Meet your chickens...

As Magda said...




..."it's bad enough having to read most of the crap that's written, without 'avin to look at a photo of the bastard that wrote it..."

Well, now it's poultry with egos too...



All I can say to Tesco is that I feel it's ethical enough to buy the locally sourced, Shiny Happy Farmers Free Range eggs, without 'avin to look at a photo of the chickens that laid 'em...

Papering over the crack...

It's not often you get to see an art work destroyed, but here it is....



It's Shibboleth again.

To create the crack, Doris Salcedo had to destroy the floor, so it can't be moved or installed elsewhere. Mending the floor destroys the art work. Destroy to create, create to destroy... It's, like, totally an aesthetic paradox and that....

It does, however, appear as though they are mending it with giant duct tape; which seems to be from the same school of civil engineering as the repair of the Huka Falls footbridge with a tile adhesive gun...

I think it was all a bit too clever for its own good. At least with the slides you were meant to fall down them...

* Thanks to Paul for the photo.

Welcome to Felpersham...

Hereford is a dump.

It's a grotty, featureless hole, masquerading as a city on account of a (rather small, squat, dirty) cathedral.

You know you are in trouble when the Hereford City Council website offers you this:



...a wonky black and white scan of a map from many years back. You can spend many a happy hour trying to locate the Tourist Information Centre. Go on, try it. I imagine that when you get there, the Tourist Information they offer would be "Go anywhere other than Hereford".

(It is helpful, though, to have the toilets categorised into Male & Female; Male, Female & Disabled; Female & Female Disabled; Male.)

Having just come from Cardiff, which is lively and cosmopolitan, Hereford is like being stuck in the 70s. Nothing opens after 5.30pm. The only things that were open after that? McDonalds, a Pizza Express (which I imagine is the height of sophistication for people in Hereford - "if you're celebrating, sit in the window") and a Beefeater.

If you're Welsh and crossing the border into England for a bit of a day out, say from Abergavenny or Monmouth or Brecon or Llandridnod Wells (Google maps...!) then you are going to be very disappointed. Cerys was right - "Every day, when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh..."; the little known next line perhaps being, "Because I don't live in Hereford..."

If I ever go there again it will really be too soon.