A paranoid, schizoid product of the 21st century

Shorter and more flippant contributions are now available on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/assommoirthe

Two things.

Yes, it IS annoying that somehow the username “The Assommoir” was already taken. I try not to think about it too much, I sleep badly enough as it is.

And when I say “now available on Twitter”, it has been for nearly 2 years. But, you know, no followers yet, so desperate times call for desperate measures.

Roy Kitchen 3 BS 1985

Banksy visits Scunthorpe

I prefer the one on the right

The Liver Building

This building is looking more and more interestingly unusual as the regeneration of Liverpool continues – not to say that either of these things is bad. Just an observation.

Wanted: chimney sweep. Must have own brush

Improbably, this is a chimney (or ventilation duct, if you prefer), on the Wirral side of the Liverpool-Birkenhead tunnel

Gainsborough Internal Drainage Board – Jenny Hurne Pumping Station

Pont de Normandie

This is the upstart younger brother of the Pont de Tancarville that I was talking about. It opened in 1995, and is over 2km long. This photo gives some sense of the rollercoaster-esque experience which is crossing this bridge (indeed there’s a smaller ‘pre-bridge bridge’ just out of shot which is itself quite something).

I spent a year in France just east of these two bridges (in a flat, that is. I wasn’t living rough). Despite Normandy’s outstanding natural beauty I wound up in a very small town, nothing too grim in itself, but situated right in the middle of the petro-chemical heartland downstream from Le Havre. (The town in question, Lillebonne, is shown here; the Pont de Normandie is the more westerly crossing over the Seine, marked as the N1029; the Pont de Tancarville is marked as the N182).

It really hit home when a fellow teacher was driving us both to a larger town one evening (I forget where now, but somewhere east, in the general direction of Rouen. This is the same teacher/route that got me into Mister Eddy). Not long after setting off, I looked out of my window, and, in the dark, saw a number of lights.

“C’est quelle ville là-bas?” (What town’s that over there?) I asked, hopeful that there was somewhere close by with a little more of that certain special, um, ‘je ne sais quoi’ than Lillebonne itself.

“Euh, non… Ce n’est pas une ville, c’est une usine pétro-chimique” came the reply: “That’s not a town, it’s a petro-chemical refinery”.

You know that line in That’s Entertainment, “opening the windows and breathing in petrol”? I started my day that way more than once. That said, as well as being home to air-borne petrol, Lillebonne also housed a certain second-hand bookshop, so it certainly wasn’t all bad.

Pont de Tancarville

This is one of two bridges which cross the River Siene and join Haute Normandie and Basse Normandie.

This bridge, the 1,400 metre-long Pont de Tancarville, was opened in 1959 and reigned supreme until its upstart younger brother came along nearly 40 years later.

Scunthorpe Steelworks

Yes, that sign does say “Industrial Garden Town”.

The four blast furnaces at this steelworks are all named after Queens (Mary, Bess, Anne, Victoria). This is probably deeply psychologically revealing.

The Humber Bridge

Taken from the south bank on a typically lovely Humberside day