Come by

If have you have been breathing a (fairly sustained) sigh of relief about the fact that Superlambanana Shooting Season is over for the year, and have assumed that I shall be getting back to being snippy about poor access, then look away now.

Because there are still a couple of loose ends left to tie up.

Firstly, there's the auction which took place on Tuesday evening at St George's Hall, at which over half a million pounds was raised, £400,000 of which will go to Merseyside charities. You can read about what happened here. The auction catalogue itself is also available online - it's a bright, glossy publication which, if you have any interest in the beasties at all, is worth a look.



More exciting than the auction - at least, for those of us with neither the finances to bid for a superlambanana nor, frankly, homes with sufficient space in which to display one - was the fact the majority of the auction subjects were herded onto St George's Plateau and put on public display on Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday. The fact that more than 40,000 people went to wander through them should give you some indication of just how well-loved they are in the city.

It was raining when I arrived at 9.15 on Tuesday morning. I doubt this will surprise you. As one of my colleagues pointed out earlier this week, my strongest memories of attendance at Capital of Culture year events will probably be of getting wet.

I was glad I went. Not just because Superstegbanana and Tiger in the Woods were there (click on the link to my Flickr stream in the sidebar if you want to see them), but because the lambs looked fab gathered together. (Plus, they had all been spiffed up for the occasion, so they were at their sparkling best.) Even first thing in the morning, the exhibition was busy. One of my colleagues walked up to Lime Street from the office that lunchtime and regaled me by email with his horror stories of having barely been able to see the sculptures for the swarms of people which had descended on them. Grim.



Another 34 of the considered-to-be-slightly-less-desirable superlambananas will be put up for Internet auction from Tuesday the 16th. Details here.

What remains of the flock of 125 are those which were designed by local schools, churches, community groups, etc. After a wash and brush up, those have been returned to the groups who created them, and are to be seen dotted here and there around the outskirts of the city.

If you have been paying particularly close attention, you'll be aware that I started the third paragraph in this meandering blog entry with the word, "firstly". Which rather presupposes that there will be a "secondly". But what can it be? Surely to God the whole thing is now over, right? Er, wrong.

Secondly, the long-awaited and much-delayed Urbananasplash has finally been unveiled at the Matchworks in Speke. (And not, perhaps, during the best of all possible weeks for Urbansplash themselves.) The original trail map promised that Urbananasplash would be installed "early July". Two months later, we were expecting something really special. Did we get it? Well, it's, um, big. Really very big. And it's a permanent installation.





The local free rag is disappointingly silent on the question of whether it's going to be used as a topiary armature, which is what it resembles to me. Because that would be cool. Well, you know, eventually...

At the moment, unless you approach it from a very carefully-calculated angle, you could easily miss it altogether. It also appears to be rusting at some of its joints already. Which may, of course, be a deliberate design feature rather than a failure to appreciate Just How Much Rain falls in Liverpool. But mine not to reason why. Mine just to hobble around the city, camera in hand, and report back to my faithful readers. Who, I have no doubt, will draw their own conclusions.

The Editor