yen_powell

I went outside to see the Hardy Tree and the bugger was fenced off and hidden behind small hedges, I could barely see the stones. Next I went to look at the tomb that inspired the designer of the red telephone box. Again, a fence was a round it.

I wanted to visit the Hardy Tree in St Pancras Old Church yard so on Sunday I headed down the motorway and into my work borough to start with. Traffic was a bit rough along Hackney Road thanks to roadworks closing lots of other main routes around there plus the adjacent Columbia Road flower market. I was filtering down the outside of standstill traffic, cyclists were filtering down the inside and the Deliveroo mopeds were filtering down the outside of me AND the cyclists. At the same time lemming peds were emerging at all locations and crossing all our paths with gay abandon. Gay abandon is like normal abandon, but better dressed. I left my borough, negotiated the madness that is Old Street roundabout and then headed along City Road which used to be a daily commute for me when I would drop my old girlfriend to work at Madame Tussauds before heading back to my own work. It hasn't changed much and soon I was riding down the side of Kings Cross station and parking in a convenient solo motorcycle bay across the road from the church yard. I went into the church first. Unusually for me I actually took a few pictures inside. One was of St Pancras himself, must have been a carbolic church if they have a statue of a saint I suppose. St Pancras is depicted wearing a fetching Roman outfit. I gather he was beheaded for being a Christian. The church is supposedly rebuilt every 200 years and there were large cracks at one end as you'll see. Walking around the tiny surrounding path of the church I turned a corner into a cloud of bees. I stepped back rapidly and took a few pictures of the almost hidden beehives tucked behind the church. On the way back out I noticed that the gravelled path had slabs as stepping stones made from old tomb stones, the date clearly visible on one of them.

My plan is to visit the Hardy Tree tomorrow, something will probably happen to change my plan though.

A real chocolate starfish

It's like this forum.....but in a big marquee.

Credit to Steve Martin (not the film star) Bloke on the left is Graham, the man who crept into my tent many years ago wearing a dress.

More pictures from the weekend, the next post are a proper picture takers pics This man had flashing eyebrows. Let me take a picture of your flashing eyebrows Superman, okay says he. Managed to get a pic in between flashes. Cow with legs growing out of its chin. Zoom in on the pic above and you can see a strip of blue and Portsmouth the other side of it. The monks' garden where they grow their food. Zoom in for all the baby ducks following mummy duck. Behind the bar.

I'm back to normal.....Well for the notification wossname at least.

Quite a few years ago at the same rally I was in my tent boiling a kettle on my gas stove to make a cup of tea before going to sleep. I was kneeling down to do this in the porch of my tent as it wasn't very high. I happened to glance behind me and nearly leapt out of my skin. A bloke called Graham was sitting behind me, I had not even heard him come in. He was wearing a dress (his wife's he claimed), but also had a moustache and a pipe in his mouth. I was a bit weirded out by it all. Anyway, on Friday night a bloke in a long leather coat with a beard came up to me and my friends and said hello. None of us knew who he was, despite his insistence that we knew him and him repeating his name over and over. It was the dress man. The addition of a beard had completely changed how he looked. He is the bloke wearing a monk's robe and glasses sat behind the inflatable doll in one of the pictures above. We made him put his hand over the beard and we all went, 'Oh yeah!!!!'

Turns out I have been riding right past it every time I get off the ferry.

That's what I asked Buckster when he showed me his scar.

I made it back from the Isle of Wight tranny run bike rally. Stan the Tran was magnificent as usual. The last band on Sunday night had people quietly distributing song lyrics set to the tune of 'Stand By Your Man' to sing to him and his wife as a surprise. STAND BY YOUR STAN was a musical masterpiece. He got a bit tearful, he has had 2 rallies cancelled by Covid etc and lots of trouble getting it going again this year. Apparently a light aircraft's wheels were only a few feet above my head as I drove into rally control which is next to a grass runway. Never heard it with my earplugs in and engine running. I visited a monastery and sat in a church with orange windows on Saturday, the light inside was something else. The monastery and church were built by local bricklayers and builders using cheap Belgian bricks and it was bloody gorgeous inside. I didn't have the heart to whip out a camera as I sat inside quietly taking it all in. The grounds were really nice as well, not even an admission charge to wander around. https://quarrabbey.org/monastery/vocation/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-monk/

£21 a day, but you get to choose from five shelters, I mean attractions.

I don't think I have put the gay Sikh punk rocker on yet, he was a teenager in the mid to late 70s. Next time he comes round on the blog I will post it, another cool story.

Illiterate (I had to bloody look up how to spell that), gay, road sweeper who had to follow a list of streets he couldn't read to do his job. Good story today. https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/04/22/kevin-obrien-retired-roadsweeper-x/

Every cloud and all that eh.

Used to see him/her out and about in Bethnal Green years ago. https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/04/18/viscountess-boudicas-easter-x/

Some dirty bastard hung his underwear up to dry on them I suppose, done for them all.

Tell the locals in Spanish the bed and mattress had to go because she brought bed bugs with her, (not the landlord though). Then watch them avoid her! How to say bedbug in Spanish What's the Spanish word for bedbug? Here's a list of translations. Spanish Translation ácaro More Spanish words for bedbug el chinche noun bug, thumbtack

An online reference to a local legend of dancing witches being turned into stone trees got me searching out more information. Sure enough the place existed and only about 18 miles away from where I live. A bit of a search on GSV showed that you could drive as far as a small medieval church and then walk through the grave yard and around a small moat to see the trees. Also mentioned online was that the trees were on private property and you had to walk around them on public footpaths. I found the road leading into a farm and the church. Straight away I saw signs forbidding vehicles to pass a certain point on the road, not to turn around there, not to park on the verge, not to park on the road, keep all dogs on leads, walk only on the footpath, keep out of the fenced areas etc, I have never seen so many signs in one place. I suspect the ruined trees are all that survived from a once lush wood, all the trees being turned into wooden and paper signs. I parked a metre off the road in an area that was once grassed verge but had been scrubbed out by vehicles leaving the farm yard and cutting the corner, just next to a sign saying No Parking. I figured if the verge was private they would have put their fence around it so it was part of the road and there were no properly legal No Parking signs, they were just bluff and bluster. Leaving my bike I walked through the church path gates. This was heavily signed, forbidding everything you could think of, plus a few things I hadn't. I made a note to try these things later on. The path turned a sharp corner and there was the abandoned church, fencing surrounded it with, you've guessed it, plenty of signs warning me to be good. The church looked fantastic, I will be returning when it is open again, the sign people look to be doing a good job fixing it up so I shouldn't really have a dig about the signs. I walked through one of the smallest graveyards I have ever seen and in front of me was a gate (multi-signed of course) and a short path to a second gate, also signed. I could see the tops of a few creepy looking trees the other side of a hedge. A quick loop around the moat and I was on a grass path next to the trees. I took a few pictures and carried on to a ploughed areal with a cross field path and took a few pictures from the side. It is a bizarre site, the trees are obviously dead but haven't rotted away like I'd expect. There are lots of new trees which looked recently planted. When I returned to my bike I was just getting ready to leave when an old man came cycling up and we had a chat. 45 minutes later he was still chatting. He had the uncanny knack of never finishing any sentence before starting the next one which made him quite hard to follow. Subjects he covered included, the Battle of Maldon, Viking raids, the manufacture of pressed house doors in the 1970s, shift and night working, Anglo Saxon coinage and the cost of cycle inner tubes. In the end I told him I had to leave for an urgent appointment and he rode off to look at the church I had just left.

Oi Mr Stunt, I don't put a camber in my roads, it makes all the water run away and fall down into the sewers, it's such a waste.

I used to have their first album. Didn't realise back then that they lived up the road to me, especially as I never heard them speak which would have given the game away. Their dad was Brian Poole of the Tremeloes apparently.