From Granby Street, Leicester, 21st March 2010

If snagged balloons are now deemed too unfleeting for the future, too easy to snap and compose in their entrapment, the airborne remain the most difficult, and remain. The sunlit brickwork and clear blue sky make this, for me, prettier than many of the snatched shots of the windblown. It was a truly warm spring day and my last trip to Leicester for a while, and I hope the new season brings the balloons out in London.

Upper King Street, Leicester, 24th February 2010

I've been in Leicester a lot recently, but I didn't take this one myself. The one person who could draw me there every other weekend from my London idyll is now the fifth to send me a balloon. London suffered a dearth of Valentine's Day balloons compared to previous years (or perhaps the denizens of Maida Vale are not so keen to declare love in such a manner, or lose their tokens so carelessly to the air if they do), so it was good to learn that that paucity wasn't universal.

It has been a winter of balloons snagged in bare branches. I suspect their relative abundance is due to their stability and longevity, two features that set them apart from the other balloons here. Not fleeting, and with their fragility out of reach, they've lost their appeal, their challenge and their joy. So this will be the last snagged balloon. I toyed with the idea of deleting the others, but a few of them are favourites for various reasons, so they remain, but end here, at 45.

Glenelg Road, 19th February 2010

Back for a night visiting friends on my old road, I was greeted on my arrival by this free-standing brown, whose helium content was just enough to keep it upright on its plastic pedestal, but not enough to lift it aloft. As such it hopped and dragged itself along on the gentle breeze, almost falling over as it went only to be righted by buoyancy each time. It didn't hop too far either - when I left later on it had made it just a few metres, and had retained its proud posture to boot.

Off Waterloo Way, Leicester, 12th February 2010

I had barely left the station when Leicester's prolific streak was extended. This white had clearly rolled through something pretty sticky on its way to this secluded corner, and as there was no obvious tar pit around it must have rolled some distance from it too. To remain on the surface of the balloon in such a discrete line the substance must have been fairly viscous, which means that the balloon itself must have been travelling quite quickly to have made it through it at all. Most odd. This one, then, will go down as one of the mysteries.