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The scuplture of Ginger, the horse, in Greenock.

© John G. Fender 2012

Today I was in Greenock on business and after the meeting I had been attending, as I had a few minutes before the train back to Glasgow was due, I took the opportunity to walk along to Cathcart Square and take a photograph of the Andy Scott sculpture of Ginger, the Horse.

Andy Scott is well known for his large galvanised steel artworks and I have featured his work "Rise" at Glasgow Harbour before (see "An 'Iconic' work of art" - Saturday 17th May 2008). there are many other examples of his work in the west of Scotland too.

This work, called "Ginger, the horse", was unveiled on 9 February 2011 and was commissioned by Riverside Inverclyde as part of the re-development of the area.

The sculpture is 3.5 metres in height and is a reminder of the cart horses that were used to move goods around the shipyards and harbour. The sculpture named after a cart horse that fell into the old Albert Harbour in Greenock on 23rd October 1889 and drowned. A queue of people waiting to embark on a steamship going to America witnessed the distraught owner cradling the head of the dead horse as it lay on the quayside after being lifted out of the dock.

The sculpture is located in Cathcart Square, opposite the police HQ and just down from Greenock Central Station, and is quite easily seen from the main road. I have seen it often, but never actually got round to taking a photograph until today. Then it was time to head up to the station in time to catch the train back to Glasgow and get out of the cold wind!.

I wandered into a branch of a large well known electricals chain at lunchtime today, with the twin aims of having a quick look at computers and getting out of the perishing cold for a few minutes. As I entered through the automatic doors, I noticed a couple of sales assistants strategically positioned so that they could see everyone who entered.

Having turned right to the display of computers, I observed one of the assistants start heading in my direction. I confirmed my suspicion that the assistant was aiming to try to get me to part with cash when I moved to another aisle and was casually followed. As I compared specifications and prices, the assistant asked if she could be of assistance.

I politely responded that I was merely looking at what was available and I though that would be an end of the conversation. How wrong I was. The assistant advised that if I was interested in computers, there were some on "special offer" that she would show me. So out of politeness more than anything else and the desire to thaw out a bit more before heading back into the cold, I followed the assistant to the "special offer" area.

These were obviously the computers that the shop was keen to get rid off and were models that no one wanted - looking at the specifications I was not surprised they were not selling - even at the "special offer prices". It was quite easy to point out that none were suited to my needs of heavy duty use and processor intensive photoprocessing and that I was not interested in any of the computers.

After that it was quite easy to make my excuses and go back into the cold, damp, foggy weather for a brisk walk back to work. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have a look at what is available in my preferred supplier.

With the Met Office putting out weather warnings for England and Wales and the media sounding like armageddon was about to arrive, with heavy snow forecast for today, we awoke to a dull overcast day in the west of Scotland... and not a snowflake in sight. Given the fuss the media had made, one would have been forgiven for being prepared to trudge through knee deep snow to get anywhere. Instead we were slashing through puddles. The lunchtime forecast warned of snow later, but I've yet to see any...so far that is!

Now before anyone gets too excited by the title of this post, it is not what you might think! And shame on you if you did think that! This is about a package that I had to go and collect this morning. Now, according to the card Royal Mail left yesterday, the package was "too big" for my letter box. I had a choice of either leaving it to Saturday morning and collect it when out and about of, given the forecast, it might be better to collect it today, before the forecast snow arrived.

So I headed off a bit earlier and got to the sorting offices just after they opened the public counter. One advantage of being that early is that there is no-one else there before you and I was attended to immediately. After handing the card over and showing my identification, the post person (note I'm being PC here) vanished into the main office and returned a couple of minutes later with the package.

This turned out to be not that big and I felt certain that it would pass through my letterbox easily, so when I got home, I posted it through the letterbox. I was right - it slipped through easily, so the question is why could the postman (Note - not so PC here) not manage it? Or was it a case of simply leaving the card instead of even attempting to deliver it?

I'm not going to bother making an issue of this with Royal Mail, it would be pointless and in fact complaining to Royal Mail about anything is practically impossible the way they have devised the procedures, so I'll just add this to the catalogue of odd events that goes towards making up the rich tapestry of life!

It was upgrade time again as Mozilla released Firefox 10, the latest version of the open source web browser. I have long been a fan of Firefox, but it has faced some stiff competition from Google's Chrome web browser and the latest version of Internet Explorer from Microsoft. But having installed the latest version, I think it is back in the lead, especially with it's enhancement of developer tools, which I have been playing with and I find are very useful indeed. So again Firefox is in the lead but I suspect that the other web browsers will catch up pretty soon. The problem they have is that Mozilla has decided on an accelerated 6 weekly build cycle for new versions, so that the browser can be updated very quickly. It will be interesting to see how the others respond to this.