Sunday 29 Dec: 3.3 miles to Ivy Bush via Oldbury
Monday 30 Dec: 3.2 to Screwfix and the New Talbot
Tuesday 31 Dec: 6.1 out to Bilston
Wednesday 01 Jan: 4.2 through Dartmouth Park and south West Brom
Thursday 02 Jan: 7.1 on first Commute of the year…in to work
Friday 03 Jan: 8.7 second Commute…home from
Saturday 04 Jan: 4.1 to the Waggon & Horses and Morrisons for decent bread
This was the final week of this nonsense. I really see why it doesn’t come around every year. The weekly tally is 36.7 miles with 266.7 for the entire festive season (quite low in recent history).
Awesome Art Deco facade on factory at the rail border between Oldbury and West Brom
The Blue Plaque at the top of the page was spotted up the street from The Ivy Bush and when I went to inspect I was pleased to find it commemorates a brief tenancy of Malcolm X.
Whilst tidying up the computer after the hols, a few other photos from the streak emerged. The Christmas feast included roast duck with potatoes, asparagus, cornbread dressing, a sweet potato pie, and the wines seen above. A run to Bilston revealed a statue of a woman with an anvil instead of a head, laden with rock or coal:
For something more traditional, here’s the WW1 memorial in Dartmouth Park:
On the same New Year’s Day run, the Oak House puts our shack to shame:
On the Friday Commute run, I passed near the water works (the reservoir is just beyond) and assumed this tower was a 70 year old water tower. Turns out it dates back over 200 years and became the inspiration for one of Tolkien’s “Two Towers.” See below . . .
We started prepping the house for redecorating and appear to be the first people to bother with prep in the last 110 years (the house was built sometime between 1905 and 1910 when the rooms were several layers of wallpaper wider than today).
We started by checking the condition of the original floors (we really love hardwoods and hate carpet. All evidence is we are going to get what we want with minimal repairs to do.
Better yet, there are several intact sections of lino that will tell us something about the years these features were installed and the sort of people that lived there (and would have thought this material was a good idea).
More lino:
I went ahead and pulled all the carpet anchor strips then rolled the material back out to act as drop cloths.
Then, we started removing wall paper so we could paint directly on the original plaster. However, we really lucked out as differing layers from across the last 11 decades were exposed.
The little bamboo pattern next to Jackie’s knife and atop the floral patch is both of our favourite and I was lucky enough to find some large, intact patches.
Salvaged a bit of this for a framed wall decoration soon:
The entire house looked like the stairwell by the time we finished the day. Exhausted. And, excited about the wee archaeological project we get along with our home improvements.
We binged the first series of Detectorists this week. In the final episode Lance, Toby Jones’ character, points out some truths about men and their hobbies: “You don’t see a lot of women trainspotters, do you?” Jackie grinned as I hit the pause button and said, “that reminds me…I found a tiny George V postbox on my run today.”
“Tell me later, Bun. Let’s finish this goofy show, first.” Later, she said that she didn’t find my postbox fetish (also here and here) all that strange. She is a wonderful woman.
Like #8 before it (as well as #5 and #6), this E8Rex postbox was an accidental find. It was spotted in the midst of a Sunday pub run and was merely the first one I could drop off some return post for a previous resident (looks like a pay-up-deadbeat letter).
Here are the links to all of my postbox fetishism posts:
One of the oddest items you might hope to find in Brum is the JFK Memorial in Digbeth. The original was put up by the Irish community in 1968 outside St Chad’s about a mile north of here but was demolished for a new road in 2007. The son of the original artist recovered what he could of it and re-did the one you see above.
Originally, the inscription was
THERE ARE NO WHITE OR COLOURED SIGNS ON THE GRAVEYARDS OF BATTLE
which was a blatant dig at the racial strife in the States at the time…thank God THAT’s all sorted itself out. The new inscription is a little less passive aggressive and bears an error of fact (should read “1961-3“).
With no chance of getting home from the meeting in time to check into work, I had an hour to kill between trains in Leicester. A walk through the neighbourhood in search of an interesting pub turned up one that whose only interest was the cool name (the Last Plantagenet was famously exhumed from a nearby car park) and cheap prices (Wetherspoons). Good enough for me.
It took just short of 530 years from the Battle of Bosworth Field until Richard III was finally re interred in Leicester Cathedral … about the same amount of time it would take to get a couple of rounds in if these bartenders had anything to do with it.
A couple of weeks ago, an old friend I’ve known for nearly 25 years asked — with regards to my move to Birmingham — “are you happy?”
I laughed, “I haven’t been happy for 30 years.”
“That can’t be true,” he scoffed. Then, seeing what only a dear, old friend can see, added, “oh, shit…I’m sorry. Why not?”
“I used to be free.”
Here’s that backstory.
The last day of my emancipation was like most others way back then. I was heavily drunk on bourbon to take a bit of the edge off the psychedelics (the flavour of the day was sublimely pure and powerful LSD delivered on plain, white, Dead Family blotter which really put an edge on driving the taxi). It was astoundingly, gloriously hot and humid and I was refusing to use the air con since I had already made my target for the day. Just driving around enjoying the great outdoors of inner city Atlanta and my inner consciousness.
Then, there it was…a fare flagging me down. Yeah, okay, I thought…what-the-hell? He looks harmless enough.
He told me a street near Cheshire Bridge Road and started smoking a joint about a block away from the destination. “You can share,” I pointed out eyeing him in the rear view mirror; he pointed to an alley for me to park and got out. I read him the meter and he reached into his bag with his left hand and handed me the joint with his right. His left then emerged and plunged a steak knife in my chest. Mother fucker.
I grabbed his arm with my right and opened the door slightly to try and reach my .38 special a little easier (the blade tearing through flesh sending intense colours across vision plane making this a little harder a task than you might imagine). He reached through the opening door with his right shouting, “GIVE ME THE MONEY,” and I pulled the door closed on his fingers. He yanked away breaking the handle off the knife and I hit the accelerator spinning him around and against the cab. I got out holding the wound I had and kicked him weakly in the chest. We wound up wrestling for only a minute or so (time was doing weird things) when a couple of guys from one of the businesses — the strip club? the filling station? — came running over and my assailant ran off never to be seen again.
At the ER, I convinced the nurse I would be fine without getting put under as I would like to see the work. She smirked a bit having already asked me a couple of times what drugs I was on, but had a chat with the doc who agreed for some reason. By this time, I was starting to get normal again (two more hours into my Grateful Dead flight) and was ready to get this all over with. Turns out we (me and the surgeon) went to a lot of the same bars and had similar reading lists. We also had a nice conversation about the size of the scar I could expect and how it might enhance my only other body modifications at the time: an earring that Jackie had used a 12 inch long dollmakers needle to put in and the goose tattoo…since then, I have become more scar tissue than man, but that’s a bunch of other stories.
The only place besides my head where hair won’t grow is the region of the 2.5 inch by 1 inch scar commemorating the start of my professional education.
Then, he ruined my life. “You seem like a smart guy. Why don’t you quit taxiing and go back to school?”
It’s my fault: I didn’t have to listen. I think he took advantage of my tripping state. That was 17 July 1989, and the day it all went to shit was the next day when I enrolled in DeKalb Community College (eventually finishing advanced degrees in engineering and chemistry and working, now, more than half of the time since that day outside of the US).
Oh well. I traded happiness for satisfaction. What a loser. Happy 30th anniversary to me.
Getting bearings before heading off to the cemetery nearby, the department where the course/conference was held is marked by a large, magnetic sector mass spectrometer. And, when I say large I mean it is massive and, if the magnet that drives the mass separation was comparable to the large dimensions of the flight path, the resolution must have been phenomenal.
A more typical sized sector instrument, above, is still a beast to behold. The we museum had all sorts of ancient goodies to inspect up close.
Just across from the front doors, this reflecting pool tempted more than one of us in the 40°C heat:
And, to wrap up the photos from Rome this mural commemorates the one day during WW2 that the allies bombed Rome. The neighbourhood was flattened with many of the memorials in the nearby cemetery holding the date of the attack. (I know this seems out of context with the rest of this post, but during a pizza meal across the street from here one of our hosts from the department pointed it out to me.)
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 