I dozed off on the tram home and awoke as the doors were shutting at my last sensible stop. Consulting my map, I identified the Lord Nelson as the closest nearby pub I had not yet visited and rode on to Wednesbury.
Along the route thru an industrial area I logged another Cut Benchmark which was helpfully filled with moss providing contrast to the wall.
Safely inside the pub, I ordered my beer and was accosted about my accent (by folks who pronounce the ‘Roast’ in Roast Chicken crisps, “Rowst”). I related my story — minus the trigpointing and tube bending refs — and after they stopped laughing about me sleeping all the way from Atlanta to Birmingham on the tram we had a grand chat about different pubs in the area.
Turns out, the bartender grew up in my neighbourhood and his brother runs the Old Royal Oak which I visited earlier this year but what seems like ages ago. The guy I was sitting with even tipped me off to another pub I hadn’t ever spotted and not a five minute walk away. I made the executive decision to head there rather than stick around for a second on here.
Triangulation Point 12770 is the church spire down the end of Solihull High Street, with the still pending Mason’s Arms to the left
Jackie had a 3:30 appointment in Olton well after Jimi’s 10:30 final post-op visit, so we made our way to Solihull to dick around in the shops.
I bought a humorously named ‘meat mincer’ (growing up in the 70s, I’ve known a few of these…hell, I’ve BEEN one). Sitting around to watch the yuppie scum (the Old English word for them is, in fact, Solihullions), we examined the lit inside said mincer’s package (let the innuendo begin) to find these other labels to snigger at:
Screw; Mincing cup (ah, both genders of meat mincer…how modern); Shaft spacer and Shaft; and, of course, Sausage nozzle.
Speaking of innuendo, one of the few American Football players I actually idolised as a child, like Y. A. Tittle and Joe Namath and Alex Karas (this clip from Blazing Saddles features him and some of the best jokes from the whole movie), just passed away. Dick Butkis was an absolute animal and, of course, he had the funniest name in the NFL: Dick, Butt Kiss. Outstanding. Chicago born, raised, and spent his entire career there. Rest well, monster.
Dick Butkis single handedly stopping the entire contingent of the Packers
We also went to this fabulous used record shop Jackie found last year on a day off work. She was kind of loaded from the Mason’s Arms (which we fell short of time to visit this trip so I still haven’t broken that membrane…NEXT time, for sure). On her solo trip, there were some old musicians shooting the shit with the proprietor who seemed to have had near misses with fame whilst their compatriots at the time did quite well indeed. She stopped thumbing through the stacks and was staring off into space when the shop owner asked if she was okay; “oh, I’m just eavesdropping, sorry…do carry on” and they did.
The cover photo of “Scott” is eerily similar to Noel Gallagher and Walker’s real name is Noel Scott Engel . . . freaky
Hounds of Love was playing when we arrived and I went through the cheap stacks and found a Walker Brothers best of and decided it was worth 3 quid. I was looking through some Doors records looking to replace The Soft Parade when the owner sidled up and asked if I was interested in 60s music to try to steer me and I told him we were probably going through every category before we left. He indicated the album I was holding; “Oh, this…Scott Walker’s voice just knocks me out.” He asked if I really liked “Montague Terrace” but I wasn’t sure, that the only one we knew the title of was “Jackie“; “oh, that’s a Jacque Brel song,” he noted and I added, “mm-hmm … in a stupid-ass way.” By the time, seconds later, we stopped laughing he had pulled the first solo album out of the stacks and headed over to put on side 1 (not a lot of things would find me willing to interrupt Kate Bush like that, but side 2 became our dinner music that night). Here’s Jimi grooving to it at the time:
Jimi finds “Amsterdam” — another Jacques Brel song — copacetic
Verdict on “Scott”: it’s alright, you should listen to it.
I was recovering from a respiratory infection and had a bunch of brick masonry to do so I resolved to keep the run short. Until, that is, I spied “Butt Puppy” on by benchmark map and thought, “hang on, I didn’t authorise this name check.” Turning off my default Sophomoric Humour mode for a second, I realised that this was for the Buttress to an Aqueduct at Puppy Green. Fair mistake.
Butt Puppy benchmark is near the ground level to the right in the above photo.
Butt Puppywall at 81 Queenscanal bridgerail (soon Tram) bridge
There were some disappointments, of course. A pub that had been converted to social housing no longer has a mark. There were once some public baths at the top of Victoria Park but that was razed roughly 2014 and the hoarding has been up since late 2013…but I managed to find a gas line plaque with Imperial units on the wall at the pavement.
The area, just down Queen’s Road from a residential (wall) Cut Mark, has been secured and allowed to lie derelict for almost a decade:
Even so, it looked perfectly functional and in use in this screen cap from July 2012:
I had some other non-residential targets that allowed me to escape the roads and use some tow paths. Here’s the bridge where I started that segment:
And, here’s the one where I got off the canal to log another mark:
I was heading from there to the ToolStation at Dudley Port so had to pass under the work on the new tramlines. Simple as it is, this old rail bridge with the beer ad on it is one of my favourites in the region. Its CM is on the wall just beyond the blue barricade:
It looks like the tram not only takes an unnecessarily indirect path but the rails are also laid more than twice as wide as the trams themselves. While this might seem to save on expenses and appears to ‘work’ in this tramvert (you can see the reflection of the one approaching on the other track), perhaps the tram line construction would benefit from building it correctly in the first place.
There was this guy I worked with in Georgia named Kumar who really wanted to feel like ‘one of the guys’. To that end, he once went on some rambling story about a woman who ‘did ALL the things’ but I was never clear on what those things were although Spiritual Healer Pandit Valmiki seems to do quite a large number of things.
The address on the flyer is for a sari shop across from the 7 Stars pub (which I visited some time ago and which is on my TrigPointing list for a return trip).
Of the problems listed for removal on the back of the flyer like Bad Luck or Children Mistakes, Sexual Problems seems to be the closest to doing ‘all the things’ as far as I can tell. I’ll be sending Kumar the master’s contact details.
After this loop through West Bromwich in which no benchmarks or other triangulation points were accessible (a lot of refurb in de buurt), I uploaded the only photo of the day. A google query of homeboy (at least he was for a few days after birth) Phil Lynott cross referenced with search terms such as ‘benchmark’ or ‘pointing’ returns rich material but nothing I can really crowbar into a TrigPointing post — but I really like this sculpture so here is something else that fits in the blog.
Not a big Thin Lizzy fan, me, but I love their version of Whisky In The Jar (which apparently Mr Lynott hated). I, on the other hand, despise The Boys Are Back In Town. Then, there’s Jailbreak…”Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.” Perhaps, and just hear me out on this, it might be at the jail? {Credit for this joke may be claimed by any number of Twitter Twats who use it without such attribution but I first heard it from one of Todd McBride‘s friends back in high school around 1979.}
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 
