One hundred and five: bluebells

One hundred and four: bluebells, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Bluebells are a mythical kind of flower to me. They seemed to feature heavily in the very old-fashioned children's stories and poems we read (or had read to us), and I always imagined them much larger, and more sky blue than they actually are. I like them better this way, delicate and subtle

Here in England they're a protected species, and bluebell woods are highly prized locations to visit. This isn't one of them, it's a neighbour's front garden (that's the lid of city of Preston recycling box you see there in the bottom left corner), but they're still lovely.

One hundred and four: Frogged

One hundred and four: Frogged, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is the result of having to undo most of a sleeve for the cardigan I'm knitting because I stupidly thought I remembered the pattern. I didn't.

Full-scale ripping out of knitting is called frogging, because ripping out sounds like ribbet. Working backwards in a row to fix a recent mistake is called tinking, ie, knitting, backwards.

The things you learn from me.

One hundred and three: earworm

One hundred and three: earworm, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Today I had to go to Blackburn, Lancashire, for a doctor's appointment and I have been plagued by an earworm the whole day.

You bet I went looking for holes to photograph but I couldn't find any, so you will have to settle for this rather strange building facade. I don't believe the text has anything to do with the bull's head, which is also above the doorway of the place next door, which seems to be a night club. All very odd.

Edited to add: apparently this building is Thwaites House, which may well be the original headquarters of Thwaites, a large northern brewery, although I still don't understand the bulls. Thwaites' logo is two horses' heads.

One hundred and two: sky

One hundred and two: sky, originally uploaded by meganknight.

England doesn't really do the dramatic skies, at least not in the way Africa does, but this did catch my eye. The tree is a local one, just a block or so away, and although everything else is green, it is showing only the faintest of reddish buds, even now.

One hundred and one: flowers

One hundred and one: flowers, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is a random bush on campus, and I'm afraid I have no idea what it is. Although this looks rather like a hydrangea, this bloom is much smaller, about eight cm across, and the bush is much bigger and bushier, with fewer blooms on it than a hydrangea would have.

I love white flowers, and loose and soft flowers, like these ones. I like things that look fairly natural and unforced, unmanipulated. Of course, having no idea what this is, it could well be some weird artificial hybrid never seen in nature, but I like it any way.

One hundred: object

One hundred: object, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is a little pewter object that we found in a flea market in Glasgow. We don't know what it is, although the shape seems somewhat religious to me (although the shell is not, I suppose). It's beautifully made, and doesn't seem to have been used, but then, pewter never really looks used.

It's a lovely, odd, unintelligible thing.

Ninety-nine: Mill

Ninety-nine: Mill, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is Tulketh Mill, just up the road from us, and clearly the most important building in the neighbourhood. It was a cotton mill, the largest and most modern in Preston when it opened in 1905, but it didn't last long as such. THe cotton industry went into decline after world war one, and by the 1960s the mill had shut down. It was converted into a distribution centre for Littlewoods, a clothing catalogue company, and then in 2005 was turned into a call centre for a mobile phone company, which is what it still is. They've been building a kind of strip mall along the Blackpool road frontage which will house a couple of restaurants and a Tesco's I believe.

The Tesco's is sneaky. When we first moved here there had just been a fight to prevent a Tesco's opening up across the road from the mill, which had been won by the anti-Tesco's campaigners, led chiefly by the Booth's supermarket a few blocks away. Since then, the Booths has become less a supermarket than a convenience store, doubling the amount of booze it stocks and severely limiting the amount of fresh and raw food. Personally, I'm hoping for the Tesco's to bring some competition back.