Life by Squares – C6

I could have come up with a better name for this series. The word ‘squares’ brings to mind boring, predictable people who are only happy with an ordered life. Ha – then maybe it’s a good name for the series after all.

I’ve ceased to be surprised by how much the dice are cheating. Again they have sent me to the same part of the city – one adjacent to just about all the others from this week. It’s a place called South Bank:

This area is absolutely chock full of terrace houses and parked cars. I saw very little vegetation, apart from what has been squeezed into the (very) small front yards; more Christmas decorations than you could imagine; and a sky that never changed from one, dull, dull shade of grey. For these reasons, I decided to concentrate on textures today.

Halfway up Nunthorpe Avenue, someone had been weeding and digging, probably in preparation for spring, and this (after a little photo-manipulation) is what the photo came out like:

In real life, it was dark brown. On the photo, it came out kinda grey. After some manipulation, it looks like the kind of earth you see when you’ve been taking drugs.

There’s a bush full of yellow leaves half way down Upper Price Street that looks a little like this:

I think it’s some form of mutant privet, but I’m entirely open to being told that I’m wrong in this case. If you want to prove me wrong about anything else then you’ll have to join the queue.

In an area full of houses you can be sure that there’s a lot of brickwork. This little section is (I’m 98.66398647% (approximately) sure) half way along Gray Street:

Note the variety in the bricks. Either they are all hand-made, are very old, have seen some extreme weather, were individually painted to look like that, or brick-factories turned out some utter rubbish back in the day. Still, it makes a nice photo, right?

Although the next snap looks, at first glance like grass, it’s actually moss on a shady corner of the pavement on a bend in St Benedict Road:

I like moss. It’s soft and innocuous and doesn’t need mowing. In fact, I don’t know why we bother to lay turf in our gardens. We should totally put moss down instead. Anyone know the reason we don’t do this?

I then walked around the corner onto Bishopthorpe Road where I found a whole set of shops! Areas like this remind of a time when this joined-up area we now called York was just a collection of little villages. This would have been the main street of one such village. I wonder what charity shops were called back then. I found two such shops that were selling books for a bargain 50p (half a British pound) each and so I stopped, perused and picked one out. It’s called Maphead: The complete story in one volume and the author is Lesley Howarth. Two books in one – yay for bargains!

Then I moved on. More terraced houses. More cars. More dinky front yards. Ho hum. Finally, despairing of finding anything to snap I took a picture of an area of freshly laid tarmac on the pavement in Southlands Road:

Again, I manipulated this shot to make it look as dark and wet as it seemed to my eyes. I must have hit the wrong key in the process because when I look at the photo now it makes me feel kinda dizzy. Can you see that blurry effect, like you’re driving past something at speed? Hmm.

Then there was the tread of a tyre on the back of a four-wheeler parked on Scarcroft Road:

Enough said.

Then some nice (heather?) flowers in one of those cute front yards on Nunthorpe Grove:

Yep, you’re right – I’m getting tired now.

And then, finally – a vision of beauty:

Yes – it’s a tree!! It’s a weeping one, but maybe not a birch this time. Perhaps it’s a willow, but there are people amongst you that know far more about these things than me. Technically, it’s off the edge of today’s grid, but I could see it from the bottom of St Clement’s Grove, so that makes it mine!

Today was a little warmer (~7°C) and so it was quite an enjoyable stroll. The soundtrack was another Jack Reacher novel: A Wanted Man by Lee Child and I’m pleased to report that no-one died in the making of this walk.