Corporation Oaks

Not a successful day, photo-wise, I was at the doc’s first thing for a flu jab so I wandered over towards Corporation Oaks to take some pictures, got one I was pretty pleased with and then proceeded to apparently break the camera. I got the bus down into town where the bloke in the London Camera Exchange at least managed to keep a straight face whilst he showed the rank camera-incompetent the button that he’d managed to inadvertently flick off getting the beast out of the bag on a windy hill. Then I came home and accidentally deleted the picture I liked whilst tidying up the results of my ill-fated trip out. My Charity-shop Treasure 'back-up blip' was also scuppered by someone going into Oxfam and buying the whole window display of rare seventies rock samplers from Island and Harvest (they've hung a load of old Genesis albums in the window as a replacement but I'll not subject you to those...) Instead, I’ve cobbled this collage together from my remaining outtakes. Corporation Oaks is an interesting bit of faded Victoriana in the less than completely salubrious hinterland between upmarket Mapperley Park and down-market St. Ann’s. Beck’s Aunt Pauline actually lived on the Oaks whilst she was doing her Teacher training in Nottingham at the tail-end of the Fifties. What you’ve got here is sort of a view out over the city from the top, rather than down through the Oaks itself, which is a lovely gently curving avenue of trees, currently carpeted in Autumn brown, with a row of slightly dilapidated villas down each side. I might have to go up again on Friday morning and have another crack at it…