Square Odds: sitting on the fence

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Going bananas!

The lovely Becky is running another Square Challenge throughout February, and her theme this month is odd. Basically nearly anything goes: odd includes odd numbers, odd balls, the exceptions, follies, and even odds and ends. Just remember to keep your photographs square and use the tag SquareOdds.

It’s a daily challenge, but I tend just to drop in occasionally and here is my first guest appearance! When I’m taking walks around my local area I try to enliven the routes by looking for quirky – or odd – things to photograph. This was particularly the case during lockdown, but predates it. My feature image is from a walk in April 2019 when I challenged myself to find as many different patterns of iron railings as I could. At Glasgow University I noticed a series of impaled bananas – how odd! A student prank – who knows? Anyway, it has left me with a slight obsession with fences, and it’s amazing how often I find odd things sitting on them or attached to them. Here are a few more.

Teletubby (Tinky Winky, Jun 2019)
Hidden bike (Jul 2019)
On the fence about Brexit (Edinburgh Oct 2019)
Ding! (Campsie Golf Club, Jul 20)
Boots on fence (Jan 21)

You could call this a fence collective! Fence Collective was (until 2013) the name of a group of musicians affiliated to Fence, a record label based in Fife. Perhaps the best known artist to emerge from the group is KT Tunstall, but I’m offering you a track from founder Kenny Anderson who performs as King Creosote. Here’s Something to believe in from the beautiful album and film From Scotland with love, accompanied by some vintage footage of Scotland, mainly, but not exclusively, Glasgow. Enjoy!

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  2. Pingback: An Odd Gallery – The life of B

  3. “Something to believe in” is a pretty song, one I didn’t know. I pulled up the lyrics online because I couldn’t make out all the words.

    The “Square Odds” in your post’s title made me think of numbers like 25 (5 squared), 49 (7 squared), and 81 (9 squared).

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  6. Poor abandoned Tinky Winky! I know when Marcus finds things in the road, he usually picks them up and sets them on the nearest fence so they can be more easily seen and retrieved, and I’m guessing other people do the same. Still doesn’t explain the bananas though.

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    • I don’t think Tinky Winky was there very long, so hopefully some child was reunited with it. Someone on Twitter replied to say they had seen a banana on a fence near the Uni science buildings and had photographed its decay over about a year! So maybe an “experiment”, though doesn’t explain this one which disappeared as quickly as Tinky Winky.

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  7. King Creosote’s name was, no doubt, inspired by Fence as in the Collective but I’m sure there’s also a nod to the Elvis song and movie “King Creole”.

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  8. Hi Anabel – I too missed the banana on the first viewing! I’m guessing King Creosote relates to coal dust and blackness – which creosote used to look like, as too the tarry smell … but what an excellent film – so interesting to note so much change. Kenny Anderson has a great voice … I’d never heard of him or his siblings before – interesting … thank you. Cheers Hilary

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  9. A good collection of photos there. Sadly I’m just old enough to remember the end of that era. The last trams and trolleybuses in Glasgow, the 100 year old tenement stairs worn down in the middle by generations of factory and shipyard workers in tackety boots (which I wore myself as well at 16), and the single end with open coal cooking fire. Great Video.. Brought back memories. For instance I’m only working out now it was the metal clegs or cleats on shoes that made my grandad’s stone stairs thin in the middle, something you just don’t see today in newer tenements..

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  11. These pics of the fences with bananas, teletubbies and the shoes kill me. It’s funny what people will do to make life interesting. I had a good chuckle. I enjoyed listening to this tune with the old look mainly of the docks. Obviously he is a Monty Python fan.

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  14. Hilarious – is this a Glaswegian thing or is the whole of Scotland having moments with their fences?! You’ve made me giggle – and so happy you are back for squares. Difficult to resist aren’t they 😉

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  22. I like the banana and the Teletubby, and it dos make you wonder how someone got home without their boots. Here’s an odd snippet – about 20 miles from me, at the foot of Pendle Hill, there’s a place called Fence 🙂

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