Jellyfish

Absent

Gonna be away for a while in places yet to hear of the internet. It's true.

Peace Cranes, Hiroshima

The Crow

There are times when I wonder what it is that's good about this little island upon which I live. It's much easier to list all the problems. But I won't - the bandwidth would go up in smoke. But every now and then something happens that makes you realise that there's something quaintly bonkers about the good old U of K. It's a place littered with eccentrics. Which is probably a reason to leave, rather than stay.

Anyways, we were driving to the coast the other night and we were stopped in out tracks because there'd been a fatal accident. With a police officer waving his arms around, we had no option but to drive down a road we'd never taken before in our lives (but, heck, at least we still had lives) and stumbled into a tiny village. Once there, we were confronted by scarecrows. Dozens of the things. Ah, yes, it was the Muston annual scarecrow shindig where, it appears, every other house devotes 364 days of the year to stuffing straw inside clothes to form impressionistic work. There was a scarecrow Dr Who, a scarecrow Lance Armstrong, and lots of other scarecrows that defied simple description. So it's easier if I just publish this - which is an emergency rescue performed by scarecrows...

While I'm posting bad photographs I thought I should follow in Pik and Hayato's footsteps and show you where I spend my working day. Nothing too picturesque, I'm afraid. Hull's going through some changes at the mo', mostly involving rather large construction and demolition plant. This, Pik, you might remember as the ABC cinema. This is currently the scene that greets visitors to the city...

Nice, huh?

Not a post about Hiroshima

There were phosphorescent plankton in the sea!

Mobile-phone button back-light blue at the edges of each wave and in the circles about the legs of midnight paddlers. Also in the air if you threw a large rock seaward. In hindsight, this probably killed several million innocent plankti (plankti?). But they looked beautiful in their airborne death throes.

Besides glowing, the little beauties exhibited the eerie vampire like quality of confounding any attempt at photographing them.

So I threw another rock in.

Ah, it was certainly a moving, emotional evening out there on the beach, luminous spume and all. Plankton, I feel blessed. And by way of thank you here's a song that I feel encapsulates the essence of my brief time amongst you.