Not a nerd. Well, not that much of a nerd.

Yeah. Halfway through the title, I realised that my opening line was going to be “Yes, I play Geoguessr…”, and that is quite a nerdy thing to do. So I had to add the second bit.
To be fair, I was going to follow it up with a “but”, but actually, it’s still quite a nerdy thing to do.

Not that I have a problem with that.

Nor do I have a problem with what follows, but it does rather put my nerdiness in perspective.

You see, I might be nerdy, but there are levels to nerdiness. In this case, there’s playing the game, there’s knowing some of the vagaries and giveaways for identifying which country you are in, there’s being aware that the roadside bollards might be one of those vagaries (you’ll find me here); then there’s identifying each design of each roadside bollard and assigning them a country, and finally(?) there’s knocking up vector images of each of the most common bollards for each country, making a 14-page long document and sharing it on Reddit.

No matter how much I play, and no matter how much I want to learn and win, I think it’s unlikely that I will ever take it to that level.

Although you never say never.

Willie Donger is a human bollard

What? As in Bollards of London?

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Well, yes. It’s all going off in Burton.

An angry pensioner has vowed to become a one-man bollard to keep town centre pedestrians safe from vehicles.

Retired Willie Donger made the promise to keep unauthorised motors from travelling through High Street, Burton, after he was just inches away from being mown down by a speeding car while crossing the road.

The 68-year-old, of Elizabeth Court, in Brough Road, Winshill, said that he would have ‘gone splat’ if he had not heard a stranger shouting at him to watch out.
He said: “I was almost splattered in the middle of the road. The car must have been going at least 45mph. If the guy on the footpath on the other side of the road had not shouted ‘mind the car’ I would have been a goner. The driver did not even slow down. He just swerved around me and carried on. I gave the car a whack with my walking stick. I hope it has made a dent.

Petty politics or something mean that the bollards at one end of the High Street or something haven’t been replaced… or something.

Now Willie is going to stand in the place of the missing bollards.

Mr Donger said that he did not want to do it, but would be prepared to control the flow of traffic himself.

He said: “You should not have to fear for your own life in a pedestrian area. If something is not done soon I am going to stand there all day and police it myself.”

Willie Donger is a human bollard. Props to you, Sir.

Bollards. Bollards of London.

Kaboom. Every now and again, there comes a time when we discover something so utterly amazing that we have to immediately share it with you, the esteemed readership of 6000 miles

This is one of those times.

Because I have discovered a site devoted entirely to bollards in London, handily entitled “Bollards of London“. Yes, that’s bollards, the singular of  which is defined as “one of a series of short posts for excluding or diverting motor vehicles from a road, lawn, or the like”.

Yep – this site is full of photos and painstaking descriptions of bollards. Who would be interested in bollards, you might ask?
These people would:


And yes, before you ask, that is an inverted cannon bollard.

What a beautiful piece of street furniture, the fact it just sits in the middle of a paved area with its beautiful rusting tapering body (outwards) with a narrowing curved top that leads to an almost door knob type handle.

And here’s a description of how and who found it:

My fellow ‘bollardarians’  from left to right @sophontrack @itsyourlondon @AboutLondon @Rigsbyhatstand and @philipkelly29 with the upturned ‘cannon’ bollard in the foreground. I will take this opportunity to thank them all again and to let you know it really was a hunt for this wonderful piece of street furniture. At the beginning of the ‘hunt’ we had a coffee on St Mary’s Axe not 100 yards from this site, it really was a bollard hunt/search with plenty of other little treasures found along the way. Badges are being prepared and made for this great bunch of people.

A wonderful hunt with lots of treasures (a coffee shop) found along the way. Pfft. Why would anyone be interested in… wait. What? There are badges?

I WANT A BADGE!

If you want a badge from Bollards of London, you’ll have to go bollard hunting. In London. And if you’re going to do that, then why not visit Leadenhall Market after trying some LSD?

If you do want a different place to visit in central London the Leadenhall Market is most unusual because of the colours/artwork/bollards/dragons which you’ll find everywhere. In part two of this post I’ll reveal the bollard I was looking which we found in the most unusual place.

Dragons everywhere? Riiiight.
Incidentally, “unusual place” in which they found the bollard turned out to be on a road, which didn’t seem that unusual to me. If they’d found it up a tree or in a lift, I would have considered it more “unusual”, as it is, I consider it disappointingly “usual”, aside from the fact that they then wrote 500 words about it. That strikes me as being a little unusual.

It’s only a matter of time until I begin the Bollards of Cape Town blog but I have some way to go to catch up with the prolific Bollards of London, who are well over 200 posts, each one of them about bollards. In London.

Amazing.