Signage, signs and portents, and scratches on walls

This is at one of the spots where patients at this hospital, mainly a psychiatric hospital, stand outside to smoke cigarettes. The writer has a nice hand. And a good vocabulary, too. Not much of a speller but that probably means s/he knows the words from ear rather than eye. In another outpouring, ten metres from this one, s/he spelt "philistine" as "philisteen" which suggests to me having learnt it in another language than English and having incompletely learnt English spelling conventions. But each of their messages makes for an interesting and poetic reading.

I do love a good pun.

This was in March month, still enough in winter to have lots of dirty snowbanks around, but late enough to start to show their non-snow accumulations. This is how I feel about winter. Reala film in a little plastic Rollei XF35, the least of all Rollei camera models. When I had this film developed, in 2005, the lab I was going to was making scans from the prints they'd made. The scans were thus pretty terrible. This week I finally got around to scanning the negatives themselves. The resultant scans are much better.

And so they do. My wife and I were on our first trip to Cuba, the one on which we fell in love with the people and the place. We have returned nine times since then. But I didn't scan my negatives from that first trip until this week, sixteen years later. This is one of them. Agfa APX100 film in my Rollei 35TE. Taken from a moving bus from the airport, or on the way to Havana.

When I was young, sixty years ago, this lane had a name. In this part of town, lanes going to the Harbour were all called Coves. It no longer has an official name because it is closed off to car traffic nowadays. But being a logical extension of Queen Street, it probably was called Queen's Cove. But I am just guessing.

This morning I stopped at my favourite fish shop to pick up a couple of meals. They were closed, at least for another quarter hour. As it turned out they were closed except by telephone appointment. I went home and called, and one of the women who works there said, "Don't worry. We know your car. We'll bring it out to you." And they did. She saw me arrive, picked up my package, unlocked the door and came out to my car. We exchanged some grim but friendly chat and I went on my way with supper for tonight and tomorrow. She went back in and locked the door again. (By the way, they did have their phone number on the sign. I thought it was probably best to remove it.)

In the course of a couple of hours, three or four people left the mark of their nose on the window of the new sliding door, nearly knocking themselves out. So the hostess made a mark on it. And then she stood for a picture.

I like signs. But of course I cannot hold my camera level. So I turn the pictures. Works for me.

This city has a habit of ceding ownership of roads and lanes to private interests. It's part of the "common sense" (ha!) that the people should not own anything that could be privately owned. I've complained about it for years but they keep telling me it was the *last* Council that used to do that. Beyond this gate is what used to be a public road. Dead-ended by a small ditch at the other end, it has become the private driveway to the two radio towers in the picture. Plus it has become a collection area for the private golf driving range to the right. And strictly prohibited is the removal of balls. Fuji 200 film in Balda 35CE.

This is a famous piece of graffiti in this town, having been exposed to the eyes of passers-by for about five years in the 1990s. I took this picture in November 1995. I am scanning old negatives and have reached that month. Along with one or two other bits of high-poetry graffiti I have seen, this ranks up at the top of my favourites. It happens to be well-remembered by hundreds of other people, though it's fifteen or twenty years gone now. Ilford Delta 100 in my Minolta X370.

In, I think, the late 1950s, this building was built as a supermarket, the first in the city. It was a neighbourhood grocery for my family. And the family who owned it lived upstairs in what must have been an impressively large apartment. Eventually, they moved out and the supermarket closed, and the building became a drugstore downstairs and doctors' office upstairs. Now, sixty years after it opened, it's being torn down to be replaced by a modern drugstore building. This film, labeled Black's Premium Film, rated ISO 100, was manufactured in Japan so it was probably a Fuji film. The package says it expired in July 1996, so it was about 25 years old when I loaded it in my new-to-me Pentax Super Program camera and shot it (at ISO 50) this past week. The camera's not too bad, but the film suffered from its age.

About thirty-five years ago I started visiting all the local radio stations' transmitter sites. I liked the pictures I took of radio antennas, some of which were pretty impressive. I haven't visited most of them in a long time and this morning I was passing by one, so I decided to visit it. To my surprise, it wasn't there any more. The buildings were still standing, though mostly for the pleasure of local young people who clearly used them for hangouts. There were scattered bit of towers and guy-wires and the like, but otherwise there were very few signs of its having been a radio transmitter for more than a half century. It looked like part of the field, in which, originally, hundreds of copper wires had been placed underground, had been torn up; I suspect someone tried to salvage that copper. The tower that had been here was installed in 1950 and it operated until a fire destroyed the tower in early 2014. Until today I thought they'd repaired it, as the station came back on air after a short period. Through some Internet searching, I've now discovered that they moved it about two kilometers to the south, across the valley it sits on the edge of.

In the summer of 1992, my wife & I, with some friends and their eight-year-old son, visited St-Pierre-et-Miquelon (SPM). St Pierre is a part of France, but it is only fifteen kilometres from the island of Newfoundland. It is in North America, but there is no ambiguity there about its being French -- everything looks and feels and smells like France. Two months before our visit, SPM had lost a long-standing court case against Canada; the international court's decision reduced French control of the sea around SPM to a tiny fraction of what they'd argued for. Thus this, and similar, graffiti alerting visitors like us, in English, to the economic hard times that had settled on SPM as a result of Canada's position. In a tiny place like SPM even 600 lay-offs was a very substantial number. But sadly for our sympathies, in the meantime (just one month before I took this picture) the Canadian government had -- as a result of decades of mismanagement of fish stocks -- shut down the main fisheries in Newfoundland and adjacent parts of Canada. It was estimated that 20,000 Newfoundlanders were immediately idled by the decision. So it was difficult for us to see the SPM situation as anything but part of the larger fisheries collapse. Whatever hard feelings to Canadians there were in SPM in mid-1992 seemed to disappear over the coming years. And their tourism has become more developed in that time. It is still a great place to visit. Ilford FP4 in Pentax SP500.

About a hundred metres down the street from our door, we saw this entreaty yesterday afternoon. It reads as follows. "Save the red fox!!! to save the red fox give Some money for saveing the red fox. We will really really really love it for you to give Lot'S of money. if you love the world you can really be a Super [ __ ]. We love you." Off to the right, on the snow, you can see the folded paper that the same person had instructions on: "put money in this slot ^ ". That piece of paper had blown off the pole and a single dollar coin was lying on top of the snow next to it.

In the almost thirty years since I took this picture in June 1989, the stylisation of penile graffiti has increased so much that this seems positively draughtsman-like. I took the picture because I had not seen penises in local graffiti before. Nowadays, they show up everywhere. After almost three decades, I still don't understand why. Plus-X in Bessa (6x9 cm).

I had to go by this place this morning on an errand, so I took advantage to take a picture, just over 29 years after the previous one. There've been changes.

I took this picture in November 1988, almost thirty years ago. I should go back and take the "same" picture in 2018. This upper building still stands but someone took a hammer to the lettering some time ago -- as someone already had on the sides of the sign in this picture. It is a good example of the vernacular concrete construction that caught on in this city eighty years ago. Minolta X370 with Kodak Gold 200 film.

As old-fashioned as this looks, with 1950's-style smiling heads and dated fonts, this billboard was in August 1987, thirty years ago, not sixty. But it was before the days of pocketable telephones, and before most people had any inkling of what the Internet was. In the summer of 1987 my emailing was entirely around my own campus. Later that year I started regular email conversations with some friends in the USA and in the UK. But that was not from a home computer yet. And certainly not from a telephone. This billboard makes me think someone high up at British Telecom said to their advertising team, "I bet those young people out there are dying to eavesdrop on the phone, like their parents did when they were young! Let's give them a chance! And make a few quid!!" I imagine that Talkabout did not last very long. I scanned this from a roll of Kodak Gold 200, shot in my Minolta X370 with its rather unsharp f/2.8 50mm lens. It is right between a string of pictures taken in Harlow, Essex, and some more taken in London. I think this was London, but I am not sure. And please don't think about the logic of the instructions. It appears that, if you were eighteen years old, you could not use the service. It had its detractors and got discussed in the House of Commons: hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/feb/09/telephone-talkabout-service