Lions are a popular subject for portrayal on door knockers. Are they meant to deter unwelcome visitors? Most of the ones in these sets are from domestic front doors which have caught my attention over the years. Can you spot one from a door of the cathedral in Mainz?
A few lion images which are not doorknockers have crept in. From inns (though none happen to be from pub signs), from an alms house building in Ludlow, and a long-defunct drinking water fountain in the same town.
A robin posing on a tree, on a Christmas Day some years ago. It didn’t want to move so a holly bush could be in the background.
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.