Coventry Christmas

Urban mistletoe

Right next to Coventry Railway Station are these two healthy globes of mistletoe. I've heard it's been a very good year for mistletoe, as with all fruits, but I've never seen it in a city before.

Nativity

I don't want to get into the current debate about how we celebrate Christmas, but it's interesting that this was the only thing I saw in the city today which portrayed the event it is about. It's a three-quarters life-size nativity, carved from reclaimed wood by a Polish craftsman.

Sunset behind big wheel

As Coventry's city fathers of the 1980s built an ugly shopping centre over the only city centre open space, the essential fairground rides have to be shoe-horned into the pedestrian precincts. At ground levels this makes getting about more difficult than usual (bah humbug!) but creates some interesting skylines.

There we go: the pagan, the Christian and the commercial angles of Christmas, all encountered in one short afternoon's stroll. Have a lovely Christmas, and I'll see you in the New Year.

Sowe in spate


I cross over this river every morning on my way to work. The level goes up quickly when it rains, possibly because it is an urban river and so much around is impermeable concrete and tarmac. But the highest yet was last week.


This is the same part of the river at more normal levels, in October. The shopping trolley is still there, but it is accumulating quantities of debris. It probably makes quite a nice sheltered habitat for little river-dwellers.

I cycle over the River Avon too, which seems to respond less quickly but still occasionally looks as if it could make me very late for work. It does apparently sometimes flood the road. Incidentally the Avon used to flow into the Sowe rather than the other way round. In the '60s river works swapped them so the Sowe flows into the Avon. Or so says my local paper. Stratford is Stratford-on-Avon not Stratford-on-Sowe, which does seem to imply that the general opinion has been Sowe > Avon for some not-inconsiderable time...