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Posts tagged Bristol
The Severn Sea
023 hours
Yesterday your correspondent took a break from the inner city and headed by rail to the North Somerset Coast at Weston-super-Mare.
Plenty of good, fresh air and healthy exercise was had, with my walking from the railway station to the far end of Weston bay at Uphill where the River Axe empties into the Bristol Channel between Brean Down and the semi-tidal Black Rock, as shown below.
The River Axe flows into the Severn Sea between Brean Down (left) and Black Rock (right).
The eastern limit of the Bristol Channel is defined by the International Hydrographic Organization as that area between two lines between Sand Point in Somerset and Lavernock Point and the western limit a line between Hartland Point in Devon and St. Govan’s Head. Upstream of the eastern limits, the body water is the Severn Estuary, whilst westwards of the western limit is defined as the Celtic Sea.
The Severn estuary, Bristol Channel and eastern part of the Celtic Sea as seen from Landsat 7.
However, the Bristol Channel has not always been used to characterise this area of water.
Until Tudor times the Bristol Channel was known as the Severn Sea. Indeed, it is still known as this in both Welsh: Môr Hafren and Cornish: Mor Havren, whilst on Jacob Millerd’s 1673 map of Bristol shows the Severn Estuary in the Latin, Sabrina Fluvius, as depicted below.
Millerd’s River Severn from his 1673 map of Bristol.
A very special bus service
01 day
One of the phrases guaranteed to dismay every regular user of Britain’s chaotic and overpriced railway network is rail replacement service. This involves taking the scheduled service off the rails (usually for engineering works at busy holiday periods when everyone either wants to get away and/or visit friends and loved ones. Ed.) and substituting the rolling stock with buses, with the inevitable increased journey times and a reduction in passenger comfort.
However, these rail replacement services do not serve Stapleton Road railway station, where the sign shown below is affixed to the Frome viaduct wing wall on the station approach.
As the station is under the management of First Great Western, an alleged train operating company, you ‘umble scribe assumes it was their staff who designed, wrote and approved the final signage.
For any passing First Great Western signage design drones, here’s a wee tip: a spellchecker now comes as a standard feature of all popular office productivity suites. 😀
As…
03 days
From Monday’s Bristol Post.
Is this:
- correlation;
- causation; or
- a typical example of a poorly written headline from a Reach plc title?
Bristol Post exclusive: Journalist eats catering establishment
3 weeks
Today’s Bristol Post website features another of modern journalism’s highlights – the hidden exclusive (posts passim), although this particular style of hackery is not itself peculiar to publications in the Reach plc stable.
Yesterday’s Bristol Post hidden exclusive features Mark Taylor, allegedly the title’s food, drink and restaurant critic, who seems to have eschewed protein, carbohydrates and fat for a more substantial diet, in this case the shipping container housing the soon-to-open Choux Box Patisserie down by the city docks. At Wapping Wharf shipping containers replace the construction materials of more traditional eateries.
There’s only one place I know of where eating buildings is not unusual and that’s the tale of Hansel and Gretel, first published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
For some reasons known only the the residents of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth, Mr Taylor’s piece is strangely quiet about the quality of the ingredients used for the shipping container. 😉
Finally, your ‘umble scribe must remark that given his constitution, Mr Taylor may like to start training for food challenges of the Man v. Food reality show variety, of which there are plenty to punish his palette in Bristol.
Priti good new stencil art
1 month
A new piece of stencil art has turned up on recent days on a wall at the junction of Russelltown Avenue and Whitehall Road in east Bristol on the building with the ever-changing messages (posts passim).
Merely as a matter of coincidence, it depicts one of those residents of Whitehall, SW1, namely one Priti Patel, an Estuary English elocution expert inexplicably elevated to the position of Home Secretary by part-time alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, after she had previously been forced to resign in 2017 as International Development Minister for breaking the ministerial code by having secret meetings with Israeli officials while serving under Theresa May.
Since her return to high public office, the permanently smirking Patel has been accused of bullying her staff, resulting in the resignation of Home Office boss Sir Philip Putnam.
I can’t help speculating if the hammer in Patel’s hand was one of the reasons for Sir Philip’s departure.
At the foot of the stencil art the Tory Party oak tree logo and the word Vandals appear.
I have lived most of my life under Tory governments and for the majority of that time, particularly with effect from the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the Conservatives have not conserved anything. Indeed they’ve destroyed important ones like manufacturing industry (which used to provide millions of skilled, well-paid jobs. Ed.) and the trade union movement, whilst flogging state assets to their rich friends and supporters.
Given the party’s record of destruction, perhaps the claw hammer in Patel’s hand should have been replaced by a sledge hammer instead. 😀
Trump in Bristol
2 months
Yesterday while walking through Riverside Park into town, your ‘umble scribe encountered some street art which immediately reminded him of Donald J. Trump, a tax dodger and serial sexual predator who was inexplicably elected as 45th President of the United States of America.
Your correspondent believes it is flattering to its subject as is shown by a comparison with a photograph of the Orange One captured in a typical denigratory pose.
Do you agree? Have your say in the comments below.
Free online waste & recycling webinars
2 months
Bristol Waste is organising a series of monthly webinars dealing with all you wanted to know about waste, reuse and recycling in Bristol but were afraid to ask!
Image courtesy of Bristol Waste
People can sign up to learn from experts about what happens to their waste and recycling once it is put out for collection.
Since lockdown Bristol Waste has been running these very popular online sessions so as to give residents the chance to ask questions, dispel any myths and find out how to be recycling and waste superstars!
Every other month, there’s a general Q&A session, where people can ask about anything waste related, alternating with a specially themed webinar concentrating on a specific topic.
There is a special recycling event planned for Recycle Week and people can also sign up for a ‘festive special’ to learn how to be more sustainable over the holiday season.
Follow this link to find out more.
The next Q&A session takes place on Wednesday, 18th August between 6.30 and 7.30 pm. Sign up via Eventbrite.
Stormy afternoon
2 months
Bristol suffered heavy rainfall and a thunderstorm yesterday afternoon, resulting in some local flooding and power outages according to the Bristol Post/Bristol Live.
And guess who was out in it?
Never mind. It resulted in a spectacularly atmospheric photograph taken a few minutes from home and shown below in glorious black and white for additional impact.
The shot was taken looking westwards from the top of Eastbourne Road, Easton towards the higher ground of Cotham and Clifton.
Games arcades for sale
2 months
One of the mainstays of local news reporting has been the opening of new businesses in the locality.
And in this the Bristol Post is superficially no different from other regional titles.
However if one looks beneath the surface of such reporting, some divergences from other local press publications may be observed, in particular the lack of copy quality control.
Such an instance occurred yesterday in a piece on the opening of a new business in a vacant shop in The Galleries in Bristol’s Broadmead shopping centre. Whilst the headline suggests that the new business will be selling access to 1980s arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man*, the piece’s strapline and the opening words of the third paragraph of the copy suggest otherwise.
Screenshot of original Donkey Kong game
They both read as follows:
More than a hundred 1980s retro video game arcades are on offer.
If games arcades really are on offer rather than poorly proofread copy, the shop would need a capacious stock warehouse, slightly more capacious than the facilities usually available in BS1. 😀
*= Pac-Man is in fact a 1990s video game, released on 31st May 1990. This other major howler in the piece could have been avoided by the use of a secret research technique know to the cognoscenti as 5 minutes’ Googling.
Only one resident at a time
0The flats at Combfactory Court in Easton have a capacious car park with at least 6 or 8 spaces.
However, owing to stringent restrictions imposed on its use – as shown below on the notice on its railings – only one resident is allowed to park at any one time.
Resident’s only? Not a chance for greengrocer’s then!
Whoever is in charge of the car park has contributed to public view a textbook example of the greengrocer’s apostrophe. This is an informal term in British English for the non-standard use of an apostrophe before the final -s in the plural. It would appear the efforts of examinations body the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority since 2006 have been in vain.