Comic Cuts - 25 September 2015

Our quiet little town seems to be a hotbed of news in recent weeks. Following the rather sad story of two schoolkids being injured on the High Street (about thirty yards from where I'm writing this), this week the headlines were about a fire that engulfed a train shed down at the local station... five minutes walk away. Certainly a walk we do regularly as the shed—which has been boarded up for as long as we've been here—is at the head of what's known as the Wivenhoe Cycle Trail, aka The Maurice Britton Walk.

Mel and I often start our Sunday walk sauntering past the station. I must admit that we never realised what was behind the hoardings and scaffolding. To us, it was the site of a war of words: a graffiti artist regularly targeted the plain boards with insults, which were then painted over. In the past few months the graffiti had turned into a dialogue with the people covering it up. You can see the last bit of graffiti on the photo below: "the tories don't care" in the lower left corner, which is admittedly far less interesting than some of the language we've been reading on our way past over the summer.

Two days later, in nearby Mersea, a steam engine fell off a flatbed lorry after it crashed into a bus, seriously injuring the driver and 21 passengers.

All this excitement makes up for the lack thereof in my own life. As related last week, I've been tied up with my day (part-time) job so tightly that I haven't had much time for anything else. The good news is that the latest issue went off to the printers on time—albeit, the revised time—on Tuesday and I was able to take a day off on Wednesday, which expanded into a day off also on Thursday. Not that I was idle. What happened was that I'd hoped to write up some of the research I was doing on Wednesday morning, but it grew so unwieldy that I decided to tackle something else. Which then did much the same thing. It has taken all of Thursday to whip it (mostly) into shape and I'll hopefully post it over the weekend, or Monday if I don't get it finished tomorrow.

No random scans this week as my cleaning-up efforts have all gone into the James Hadley Chase and Agatha Christie cover galleries.  Chase is now up to 73 images with at least that many again still to go; the Christie has 34 and an impossible-to-guess number left in the folder. I shall keep plugging away at both of these until I've eventually cleared the decks of scans.

Instead, here are a couple of pictures of the Colne taken last Sunday. The first is actually three pictures photoshopped together; the second two pictures of some recent works. We've no idea what's going on, whether they're demolishing something or building something. What we did discover was that, now they've cleared some of the trees on the far right of the picture, there's a road which we never noticed before. It's one of the reasons I enjoy just snapping photos around the town – there are subtle changes happening all the time and, if I'm lucky, I might just capture some of them.