Medieval Coventry

Coventry was supposed to be one of Europe's best preserved medieval cities until some unsympathetic remodelling by the Luftwaffe, and finished off by 50s and 60s planners. However if you look hard enough behind the post-war excrescences there are still a fair number of fine remnants, such as the shops on Spon Street,

Ford's Hospital,

St Mary's Hall and its environs

 the Old Grammar School,

and more besides

as well of course the ruins of the old cathedral.

And there are some decent Victorian Gothic reproductions, notably the City Hall.

And to be fair some of the most recent modern additions are quite dramatic,

even working rather well with the older heritage.

Just the 50s to 70s stuff that is hideous and totally disrespectful to what had gone before. All Brave New World stuff at the time, but now looking more like 1984.

UK Athletics Championships, Birmingham

I have been to many athletics meetings over more than 30 years and across Europe from Split to Gothenburg. But this is the first time I have actually gone to watch someone I know compete. One of our department's trainees Ed Jackson is also a top 800m runner. By complete coincidence on the Friday night, one of his rivals, Jonathan Cook, sat right in front of me prior to running his heat. As any friend would do, I embarked on a spying mission and was able to text Ed that his rival was tucking into a pasta salad. As it turned out not so useful information as Jonathan just pipped Ed in both heat and semi-final. I did also ask whether garroting Mr Cook with my spare T-shirt would be considered bad form. Well I offered.

Unfortunately Ed was suffering from a cold which, when I had it, wiped me out completely for two days, and I wasn't trying to run 800m in 1:48. He qualified fine from the heats but went out in the semis. (Photos of the big screen as by the time the heats came up the light was rather too low to take decent shots. Last shot will show you what I mean.)

The rest of the weekend was perfectly entertaining although I would have liked to have been cheering Ed in the final. Instead I tried taking some action photos, which with a small camera is pretty hard to do. And you need to be quick on the trigger. Some of my steeplechase photos managed to miss all the runners - leaving just a picture of a bit of fence - and some of the pole vault photos were similarly missing a vaulter. And the odd triple jump shot ended up as just a nice shot of a sand-pit. But anyway here are the best.

And most (unintentionally) amusing note came in the 1500m. For some years now it has become customary to play pop music during races, with the commentators chatting over the top of it. And in the 1500m the commentators kept telling us that the runners were aiming for the World Championship "A" qualifying standard time, and with the support of the crowd they could make it. And so what more inappropriate music could they play than the Theme from Mission Impossible! But prophetic as winner James Shane, albeit after a valiant effort, fell a couple of tenths of a second short.