Author: David

Merry Christmas. Here’s some seasonal street decorations from a couple of European capital cities.

If the famous mannekin pis fountain wasn’t kitsch enough already, it gets dressed in a regularly changing array of costumes. I don’t know whether the little santa suit is an annual tradition or not.

There’s a shop entirely devoted to Lego among the up-market establishments on Berlin’s Potzdammer Platz (I assume it’s still there). They have big Lego models outside the shop. A life-sized Santa was there some years back.

Across the city, the Ku’Damm is another up-market shopping district. I’m not sure whether the larger than life figure here by one of the stalls of a Christmas market was meant to be Santa (beard, red trousers and boots) or one of the three kings (the crown).

Some of the reindeer from the Frankfurt Christmas Market in Birmingham city centre. Spot which of the reindeer are actually elk / moose.

The singing head on the glühwein / beer stall opposite the town hall has been there many years now. It missed once, then returned the following year, refurbished – it looks like it’s time it had some more care. No singing when I was there.

I saw this heron on the same day as the canal scenes in yesterday’s post. It was standing stoically on the snowy canal footpath at Compton, undisturbed by the noise of the traffic heading along the Bridgnorth Road.

This purple jellydisc fungus was growing on a felled tree trunk in the Northycote Farm Local Nature reserve back in 2015. It’s one of many fungi species which feeds off dead wood, helping to recycle it.

It’s also a species which reproduces by spreading two different types of spores. At different times of year the same individual fungus produces spores asexually and sexually, the former leading to clones of the originating fungus. The clonal pores are released from brownish fruiting bodies in spring, the so-called perfect form with sexual spores as autumn becomes winter.

On this day in 2010, snow on the ground and the beginnings of a layer of ice on the canal.  All pictures taken from the canalside footpath, from the Meccano Bridge which carries the Railway Walk over the canal near Compton, to Castlecroft Bridge carrying a farm track in the South Staffordshire countryside.

The strong blue colour of the snow in shadows was a reflection of the almost cloudless sky. The camera records that colour more accurately that our eyes.

What with the weather and one thing and another, I’ve not been taking many pictures recently. So from now to the end of the year it’s likely that most posts will be pictures I’ve dredged up from my archives, taken in some previous December, but only uploaded now.

To start, a Christmas emu, in Ilfracombe some fifteen years ago. It was in a field on the edge of the town, on the slopes of Hillsborough, where the coast path left in the direction of Combe Martin and Exmoor. It may have been around for some time: web searches throw up reports of an emu escaping and wandering round the town in 2015,