Tag: Bench Challenge

A Final Bench for The Bench Challenge

All through 2025, Jude of Travel Words fame has invited us to give our Sunday posts over to benches. Benches that are worth sitting on for the rest and comfort they offer, or for the views they preside over. Even though I’ve been an inconsistent post-provider, it would be rude to ignore this final Sunday. And just to be contrary, I’m offering not an actual bench, but a piece of street art in Angers, France, showing a bench – in honour of this song composed for Jeanne Moreau, who sang it in the film Jules et Jim.

Too Late to Take a Seat

A slightly enigmatic shot taken while clearing the Cellarium at Fountain’s Abbey after a concert.

And that’s it. Becky’s NovemberShadows are over. It’s been fun, at least for the participants, and I’ve ‘met’ new bloggers in almost every continent. Thanks, Becky, for being Queen of Squares.

For Becky’s NovemberShadows. And. Dead cheeky here. Jude’s Bench Challenge. Those first three. They look like a bench? Just … maybe?

A Bench by the Thames

On Thursday I walked the Thames Path from Woolwich via the Thames Barrier and the Millennium Dome to Cutty Sark in Greenwich. A story for another day. Today I’ll just show a view across the Thames, as enjoyed by two picnickers on a bench in the gentle shadow of the buildings near the Dome, especially selected for Jude’s Bench Challenge, and Becky’s NovemberShadows.

A Buxton Bench

Or is it two benches? Either way, it/they could do with a lick of paint to keep up with the cheerful shop front behind.

And that, Jude, is me done with benches I think. Unless I spot anything interesting in the remaining months of the year. My archive is now a bench-free zone – apart from the ones I’ve shown you. But it’s been fun. Thank you.

For Jude’s Bench Challenge.

A Bench on the Waterfront

Back when I lived in Leeds, its waterfront was emphatically not A Thing. It was certainly not called The Waterfront, being a disregarded area of town rotting behind the station, with long-closed mills and factories collapsing into weed-smothered decay. These dessicated buildings stood alongside ill-repaired streets, deserted except by cars whose owners parked here for free before scurrying off to work or shop in a more salubrious part of town. The River Aire, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal were uninviting, rubbish-clogged. The area wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good day out.

Nowadays, what a surprise! Mills and factories have been restored: repurposed as offices, shops, bars and restaurants. It’s busy day and night with local workers, tourists and pleasure-seekers. Canal boats saunter in and out. Here’s a woman enjoying a quiet moment, probably in her lunch break, on a bench overlooking the canal.

And here are members of a local art group, sketching the area in all its vibrancy one sunny August day. They seem to have commandeered all the benches-for-one.

For Jude’s Bench Challenge.

A Bench for a Fairy or Two

Last Sunday, my Spanish grandaughters went to fairyland. Actually, they went to Mother Shipton’s Cave. This long-established tourist site is where, back in the 1500s, a woman we now know as Mother Shipton apparently prophesied many things which came to pass, such as the Great Fire of London, and the invention of the iron ship. It’s also where you’ll find a source of water which petrifies into stone any objects left long enough beneath the roof of the cave from whence the water drips: calcified teddy bear anyone?

These days the paying public expects more, so this season, the woodland surrounding the cave has been transformed into a fairyland of exactly the kind beloved by small children. Anaïs and Olivia were entranced, especially when they met a real live fairy, all the way from Greece.

My featured photo is of a bench much favoured for sitting on by would-be fairies. The remaining shots are from other parts of the site.

For Jude’s Bench Challenge.