Thomas the Tank

Jun. 14th, 2025 09:29 pm
[personal profile] loganberrybunny
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M18 Hellcat, Kidderminster station, 14th June 2025
134/365: Tank destroyer, Kidderminster station
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On my way to Worcester today I noticed this outside Kidderminster station. It's not actually called Thomas, sadly. In spite of my (usually humorous) references to Kidderminster being a place only one step short of being a post-apocalyptic wasteland, this tank¹ had not been placed here to keep the peace. It was actually there as part of the Severn Valley Railway's annual "Back to the 1940s" weekend. Well, the first of two. This has been running for a long time now and is always one of the SVR's busiest events of the year. I'm rather ambivalent about it as I tend to think we go on and on and on about WW2 rather too much in the UK, but I have attended a couple of times and I won't deny that it made for an entertaining few hours.
¹ Technically an M18 Hellcat tank destroyer, but close enough!

Bit of an irony, really

Jun. 14th, 2025 09:49 am
[personal profile] loganberrybunny
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The widespread "No Kings" protests in the US today, objecting to (among many, many other things) the military parade for Trump's birthday, are happening on exactly the same day that our Actual King is attending... a military parade for his (official) birthday. :P

ETA: Americans, was that deliberate? The thought just occurred.

Much better weather today

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:29 pm
[personal profile] loganberrybunny
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Outdoor seating at Rise, Bewdley, 13th June 2025
133/365: Outside seating at Rise, Bewdley
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Sod's Law being what it is, today -- when I didn't need to leave Bewdley -- had considerably better weather than yesterday -- when I did. Warm and bright with a reasonable amount of sunshine, although it clouded over considerably later. I had a pretty uneventful day today, not even doing the tiniest amount of shopping. Did have haddock, chips and mushy peas for tea, though, which was probably the highlight. My photo is also food-related, I suppose. This is the outdoor (albeit with a roof) seating area out the front of Rise, a café along Severnside North. I thought it looked particularly cheerful today, and I'm very fond of the bright mural, especially the smiling flowers. :)

Darren Jones, you are an utter fool

Jun. 13th, 2025 01:09 pm
[personal profile] loganberrybunny
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Last night on BBC Question Time there was an exchange between Labour Cabinet minister Darren Jones and Reform's former chairman Zia Yusuf about migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. Jones started an answer with the words "the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women". Yusuf then claimed that "more than 90% of them are adult men".

As it happens, both were wrong. The UK government's own figures (section 1.1 there) show that "since January 2018, 71% of people detected arriving irregularly have been adult males aged 18 and over." Not all arrivals designated irregular are via small boats, but a large majority are; 86% is the figure given in the above-linked document.

But it's just such idiotically stupid politics by a government MP to insist on something that is so trivial to prove is wrong. Jones now looks as though he was either outright lying to the Question Time audience, which is unacceptable, or he wasn't in command of the facts on a subject that was near-certain to come up, which is incompetent.

And no, "Reform are full of racists" isn't remotely a good enough defence to this. It may very well be true, as Yusuf himself has quite possibly found in his own time in the party, but it still doesn't excuse a Cabinet minister baldly stating something that is utterly inaccurate, and that he should have known was utterly inaccurate.

It's a fundamental principle of politics, at least for me, that if you can't bring yourself to call out people on your own side of the fence, your comments cease to be debate and just become cheerleading. Jones should have done better.

Rather a grey day

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:29 pm
[personal profile] loganberrybunny
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St Mary's Steps, Bridgnorth, 12th June 2025
132/365: Old Kingdom Hall, St Mary's Steps, Bridgnorth
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I was in Bridgnorth today, and the weather was rather unhelpful. It was okay in the morning and on my way home, but lunchtime and early afternoon were grey and wet. It's a pleasant town to walk around, even when just going from place to place, in good conditions but it's a bit more of a trial when it's damp and grey and the light is flat (unlike the town). There were some rainbow flags in the High Street as it's Bridgnorth Pride on Saturday, but not in places I could easily get good photos. The best I could do for a 365 photo was this. It's looking down a portion of St Mary's Steps, one of many flights that link Bridgnorth's High Town with Low Town. The large building on the left is the Old Kingdom Hall -- yes, as in Jehovah's Witnesses; it's since been replaced by a newer Kingdom Hall on the edge of town. Those with good memories may recall that I used a pic of a nearby part of the same steps looking uphill back on 7th February.

RIP Brian Wilson

Jun. 12th, 2025 05:06 pm
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Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has died at the age of 82, and so today's music is chosen in his honour. I'm quite fond of the Beach Boys, so I had plenty of songs to choose from, but I've always really liked "God Only Knows" from the classic 1966 album Pet Sounds. Like the album it came from, the song did considerably better in the UK than in its native US. Over here it made it all the way to number two, kept off the top only by the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"/"Eleanor Rigby" double A-side. The video here is obviously much more recent, but it is an official one from the Beach Boys' own YouTube account, so I'm more than happy to embed it.

Areley Kings

Jun. 11th, 2025 11:36 pm
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Church House, Areley Kings, 11th June 2025
131/365: Church House, Areley Kings
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Here I am in June, and I've still not posted a single 365 photo from Stourport, the nearest town to Bewdley! In my defence, there is a reason for that, in fact: its direct bus service from here is pretty limited, much more so than several more distant towns such as Ludlow. Nevertheless, I hope to post a few pics from Stourport in the coming weeks and months. You're nearly getting one today, as this is Church House in Areley Kings, a small village that's basically stuck on to the fringes of Stourport these days. It was built in 1536 and restored in 2013; it's now hired out for small events and to community groups. It gets its name from St Bartholomew's Church next door, which pre-dates it by a couple of hundred years.

Where there's muck there's brass

Jun. 10th, 2025 11:34 pm
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Brass foundry office, Bewdley, 10th June 2025
130/365: Brass foundry office, Bewdley Museum
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Today started out rather damp, but things eventually improved and the evening was warm and sunny, which weather is supposed to continue into tomorrow. We'll see! As it's June, the sun didn't set until well after 9 pm, and given my latitude (about 52 °N) the sky never really gets fully dark overnight. It's no midnight sun, but you can see slightly more light if you look north in the early hours, which is always a mildly strange feeling! I did a bit of top-up food shopping today, having to go to three different shops to find chives which was very slightly annoying. It's not as if they're a herb that's highly obscure!

My photo for today has nothing to do with that, other than being in Bewdley. This is part of a re-creation of the old brass foundry, which operated here on and off from the late 1600s until the 1960s. The building is now part of the town's small but interesting (and free!) museum. In fact brass-making was revived here for a little while in the earlier years of the museum's operation, but eventually modern safety standards caught up with it to the extent that it couldn't be sufficiently modernised at a sensible cost or without losing its historic character. Since then the foundry has made use of exhibits like this, multimedia presentations, etc.

I do actually remember seeing brass being made here before the museum foundry had to shut up shop in 1996. As a child I was brought here by my parents (I grew up only a few miles away) and it was quite an exciting sight. Cramped, noisy and -- what I'm sure sealed its fate -- very, very dusty! We visitors had to enter by a different door to the workers, and we were kept several metres away behind a perspex screen. Given that molten brass has a melting point of about 950 °C, it was sensible to keep us away from the furnaces! Sadly I can't find a video of Bewdley brass-making in those days, which is a pity.

A little urban charm

Jun. 9th, 2025 11:29 pm
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Poppies, Bewdley, 9th June 2025
129/365: Poppies, Bewdley
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Not a great deal to report today, as I didn't really do anything terribly interesting. I did enjoy some rum and raisin ice cream, which is one of my favourite flavours, though in truth the weather was only just warm enough for it. It's supposed to be a good deal warmer from Wednesday onwards, with temperatures into the mid-20s, but also a substantial risk of thunderstorms. I popped into Sainsbury's to get a snack, but I dithered so much that I didn't end up buying anything. Today's photo was taken on the eastern edge of Bewdley, along Kidderminster Road. There's a building site just over the wall you can see here, so the poppies create a nice splash of colour to compensate a bit.
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Today's U-turn on Winter Fuel Allowance payments is arguably fairly reasonable in its intent, in that it means truly wealthy pensioners will not receive WFA but those on average incomes will. Put like that, it sounds fine, and in principle I can get behind it. The snag is... well, the several snags are:

1) The government has insisted, loudly, since last year that on no account would they do this, and that anyone suggesting they'd U-turn was not telling the truth. The "anyones" were telling the truth; the government wasn't.
2) Rachel Reeves has acquired a reputation as an extremely poor Chancellor who neither sticks by her commitments nor acknowledges U-turns. This will make that reputation even worse.
3) The new limit will be £35,000 a year, per person. But a couple on a combined income of £69,000 with no mortgage is much wealthier than the large majority of working people, especially those with children to support.
4) We're told that whether someone reaches the £35,000 mark will be decided via income tax returns. But most pensioners who have no other income don't do tax returns in the first place.
5) The change will cost £1.2 billion. Where's that coming from? Almost nobody believes Reeves' comment that the economy is suddenly doing sufficiently better to afford this.
6) There's already a strong sense that wealthier pensioners are uniquely shielded from cuts while everyone else suffers -- the triple lock is another example. This looks like strengthening that feeling.
7) If previously announced public spending, eg the extra money for public transport outside London, is cut again to pay for this then there will be absolute carnage in Labour's support in the regions.
8) The UK's demographics mean that the pensioner:worker ratio is becoming ever more tilted towards pensioners. If current trends continue, this change will become less affordable, not more.
9) One way of ameliorating this is by allowing more immigration -- but this is becoming politically toxic. England (specifically) is the most densely populated non-tiny country in Europe.
10) Nigel Farage, who pushed for this change, now has a clear win. Everyone knows that Reform's economics are far more fantastical than Labour's, but it doesn't seem to affect its polling.

Other than that, it's absolutely fine...

Colliers time!

Jun. 8th, 2025 09:31 pm
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Colliers Country Stores, 8th June 2025
128/365: Colliers Country Stores
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I was treated to breakfast by someone today at the Colliers. This is a pub-restaurant a few miles west of Bewdley, near the small village of Clows (rhymes with "cows") Top. Their breakfast baps are truly excellent -- I went for sausage, bacon and tomato today. Then it was off to the next-door shop you see here. It sells some ordinary things, which are frankly expensive, but of more interest to me are the local pies and pasties, Bennetts ice cream (my favourite farmhouse brand) and cider. All of these were acquired today, so I think it counts as a successful mission! The shop also sells a few locally made ornaments and such -- you can just see some of the wooden animals (reindeer and rabbits) inside the outer door.

Worcester Cathedral

Jun. 7th, 2025 09:46 pm
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Worcester Cathedral, 7th June 2025
127/365: Worcester Cathedral from Cathedral Square
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I was once again in Worcester to see friends today, but after I'd left that meetup I had a short time to do some shopping before my bus home. I took the opportunity for a photo, as you can see! This is Worcester Cathedral, taken from the first floor balcony in the Cathedral Square centre (a few restaurants and coffee shops, plus a hotel). I had several goes at getting a snap with all of the flags visible, but this was the closest I got! You can easily see the Ukrainian flag on the left, then the Union Flag. The third pole currently has a Pride flag, but that one refused to co-operate. On the top of the Cathedral tower is the English flag (St George's Cross). As you can probably tell from the sky, the weather was a tad iffy today, though fortunately the heavy rain held off until I was on the bus back!

A real local legend

Jun. 6th, 2025 11:34 pm
[personal profile] loganberrybunny
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Teddy Gray's van, Bewdley, 6th June 2025
126/365: Teddy Gray's van, Bewdley
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This van belongs to Teddy Gray's (or Grays; they use both spellings) sweet shop, which is off to the left and round the corner. Teddy Gray's is a local fixture, having had a shop in Bewdley for generations; it hasn't changed much beyond going to metric weights (ie selling in units of 100g, not ¼ lb) some years ago. The company is based in Dudley and was founded in 1826, so it will be 200 next year! It moved to its North Street factory in 1933 and still makes sweets in a traditional, old-fashioned way. The herbal tablets advertised on this van -- "for cold nights and mornings" is a very long-standing ad for them -- are among the company's most famous products. They're throat pastilles rather than sweets as such, but everyone who's ever eaten one will recognise their distinctive smell and taste!
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Wikipedia page including full result here. This by-election in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse constituency was for the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, and was caused by the death of the sitting SNP MSP Christina McKelvie in March. The by-election was held under the first past the post system used for Westminster elections, and the top four in the result were as follows:

Labour......... 8,559 (31.6%, -2.0 pts)
SNP............ 7,957 (29.4%, -16.8 pts)
Reform......... 7,088 (26.1%, new)
Conservative... 1,621 ( 6.0%, -11.5 pts)

The six other candidates were even more also-rans than the Tories, with none of them winning more than 2.6% of the vote. Turnout was 44.2%.

I wonder how many people saw this result coming? There'd even been a front-page interview in the Daily Record by the SNP's First Minister, John Swinney, which was predicated on the idea that this would be a straight SNP/Reform fight and "Labour can't win here". In the event, they could and they did. My own view, for what it's worth, was that the SNP would probably hang on with a reduced majority, with Reform and Labour in a close battle for second. I was wrong too.

From down here in England I'm obviously missing some context, such as how much of a personal vote McKelvie had, but a few things come to mind. First, the days of the SNP simply cruising to election victories are gone. They've been in power at Holyrood for a long time now, and Swinney just doesn't have the star power of Nicola Sturgeon. "It's all England's fault, vote for us and independence" is a rather unfair way of representing the SNP's pitch, but the heavy fall in the party's vote suggests they'll need a lot more than that. They may struggle to get close to a majority in Holyrood next year.

Labour will be delighted on the surface, and after all a win is a win. However, they lost vote share since last time (2021), and only won the seat because the SNP lost a lot more. Given that Labour is an opposition party in the Scottish Parliament, getting under a third of the vote is not some kind of overwhelming mandate. I suspect that a lot of anti-Reform and anti-SNP voters simply coalesced around Labour as the least worst option. In parts of this constituency unionism is still a strong factor, and Labour might have been seen as best placed there, too.

Reform has, inevitably, got the lion's share of media attention. This has been a bit silly in places -- as someone said elsewhere, the BBC in particular has been a bit "Labour won from the SNP, now let's talk to third-place winner Nigel Farage", which is something they do far too much. Nevertheless, going from zero to over a quarter of the vote isn't something anyone can ignore. I said a little while ago that Scottish (and Welsh) politicians should not be smug about Reform's victories in English local elections and imagine they were magically immune. This underlines that.

The Tories had a terrible night. I'm sure they expected that, but it was a fall from a respectable position four years ago. They clearly lost a lot of voters to Reform, but Reform didn't only win from the Conservatives. I suspect in fact they took some from Labour -- and even some from the SNP. Although the SNP is fairly unusual in modern Europe in being a liberal, left-wing nationalist party, not all its members are of that persuasion. It would be a mistake to assume that Reform's blend of social conservatism and left-wing economics didn't appeal to some SNP voters.

First Past the Post is a poor electoral system, but it's an even worse one now we have an extra major party in the mix. I suspect that in Westminster by-elections too, we will see more results like this in the coming years, with winners on barely (or even less than) 30% of the vote. The optimist in me hopes this will finally see us adopting a modern voting system, but the optimist in me has been repeatedly disappointed over the last decade or so.

I do have one final thought about Reform's popularity, both here and in Great Britain as a whole. These days, the main traditional parties go for an almost obsessively targeted, data-driven approach to canvassing, concentrating heavily on winnable floating voters or getting their base out. That means a lot of people never see a canvasser at election time. It's easy for those voters to feel the main parties don't care about their views. There's a clear space there for a party who'll "do things differently", and some evidence suggests many Reform voters usually don't vote at all. I think the traditional parties need to take some note of this. To a certain extent, their laser focus on a small subset of voters may be helping Reform...

Rain, rain, go away

Jun. 5th, 2025 11:37 pm
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Dog Lane car park, Bewdley 5th June 2025
125/365: Dog Lane car park, Bewdley
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It was pretty wet at times today, especially but not only in the morning. I did pretty much nothing of actual interest, just worked on boring everyday stuff, did chores, got a small amount of shopping and so on. That also means I didn't get any interesting photos for the 365 -- so you get this one of a car park! Actually two, since the barriered space on the left is for staff at the medical centre, which is the building you see on the left. The public car park is the area to the right, which extends out of shot. The chemist (pharmacist) I use is just out of shot to the left, and the public library is the last building in the row, just visible in the distance.

All kinds of political stuff happening, and no I don't just mean tonight's US soap opera/horror show involving Trump and Musk. We've got quite enough to be going on with here. A Parliamentary by-election in Scotland, one of Reform's leaders resigning in a strop, the Russian ambassador partly blaming the UK for the Ukrainian drone attack... there's more, but I'm too tired to write about all this tonight.
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Long-time readers here will know that my views on AI (more accurately here, LLMs, which are only a subset of AI) are rather mixed. Unlike some people I don't think it's even necessarily desirable, let alone possible, for "AI to go away". However, neither am I an AI (okay, LLM) fanboy. Although the publicly available chatbots have improved noticeably in the last couple of years, they still have all sorts of issues -- hallucinations, repetitiveness, US bias, hectoring, etc etc.

Since yesterday was the 36th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre, I was curious to see how DeepSeek -- the Chinese chat bot most easily accessible to Western users -- would handle a question on the matter. The results were actually quite interesting, though not without serious problems and concerns. I'll share the entire conversation with you. I'd hoped to post it locally, under a cut, but DW simply refuses to co-operate and format it properly, so click on the link below to read. (No login or personal details required.)

"What happened on this day in 1989?"

Till the cows come home

Jun. 4th, 2025 09:47 pm
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Cattle from Silverwoods Way, Kidderminster, 4th June 2025
124/365: Cattle below Silverwoods Way, Kidderminster
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I've finally been starting to catch up with Doctor Who. For ages I'd only seen the first two episodes of the current series, of which I had mixed feelings about "The Robot Revolution" but really liked "Lux". I also really liked "The Well", which was full-on scary in a way Who doesn't often nail these days. Probably the best episode since "73 Yards" last year. I also watched "Lucky Day", which was so nearly another great. The twist was superbly executed -- I did not see that coming -- but although I heavily sympathised with the Doctor's monologue to Conrad it seemed to have the common-these-days RTD fault of being far too unsubtle.

Today's 365 photo is from Kidderminster. Yes, oh ye of little faith, I did indeed take this picture in Kidderminster! To be precise, I was looking down from Silverwoods Way in the south of the town. These cattle are not part of a normal beef or dairy herd; instead they are kept by the local authorities to make sure that the important wildlife habitat doesn't simply end up as endless scrub. They all seem to be lazing about a bit here, which is something I rather envied them for as I passed by! You can't go right down there yourself -- that rough path is used to take feed to them -- but it makes a change to see this in a very built-up area.
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Entrance to Hole Farm, Bewdley, 3rd June 2025
123/365: Hole Farm, just outside Bewdley
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This isn't the most interesting scene in and of itself, I know, but I chose to include it in my 365 series for a reason. This is the entrance to Hole Farm, just to the west of Bewdley. An unusual name for a farm, but although it's a tranquil place now it has a dark history. It's named after the nearby "Bloody Hole" valley, where Royalist troops were caught and massacred in 1651 after fleeing the Battle of Worcester. That battle was the final major engagement of the English Civil War (more accurately, of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms) and the Parliamentarians' victory led to the flight of the future Charles II and, eventually, Oliver Cromwell becoming Lord Protector of England. The "Bloody Hole" is rarely mentioned now, and I only found out about it myself a few years ago thanks to a small book of local history which I'd been reading for another reason.
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He lost the last battle for the Conservative Party leadership to Kemi Badenoch, but by common consent inside and outside the party, Badenoch has failed to make much of an impression. The Tories are still languishing in the polls, failing to reach 20% for ten polls running as I write. Given the deep unpopularity of the Labour government, they will feel they should be doing better than that. Of course, part of the problem for both parties is the surge of Reform, which is now routinely recording 6-10 point leads and hasn't been behind in a single national poll since mid-April. It's no longer realistic to call that a blip.

Jenrick is generally seen as pretty right-wing even by Tory standards, and he is sympathetic to many Reform policies.¹ However, he started out in politics as a centrist in the party, and that's doubtless given him a better idea than some about what mainstream voters might find appealing. His recent video in which he confronted fare dodgers at a Tube station was a political stunt, absolutely -- but an awful lot of people who wouldn't normally support him found themselves sympathising. I freely own up to being one of them. In my experience, rail fare dodgers are only rarely those who genuinely struggle to afford the cost.
¹ Though an as yet under-explored aspect of Reform's appeal is that its platform includes some quite left-wing economic policies...

And now he's weighed in against the conviction of Hamit Coksun, who burned a Quran outside the Turkish Embassy while shouting insults about Islam. Again, this is a clever political move by Jenrick, as quite a few people have expressed concern that this conviction comes close to reviving (at least de facto) the blasphemy law that was finally taken off the books in England in 2008. That concern comes from well beyond the usual right-wing tweeters: for example, the National Secular Society, which is hardly a mouthpiece for the alt-right, has contributed significantly towards Coksun's legal fees.

People have wondered for a while whether Jenrick would jump ship to Reform, but after the last week or so I think that's probably unlikely. I think he's clever enough to realise that Reform is held together by Nigel Farage, and that when Farage finally goes it's likely to splinter badly. I think what he wants to do is to take the Conservatives in a direction where they can get at least some support from "old Labour" voters, who are often quite socially conservative. I still don't like Jenrick and I would never vote for him myself. But I don't think it's entirely out of the question that he could be the next PM.

Das Boot

Jun. 2nd, 2025 11:42 pm
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Husum boat, Kidderminster station, 2nd June 2025
122/365: Kidderminster-Husum friendship boat
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No, not Das Boot the film! Since I started my 365 project on 1st February owing to my procrastination, I'm only now reaching the one-third mark on the journey. Today's photo is of the replica boat outside Kidderminster station, donated by Kiddy's twin town of Husum in far northern Germany. The boat was installed here last year, and it's added a very welcome splash of colour to the entrance to the station car park. Over the road in the background you can see Captain Cod's Fish Bar on the far left, and the Railway Bell pub with the white door. The road itself, Comberton Hill, is annoyingly steep if you walk up it from the town centre about half a mile away off to the left as you look at this photo.

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