Wolves Wild

When I last visited West Park, back in early June, the sole surviving Canada goose gosling was growing rapidly, but was still being guarded by the parents.

Window display in a Cologne city centre shop devoted to the sale of noble metals, with a scarf which I presumed was in the colours of one of the local football teams.

Round the corner, a popular bar had the same model of statue. This time the goat itself, as well as the scarf it was wearing, in blue and white colours: perhaps the other football team. No pictures of this one – I was too busy drinking their Koelsch.

One of the pairs of turfed ducks which stayed on West Park lake over the summer. The female was just about to dive in search of something to eat.

From way back in the middle of May, and already at the end of the flowering season even then, a bluebell in the small patch of woodland on the path between Compton Mill Lock and the Railway Walk.

Early June. One of the rock rose (cistus) bushes in West Park covered in flowers. The flowers in their turn were attracting lots of bees gathering pollen.

The fashion started in pre-unification East Berlin, which had a quirky design to the cartoon figures used on pedestrian crossings. Post unification, and after some humming and hawing, the designs were adopted across the whole city, becoming a tourist attraction in their own right.

In the past thirty-odd years, many other cities across Germany and around the world have adapted the idea, often basing their designs on well known figures associated with their locality. Trier commissioned these to mark the bicentennial of Karl Marx’ birth there.

Another marker of the 200th anniversary is a 15 ton, 5 metre high statue gifted to the city by the Chinese state. I preferred this statue, in the window of a city centre art shop.