Chalked rainbow

Such home-made rainbows - painted, chalked, made of fabric - are appearing everywhere.  They are intended as a sign of hope to all during the coronavirus crisis.

Coal-door

It was hard to work out at first what the function of this little door was - or what, when it was opened, you might see.

A passer-by explained that it was an old coal-hole.
Most houses' coal-holes would be at ground-level, as the coal-store was often in the house cellar, and the coal merchant could just pour his delivery straight in and down. Presumably this house had no cellar, or coal-shed, so a back-room must have been used - and this unusually high coal-hole was where the load was poured in.

Action - frozen

The only action at Port Vale Football Club in Stoke on Trent right now is in this frozen pose of Roy Sproson. 
Games at the ground have been cancelled due to the coronavirus.

Roy was one heck of a player; and fans toiled long and hard to raise the funds to have this staue made and installed. 
The Vale languishes at the moment, but once, seventy years ago, reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup. Fans have long memories.

Closed due to Corona

Villagers have been used to buy their eggs here at this farm each day.  Not this week.
So it goes.

No buses stop here

Bus services in rural, and even now in semi-rural areas too, have been simply cut. They are no more.
This means that there are many bus shelters that are useless.

But parish councils continue to maintain even very remote ones, like this example on the road to Dilhorne, in the rather sad & forlorn hope that ‘one day bus services may come back’.      

The power of Rugeley

Rugeley has never been considered a pretty town – and it’s not.  It’s the centre of an old mining district, and, like so many of former such towns, now feels neglected and forlorn.
In fact, it is now more famous for the huge power station on its fringes.

There is an odd sense of pride in Rugeleyans; they seem to say, “industrialised is what we were, and what we are - and we don’t worry about it much… why do you?”

Nudes for the suburbs

January is the month for garden centres.
It is very strange to me that sales of nude and semi-nude female statues are the centrepiece of many of them, such as this one at Trentham.
What is it all about?

Although they pretend a guise of being quasi-classical atworks, they are in reality, plainly ... semi-naked ladies, meant for the pleasure of the suburban gardener.

That which is necessary

Well, a joke in church is never a totally bad thing.
In the church at Sandon, the toilet door is labelled (in Latin) as a 'necessarium'...

Shafts like art

Unless you know that Biddulph is an old coal mining area, you'll probably not guess that these three structures are ventilation shafts. The dangerous gases that build up in the old works down below can be released safely through them into the atmosphere.
The low brick walls around them give them a kind of arty feeling, and their arrangement even has echoes of standing stones.

Frida, the face of hip

The 'face' of everything hip, universally recognisable, used to be Marilyn Monroe, or Elvis, or James Dean.
Now the equivalent is the 20th-century Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, whose image seems to be ubiquitous. 
In a local Oxfam shop these Christmas cards depicting her as an angel don't even need to say it's her - we just know it is.