More urban art

Our monarch in a bullet-ridden smart car has been repaced by this Dan Innes stencil that I just don't get, called "Where to darlin'?". Is it a stencilled equivalent of the rocket launch cliché in films?

His website has some pictures of him making the work:

http://www.daninnes.co.uk/

Up the garden paths

A newly restored tiled front path just up the road inspired this collection of images documenting a variety of refurbished neighbouring paths where the original tiles have been replaced, as well as some of the few surviving Victorian patterns. Ours is original and one of the prettiest, I think. A similar design featured in the Boyle Family's Broken Path series, which I saw at the Hayward Gallery in 1986 soon after I started studying at St Martin's. We had already lived in this house for some years and I was thrilled to find our front path on the gallery wall - the first path is ours. It inspired a series of plastercast works, one of my only attempts at 3D or relief. Theirs are in fibreglass and very large scale:
http://www.boylefamily.co.uk/index.html

http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/online_az/4:322/result/0/418?initial=B&artistId=4553&artistName=Boyle%20Family&submit=1

This is the new path:

M4: a tale of woe

Despite frequent roadworks, the journey time was good from London to Swansea down the M4 last Friday .... that is until Junction 33, just after Cardiff. A four-hour delay, much of it stationary, after a bad crash involving a lorry and van closed a significant section of the westbound motorway. It took almost three hours to get off the slip road and onto the A48, but the pain was in part compensated by the pleasure of rediscovering a childhood route with beautiful scenery, barely glimpsed from the motorway - the picturesque villages of St Fagans and St Nicholas, the panorama coming down the hill to Bridgend, Pyle (we used to chant "one mile to Pyle" as we passed the white milestone).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/8639609.stm

The only plane over Heathrow

When I drove back to London on Sunday evening, the only plane from Heathrow since last Thursday was just taking off on a short test trip to Cardiff. The results must have been negative as the flight ban still applies, at least over Southern England. By the time I got my camera out, it was just a matchbox toy in the sky, in fact I thought I'd missed it, but the detail shows I hadn't.

Air traffic chaos hits Swansea

The Evening Post takes a less than global perspective on the international travel crisis, making a molehill out of a mountain - or volcano in this case.

Volcanic skies

In South Wales for the past week there have been spectacular skies and technicolour sunsets, an effect perhaps of ash from the Icelandic volcano that has grounded all UK flights. Travelling light and in haste, I left my digital SLR in London, so there has only been my Ixus to capture inadequately something of the effects.

Desktop bliss

Driving down the M4 last Thursday, I glimpsed views that almost replicated the Windows desktop screen saver (called 'bliss'). Vivid green spring grass silhouetted against intense blue sky, patterned with ranks of fluffy fairweather cumulus. I grabbed this shot (driving slowly through one of many roadworks) and wished I could have captured the panorama seen just before the Windsor/Slough junction, a pastoral idyll of sheep and lambs against the green hillside.