Festival Retail Park

After it got dark yesterday evening I took one of the full rubbish bags for a walk and along the way successfully managed to leave it behind when it wandered off to sniff a public rubbish bin. 
This morning we awoke to find one of the three boats moored outside the Toby Carvery had left.  A decision had to be made whether or not to move and take the vacant mooring.  In the end we decided to stay on our current mooring.  It might be noisier outside the carvery and the area is more exposed to the wind.

There Is a path on both sides of the canal here, but our side appears to be getting less foot traffic. There are also buildings on both sides which are creating a slight wind break. 
Mid morning we walked up to the retail park, primarily to get some essentials from Morrisons supermarket.  PC World was on the way so I took Jan in to look at OLED TV’s.  The young sales assistant wanted to show us 4K TV’s.  Now I wasn’t wearing my “WARNING RETIRED.  Knows everything and plenty of time to tell you about it!”  T-shirt.    But he still received the full spiel why 4K is just marketing hype and as useful as a chocolate teapot.  In anticipate of seeing a working OLED TV I had copied three short video clips onto a USB stick.  One was original TV resolution, the next was standard definition TV, and the last was Blue-Ray quality.  We played all three clips on both the OLED and a 4K TV.  They looked better (IOHO) on the OLED.
After buying essentials at Morrisons we walked up to the nearby Currys store where Jan wanted to look at coffee machines.  I don’t drink the muck  (did you know it kills all the male sperm!).  Along the way we noticed a statue in the middle of a large roundabout.  Initially I thought it was a statue of a soldier.  However I couldn’t see any reason for a military statue in this location.  The stance looked military but equally it might have been a miner holding a pneumatic drill.  This area used to be heavily industrial so that made sense.  But then the helmet looked like it was covered in camouflage netting.  On the way back from Currys I had a second look from the other side.  The statue looked more military than miner.
Google again came to my aid.  It’s a statue of Lance Sergeant J.D. Baskeyfield VC.  He was killed in the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944 aged 21.  During the battle he was in command of a 6 pound gun which destroyed two Tiger tanks and a self propelled gun.  His gun was hit and all his crew killed whilst he was wounded.  He then crawled to a second unmanned gun and destroyed a third Tiger tank before being killed by a fourth tank.  L/Sgt Baskeyfield was born locally in Burslem, Stoke on Trent.