Putting Your Finger On It

Today I returned from a beautiful cycle into the hills only to see a mural that had been started that morning at the end of my street getting finished. I stopped to enquire as to what they were painting and it turned out they were celebrating the nature of our neighbourhoods, Cessnock, Ibrox, and Govan. There were newts, bats, a bird man (of Pollok), a local pond, and a badger (Ibrox meaning the place of the badger). There were no people, no pets, no smartphones, and no cars. And then I saw my name, Roman, that the artist had just signed in the middle of the mural not because this was his name but because, apparently, someone had walked by with a dog called Roman. And I just couldn't put my finger on it, the strangeness, the synchronicity, of my extolling the virtues of Nature these past couple of years in this area amongst others via the stencil. I had never put my name to them though, and so I chortled at the coincidence. That somehow the universe was saying something to me, that somehow I was saying something to myself. But I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Road Signs as Frames

And so, another frame (another useless road sign) gets painted along the Sustrans cycle path with something a little less useless.

A437

Ok, so you've probably guessed that I hate cars. The car is the most demented and stupid item man has ever created. And yet...

And so when I came across this useless little road sign telling foot pedestrians on a footbridge that this open gas pipeline (road) is the A437 I thought 'Nice one, what a lovely little frame.'

Kermit by Kilbarchan

Boy was I surprised at how evil some people can be when I came across poor Jeanne Moreau's 'figure' defaced so violently. I had put up a stencil of her (see previous post) on an opportune plaque along the sustrans cycle path at Kilbarchan. The following week when I passed here, I noticed (you couldn't not notice) that someone had taken their keys or a knife to the wood itself upon which it was painted and gouged it so violently that I actually wanted to meet this 'evil person' to ask him why he did it. At any rate, today I painted over it as best as I could and put Kermit up in Moreau's place. But the site has been ruined for good I fear due to this moron's antics. What can you do? You put up some art and people destroy it. Go figure.

Steam

Ok, so the picture above is not mine, but what a cracker! And it's the same steam engine that I saw yesterday chugging through Kilpatrick station which you can see below. It's one of the Strathspey/Jacobite engines now which has been plying Britain's railways since 1945. And I saw it, and it was good. Everyone else missed it cause they were staring into their hands.

Engine 44871 passing through Kilpatrick. (Above) The same engine passing across Rannoch Moor.

Two Jeanne Moreaux & A Jean-Pierre Leaud

On my routine cycle where nothing is ever routine since I'm out on the open on a bicycle I pass three schools in amongst the villages and towns. For a large part of the route I'm on the Sustrans cycle path - a bucolic corridor of a million trees that leads us down to the coast as serenely as possible. And so, a little tasteful 'artwork' and not 'graffiti' as the three lads having a pathside San Miguel corrected me.