The Bus Stops Debate

We went away for a few days.

On Friday morning I went to get a flu jab. I waited at a bus stop where this sticker had been put up:

However before I could think about this much more, I was startled to see what I thought was a human skull lying in the undergrowth on the other side of the road. But when I tried to see it more clearly from another angle, parallax dissolved the illusion created by dead leaves and shadows. What a superb metaphor in search of a meaning.

I went to my GP clinic, got a flu jab, saw this notice:

When I got the bus back home I saw some other messaging had been put up on the other stop on our side of the road. There seems to be a conflict in progress – previously I have seen an anti-lockdown sticker disappear within a day of going up, and the one in the banner has also been torn away. And there was this one, message and comment:

We hired a car and travelled up to the Midlands. I had done a negative lateral flow test. At Banbury the retail park is now growing on both sides and will soon be a new town by itself.

in Redditch it seems the Advertiser is no longer in business but these are the notable stories in the Standard:

On Saturday we drove up North. By the M5 there was a banner advertising jobs available for tanker drivers, with “competitive wages”. The connection from the M5 to the M6 is the most Ballardian concrete edifice in the country. Along the M62 were the giant warehouses of Amazon and others.

We went to Widnes to see someone we hadn’t seen since September 2020. These are the main items in the Widnes Weekly News: