out, stuck in the usual place, above the land and below the sky, a view that is often described when a tsunami is imminent. Children were rooting around in the mud, much like peasants from medieval times.
There was a sand sculpture exhibition on the beach which was stingy as students did not count as concessions. So we regrettably paid full price, determined to maintain the high cultural level we had established the previous day despite the council’s disregard to the state of student finances. If anyone asks how to attract a younger audience to ‘traditional’, read ‘generally rubbish’ seaside towns, mention making it cheaper for students who don’t have budgets to go abroad or go on fancy holidays. It was a good display of sculpture and some clever sand works, including a cascade of rays and a detailed inside of a sub.
We considered playing crazy golf, but the onset of rain would have meant that it would have been more than crazy to play to play golf, more like insane or psychotic golf, so we gave up on that idea and left. Clearly from our experience, ‘super’ is an ironic name, like ‘Great’ Yarmouth. We looked at a map and found out a much quicker route than the sign posts directed. I recommend you do the same incase you find yourself in Weston super mare and need an escape route, perhaps when a tsunami eventually arrives.
We got back to Mary’s and got a BBQ going. Unfortunately the rain had followed us there and we managed to get the cooking done on the fire, but had to eat inside.
After lunch we packed up and got moving ready to get home and ready for work. I had one obvious detour to conduct, and just down the road in Bedminster is a circle of fun, Aylesbury Road and Aylesbury Crescent.

My brother’s second and third Aylesburys, wow three in a weekend, I don’t know how he handled it but he managed to suitably contain his excitement. The streets are quite well kept and have some really nice houses on. I think they were 1930’s housing and apart from the skips up and down the street and the messy builders house on the corner, it was a good road.

We set off for Swindon to drop Steve off, then Reading, as once again the railways let him down, then home accompanied by the end of the Men’s Tennis Wimbledon Final. A great weekend, thanks Mary, Paul and Steve. We will have to do it again sometime.

Birmingham's Aylesbury

The sky is blue, the day is fine
I am off on a little jolly to North Wales to continue my Msc course in Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies. But on the way time for a quick stop off in Birmingham, just a small detour from the motorway, down a couple of roads and the arc of goodness that is Aylesbury Crescent. It was bin day when I visited and there were lots of compost bags outside people’s houses. I am yet to understand this logic. Fair enough some people do not have gardens, so do a good job to share their waste garden material with others.



However if you do have a garden, then allow the stuff to compost over the year. Surely you would be using more energy by having a lorry come round and pick it up and then have machinery move it at the tip. Then more machinery to process it to distribute it. Just burn it, if it is a voracious weed, or compost it in your garden and keep things simple.
The school on Aylesbury Crescent looked a fun place with lots of colour and grafitti, a real community place. I hope it gets used a lot for other stuff. There seemed to be a youth building at one end. A great idea as young people often need places just to be together, rather than things to do and spend money.
CAT this time was quite fun with a group project trying to look at the best way to build up a housing block on a Greenfield site. The week went well, still haven’t written my essay, but oh well, consider this as part of my procrastination time.

Skeggy Aylesbury

Spring Harvest happens every year in various Butlins holiday camps around the UK. It is not a place where the UK’s farmers bring their crops of newly sprung springs for testing and grading, but a Christian holiday week with lots of bible teaching, worship and fun for people of all ages and abilities.
This was my 1st time to Skegness and my 1st time as to spring harvest except a visit as a child. This is really a follow on from the previous Aylesbury find as I was in Derby because there was a preparation day for this event there and I was doing the visuals for the X:site team who were running the 8-11s programme.
Spring Harvest is a very well established event and getting up to speed with it is impossible in a short space of time. Lots of people all turn up all at once and get very busy instantaneously, like a hive of ants. There was me after a 3 hour car journey cast into the hasty setup day not a clue where I was to sleep, if I was going to sleep, where to eat, when to eat, trusting that somewhere in the huge organism someone would have remembered me and sorted those things out. Luckily they had and although the first day was hectic and I didn’t stop until midnight sorting visuals out it all worked smoothly and all was OK.
Wednesday afternoon, I had time off and took the opportunity to visit this Aylesbury. Over lunch, I told my room mate Simon about my search and I think he took it rather well, although he was not really keen to join me on the pleasant jolly into Skegness. He asked if I had heard of Dave Gorman, which I have and think he is a very good comedian with a good friendly humour, looking for the eccentric, unusual and ultimately good in human nature. When I told Simon about the spread sheet, he was most amused, can’t think why?
After lunch I set off to find Aylesbury Drive in Beacon Park Skegness. It is in a place where there are lots of bungalows and I saw a few elderly residents and some young couples with children. It is a nice estate, well ordered and with lots of neatly kept gardens and large amounts of gravel and low maintenance gardens. There are several large ponds which the houses sit around and that is where this Aylesbury gains its name as part of the local bird population or Kingfisher, Mallard and Swan, the Aylesbury Duck connection is there once again. I had a little wonder up and down the road and observed the little pieces of kitch garden statuary and ornaments and thought what a thoroughly nice place to live. Despite the rather confusing signage, clearly designed to baffle everyone.

I continued to Skegness beach and enjoyed paddling in the sea, the first time this year and trying to take pictures of the large off shore wind farm, occasionally catching a glimpse of the turbines through the haze.
The rest of the week was very busy and ultimately can be considered a great success. At the end I was given a ‘geek of the week’ award, I can’t put my finger on the reason though. Perhaps some things will remain a mystery.