You may be interested to observe the anal retention (twice over) in this view of St.Mary’s Avenue, Gedling.

1. The first is in the spelling of the street, as in the signpost at left foreground. Notice the full-stop after the “ST” & the apostrophe within “Mary’s”. The street to the south runs parallel to St.Mary’s & is called “St.Michael’s” (same stop & apostrophe). Excellent. I’m with Lynne Truss on this.
2. The second is the weather being anal retentive, due to the presence of an inversion layer.

Chris Fawkes, the weather forecaster on PM, BBC Radio 4 (56:16), spoke of a weather balloon launched today at Nottingham (where I live) which measured the base of the inversion at only 100m from the ground. This inversion is pretty much country-wide and is responsible for some foul air, particularly in the cities.

An inversion layer is a layer of warm air above a ground-layer of colder air; that can be a local effect, a district-wide affair or country-wide (and the latter seems to occur regularly in Britain every 10-or-so years). Fog is a classic consequence of an inversion layer, as is foul air, particularly in cities.

Warm air rises, but any smoke from a fire on the ground will stop at the bottom of an inversion layer. I just once was lucky enough to observe this whilst driving my car southwards on the M1. It was icy-cold but perfectly clear & early morning. An isolated house close to the other side of the motorway had smoke coming from it’s chimney (a wood and/or coal fire), but the column of smoke stopped just a few metres above the top of the stack, and then descended towards the ground. When I spotted it, the house was surrounded by a perfect sphere of smoke; an astonishing sight.

It was the combination of a district- (or country-) -wide inversion layer + millions of coal fires that led to the smog that killed thousands of city inhabitants & ultimately to the passing of the 1956 Clean Air Act in Britain.

Interesting or what?

Coda: A big shout-out to Nominatim

Nominatim is the search-engine used within OpenStreetMap to find streets, etc.. I used it just now to add the links for St.Mary’s Avenue, Gedling + St.Michael’s Avenue, Gedling. Full-stops & apostrophes can be a real bug-bear for text-searches. No problem for Nominatim; it found both streets first time, no issues at all. Hoo-yah!