Banksy - Defaced.

Another "brass monkey" day, a bitter east wind that made operating a camera for more than a few minutes at a time very painful. Normally I take half a dozen or so shots of each subject, today it was find a safe one - grab it quickly - and move on. There is an urban legend that the "brass monkey" was a device for holding one's cannon balls on board ship, the difference between the coefficients of thermal expansion of brass and iron resulted in the iron balls falling off it if the temperature dropped below a specific threshold; me - I don't believe a word of it.
Wikipedia refers to the sets of wise monkey ornaments, some variants having a fourth holding his genitals, I would consider it likely that he was a joke that came after the commonly used expression simply migrated from his nose, ears or tail.

I've had my eye on this Banksy painting since I started blipping, even though it's been vandalised by hooligans; it is the only one that I can reliably attribute to him and is on the side of a "Brook's" sexual health clinic facing the Bristle cooncil offices and the cathedral. The cooncil wanted it removed but the good citizens of raised a successful petition and saved it for posterity.

The large curved pond in front of the cooncil chambers, known affectionately as "The Lord Mayor's Duck-Pond," had not a trace of ice on it in spite of the cold yet, as a snotty nosed schoolboy back in the fifties, I regularly arrived home from school soaked from the knees down as a result of trying to walk the few hundred yard length of it on the ice.
Those were the days when we had real winters.