Smoke Signals

Ian Hutson

The canal was frozen over again this morning – lightly, just enough to really cheese off the resident swans once more. Cardinal Wolsey was not impressed, and spent much of the morning sending up smoke signals. Mostly steam, I would posit.

I rather like this image of him in the early-morning light.

As you can see, we’ve got neighbours, although rather more of them this time. Most of the stove flues were sending up Morse Code messages in their turn.

There’s a fog descended now – meteorological, not just cranial. I suspect that things outdoors will once again be somewhat chilly.

A fair portion of today has been spent uploaded some thirty fresh images to the Hutson Fine Art America shop thingy. I have discovered that while the printed stuff is indeed produced in England when necessary, some of the items such as mugs and wotnot, are not. You can still order them, but there are the usual concomitant fusses of someone in the U.S.of.A. posting something across the pond. I have added some… variety.

Hong Kong…

@ Ian Hutson Fine Art America – Hong Kong in the sixties, from my Father’s slide collection.

An abstract or two…

I call this one The Angry Blue Cow.

@ Ian Hutson on Fine Art America – The Angry Blue Cow. Yes madam, it’s and abstract… đŸ˜‰

An unashamedly fairy’d-up landscape or two, for those for whom the originals are not cheerful enough…

@ Ian Hutson on Fine Art America, Landscape with cheerful bokeh… for when madam needs some cheerful colour…

…and one of yesterday’s ‘Ye gods, it’s cold but I am walking anyway’ photos…

@ Ian Hutson on Fine Art America, A Cold Walk…

…which is wot as wintery bucolic as it gets and there we’re back to abstract Angry Blue Cows, aren’t we.

If you ask me, all cows are angry.

It’s probably because they’re cold.

I have just about become inured to the sound of ice scrapping and scraping on the Cardinal’s nice fresh hull blacking as folk hurry past in their ice-breakers. Just about.

It always – generally always – sounds far worse than it is.

Mind you, so do I.

Chin-chin, chaps.

Ian H., & Cardinal W., lost in Time and Space and Meaning and, tonight, in Dickensian Fog.

9 Comments

  1. Not too bad here in the SE of England. Still only reaching about 8 of the degrees. That’s cold, but not as cold as it might be, nor as cold as you Up North.
    We’ve also had sunshine, although my son tells me there was a sea fret in Brighton yesterday.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. There’s time yet for winter to have a quick nibble on us all. When I am Lord High He-Who (Must Be Obeyed) I shall make all foreign persons who laugh at us in re our weather spend a year here themselves, just to see what it’s all about. They’ll soon learn about five or six seasons in one day and then the same again the next but reversed!

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  2. You think that’s cold? I was up in the Pennines last week for some reason or other that I can’t remember now. It was really cold up there, made all the worse by what my grandmother used to call a ‘lazy wind’ (because it couldn’t be bothered blowing around you, but just went straight through you instead). There were some very glum looking brass monkeys up there, I can tell you.

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    1. The Pennines – or rather, a drive across them – were a magical and nebulous thing when I were nobbut knee-high to a Condom Machine. We usually were in a convoy of two, Singer Gazelle Estate and Austin A60 Cambridge, up in t’clouds (and fog). Doubtless it was nothing of the sort, but at that age…

      In re why you might have been on the Pennines; burying more bodies, perhaps?

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      1. Somebody had suggested filming Jubilee Tower round the back of Quernmore. It turned out to be a rather pointless pile of old bricks, providing no better vantage point than climbing twenty foot up the scree behind it.

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        1. You see, this is precisely why I recommend taking a 45′ ladder on any sight-seeing trips. Mother always did, and she swore by it. Of course, the porters weren’t so keen. I am thinking of buying Quernmore Park Hall.

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  3. That group of boats sending up smoke reminds me of a photo of the Home Fleet, line astern from the Great War. Mark you, given the commissioning abilities of the Ministry of Defence, your line of boats probably is the Home Fleet these days…

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    1. I wouldn’t be surprised these days to be conscripted as part of some cross-Channel rescue mission to bring back our stranded politicians… Calveley to Dunkirk and return to Dover, or some such. Winter temperatures have most definitely arrived!

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