Looked in the eye at Hallam's

I walked into Hallam's on the High Road looking for fish and all I saw was this — an eye staring out at me.

I don't know if the display on Hallam's fish counter intended to be as eye-catching as it was. My next visit will be on Tuesday and I will be looking for a treat. Until I was in my thirties it would have been skate, but a visit with my children to the then newly opened Sea World in Birmingham ,where we had skate eating from our hands made me see this wonderful fish completely differently. I don't eat chicken because I use to have a pet hen when I was child. Irrational I know. When we have visitors I take them into Hallam's with me. A wonderful greengrocery and fishmonger by any measure.

The Fabric Place on Chilwell Road has a lovely 'seaside and beach hut' display in its window at the moment which caught my attention. Susan had gone there to buy some denim. To see the display in more detail click on the picture and it will enlarge (as will Hallam's fish counter).

What prompted our walk was the  need to collect our car from the garage after servicing and when we got there we noticed some cottages we had, somehow, managed to miss before, even though they were right in front of us all the time. It is so easy to miss Bridge Avenue on the south side of Chilwell High Road, sandwiched as it is between to large garage forecourts packed full of cars.

Three houses collectively named Carlyle Cottages dated 1906...

...and to their right another three named Ruskin Cottages dated 1906.

What we now have to learn more about is how they came to be built, assuming that their naming is linked to the 19th century radicals Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. This would would suggest they were built to house workers. A quick search of the web provides no answer, so we will have to ask around.

The one other house on Bridge Avenue is called Rugby Cottage and also dated 1906, which suggests all were built at the same time, though the latter in a very different style. Were all three built by the same person?

It never cease to amaze me how every time I walk along a road or ride the same journey on a bus I notice something new or different every time. It shouldn't, because that is how life is... a ever changing right before our eyes. To have gone to the garage to collect our car and to have left wondering made the visit special.

The afternoon ended beside the Trent. Lenton, where we lived for thirty-five years, and Beeston are neighbouring historic parishes with the River Trent as their southern boundary, yet both seem to have turned their backs on this river which in the minds of many (wrongly of course) is what seperates England into north and south. I do sometimes wonder how both would see themselves if they were named Beeston-on-Trent and Lenton-on-Trent? I suspect it would be a little differently. The outside world would be more attracted to them as destinations, of that I am sure.

The picture is from the east side of Beeston weir looking across the Trent to Clifton Hall. I think this section down towards Clifton Bridge is one of the loveliest.