This is Flying Angel in Custom House, a building built as a seafarer’s mission in 1936 when the nearby docks were thriving. Note the little model ship on the roof. These days, the building has been converted to flats.

I’m approaching two years of daily blogging. One consequence of this, as Wendy will tell you, is that I’m prone to whip out my phone and photograph any public artwork or memorial I happen across.

This one, in Hartlepool, struck me as one of the better artworks I’ve seen this year… but it’s been on my list of things to post for longer than usual, as I’ve struggled to find out anything about it.

But now, I’ve cracked the mystery. It is the output of a competition from the 7-9 year olds at the nearby Ward Jackson Primary, 18 years ago. The kids were asked to design an artwork to replace frequently-vandalised lamppost. This winning design belonged to Jessica Draper.

An interview with the artist at the time revealed her motivations: “Most people like the sun and say it makes them feel better, so I thought I would include it in my design.”

Honestly, I think that may also be one of the best justifications for a bit of civic art that I’ve read this year as well.

As someone who has occasionally been a little grumpy about children’s art, even I think this example is worth celebrating.

This is an ex-RAF Jet Provost which looms over the car park of the Hartlepool College of Further Education. It’s there because the college specialises in aerospace courses, among other things.

I’ve driven and walked past it many times, but most recently thought about it when I was in Stockholm earlier this year, and saw this Bell 206 helicopter on a stick:

A lot has been written recently about the development of artificial intelligence tools hitting a wall: that is, we’re reaching a point where the pace of improvement in models has slowed considerably. Some have made the point that this may not matter as we’re not yet close to exploiting even a fraction of what the existing models can do.

I think this is a reasonable take. One of my main uses of ChatGPT has been to help with the finer points of coding. I’m not really a coder, but I occasionally throw together a bit of PHP or Javascript to solve a specific problem: to tweak the output of an ical feed, for example, or to tweak the layout of a webpage, or to use an api to very quickly check public transport departures for a specific stop. This has been made much easier by being able to paste the code into ChatGPT and ask: “Why isn’t this working?!”

But just recently, I’ve been playing with the ChatGPT api and plugging in into some of those small scripts—with great results. When my alarm goes off in the morning, ChatGPT gives me a quick, sensible verbal briefing on my calendar events, tasks and so forth before I’ve even opened my eyes. I plug it into scripts where I’d like the wording to be a bit varied rather than identical every time, with pretty good results each time.

None of these things are lifechanging, but they are the sorts of small quality of life improvements that haven’t yet become commonplace—but will no doubt spread over coming years.

Visible for miles around, and prominent in the landscape from the nearby Metro line, Cleadon’s 1860 water tower is the village’s best-known landmark. It has a very distinct and decorative Italian style.

I’ve always wondered why a water tower would be needed in the middle of nowhere. I usually think of a water tower being required to power industrial processes, such as canal locks, dock works, railways, or systems that need sudden deluges of water. But there’s nothing obvious nearby that would need such services… so why does it exist?

Well, in a sense… it doesn’t. Despite its name, it isn’t a water tower at all, and never has been. The Sunderland and South Shields Water Company used to pump water from the limestone in this area to supply to local residents and businesses. It used steam boilers to do this work, and the tower is actually a disguised, aesthetically pleasing chimney. You can see how easily a ‘tower’ associated with a water company would become known as the ‘water tower’ in local parlance, even if that was never its function.

The tower also contains a staircase around the central flue, and a balcony at a height of 25m. In the Second World War, it was therefore repurposed as a lookout for enemy aircraft. These days, it is used as a site for radio aerials and the like.

But Cleadon Water Tower isn’t, and never has been, a water tower.

This rock, which gives strong ‘Permanently Low Prices Forever’ vibes, commemorates the opening of Seaton Carew’s Esplanade by Councillor R Sargeant in August 1905.

The area on which it now stands was in fact constructed in 1997 as part of a new coastal protection scheme for the town.

So the rock is commemorating the opening of something that, in a sense, closed some time ago. I’m not sure I’d have retained it in the new scheme for that reason—but, then, no-one is ever likely to put me in charge of any commemoration of anything being opened. Thank goodness.

This 2018 sculpture on the seafront at Seaton Carew is by Stuart Langley. The sea glass used in the sculpture was collected and donated by local children.

The artwork is supposed to draw a connection between the ‘waves’ of the sea and the ‘waves’ of industrial, social and cultural change that are all around us. I’m not convinced I’d have guessed that. The art work’s local nickname, ‘the airwick’, feels more apt to me… but it’s nice to see something a bit different.

I recognise that there’s little duller in life than hearing about other people’s Spotify habits, especially at this time of year… but it does make for a very easy blog post when one is trying to post daily.

And so, allow me to present my top five artists of 2024, according to how much time I’ve spent listening to them on Spotify:

1. Stacey Kent
2. Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox
3. Max Richter
4. Blossom Dearie
5. Armin van Buuren
   

This may be the only chart in history where Blossom Dearie, an American jazz singer and pianist born more than a century ago, is nestled between Max Richter, the French-British postminimalist classical composer born in the 1960s, and Armin van Buuren, the pioneering Dutch trance DJ born in the 1970s… though their music could make an incredible mash-up.

Kae Tempest wrote:

If you are moved by a rapper that you listen to on YouTube, it’s really not a big deal. You shouldn’t have to apologise for it in literary environments. The same is true if you love a classical poet. It isn’t the case that you need to approach lauded works on bended knee. The pool of influence you draw from does not have to meet the approval of an academy or an institution, or be bound by the parameters of a genre, sub-genre or ‘movement’. Listen to everything. Read as much as you can. Try to stay present and connected with whatever you’re engaging with when you’re engaging with it.

I think that’s right.

This corn mill was built in the early 1800s of local limestone. It was badly damaged in a storm in 1870, and probably didn’t return to use after that. It was further damaged in the First World War when it was used for target practice—what use a ruined old mill anyway?—but it was patched up by the Council in 1992.

You know how much I like to give you a little bit extra in these posts, often sourced from historical newspapers… but I’m struggling on this one. I can, however, share that the Shields Gazette had a whole feature on the ‘Cleadon Big Cat’ which was apparently spotted near the mill in 1999. An anonymous man’s wife told journalist Iain Smith, “He used to always take the family labrador out for a walk and he knows what a dog looks like but he was certain it was not a dog, it was a big cat. There’s definitely something up there.’

I’m pleased to report that I didn’t spot any big cats on my wander past.