Location:Digbeth
Saturday, 27 July 2013
Local action
Local mini-festival on Fazeley Street with allotments in troughs or containers. Behind the small site a disused warehouse where cyclists on fixed bicycles seemed to be powering a screen display of animated short films.
It's the sort of thing you come across in unpromising unoccupied stretches of Birmingham by chance or word of mouth or nowadays maybe a tweet or blog post.
It's the sort of thing you come across in unpromising unoccupied stretches of Birmingham by chance or word of mouth or nowadays maybe a tweet or blog post.
Location:Digbeth
Friday, 26 July 2013
Sport Live
This year I've had a chance to enjoy live sport twice, tonight at a T20 short-form cricket - Warwickshire versus Worcestershire at Edgbaston - and earlier at the Hawthorns when West Brom played Wigan.
You do have a different experience when you're at a live game, seeing the pitch and the players (very near at West Brom) and watching the spectators' reactions through a game and reacting yourself. At West Brom I had the advantage of not being too involved in one team, although it would have been nice to see the home side doing better than the 2-3 loss. There wasn't that strange and obsessive sense of anxiety and personal loss in what's after all "only a game" that comes with being bound up with a local side.
I've lost touch with who's winning in which leagues when it comes to county and one-day cricket, but it didn't matter this evening, I do enjoy and follow cricket a bit more and used to be a junior member at Warwickshire (watching not playing) and thought a bit of a couple of scenes I still have in mind of seeing players come off the pitch, and getting autographs as boys always do, famous players then and still, looking back, and of being high in an old stand as two of the West Indian greats batting for their county side.
Another, vaguely, being at the ground with my mother as the well-known local opener knocked the ball around before getting out.
How we remember things, scenes, snapshots, a feeling maybe, only then the word or words that attach themselves and cling in the telling of stories. Names in the autograph book, vaguely, perhaps, the handwriting, more the colour, shape, maybe size of the blank notebook for autographs.
Did I think that decades later I would recall, even hazily, those scenes? Did I think that decades later I would be, and that others I saw, much older, would become me in years?
No, and another pleasure of the moment. Sport, whilst prepared, is of the moment and created from one moment to the next, from afresh, using the mix of talents and people and what happens in improvisation.
We need sport, sport as well as art and literature, sport as a kind of stuff of life or reflection in itself.
If you can afford it, get along to a match, if not, then do think of local smaller sides and amateurs just having kick-arounds in the park on a Sunday.
Birmingham has Warwickshire CCC, and Worcester is 40 minutes on the train. For football there's Aston Villa and Birmingham City and nearby the town and club West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
You do have a different experience when you're at a live game, seeing the pitch and the players (very near at West Brom) and watching the spectators' reactions through a game and reacting yourself. At West Brom I had the advantage of not being too involved in one team, although it would have been nice to see the home side doing better than the 2-3 loss. There wasn't that strange and obsessive sense of anxiety and personal loss in what's after all "only a game" that comes with being bound up with a local side.
I've lost touch with who's winning in which leagues when it comes to county and one-day cricket, but it didn't matter this evening, I do enjoy and follow cricket a bit more and used to be a junior member at Warwickshire (watching not playing) and thought a bit of a couple of scenes I still have in mind of seeing players come off the pitch, and getting autographs as boys always do, famous players then and still, looking back, and of being high in an old stand as two of the West Indian greats batting for their county side.
Another, vaguely, being at the ground with my mother as the well-known local opener knocked the ball around before getting out.
How we remember things, scenes, snapshots, a feeling maybe, only then the word or words that attach themselves and cling in the telling of stories. Names in the autograph book, vaguely, perhaps, the handwriting, more the colour, shape, maybe size of the blank notebook for autographs.
Did I think that decades later I would recall, even hazily, those scenes? Did I think that decades later I would be, and that others I saw, much older, would become me in years?
No, and another pleasure of the moment. Sport, whilst prepared, is of the moment and created from one moment to the next, from afresh, using the mix of talents and people and what happens in improvisation.
We need sport, sport as well as art and literature, sport as a kind of stuff of life or reflection in itself.
If you can afford it, get along to a match, if not, then do think of local smaller sides and amateurs just having kick-arounds in the park on a Sunday.
Birmingham has Warwickshire CCC, and Worcester is 40 minutes on the train. For football there's Aston Villa and Birmingham City and nearby the town and club West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Location:Edgbaston +
Saturday, 20 July 2013
More international Brum :-)
Just to show what a wonderfully international and diverse place Birmingham can be, we were sitting in a city centre pub around 5 o'clock, waiting for the EDL idiots to be escorted back out of Brum, when a colourfully dressed folk group from Alicante (we asked) came in and cheered us all up.
You can't see the instruments in this picture, but you get the idea! :)
You can't see the instruments in this picture, but you get the idea! :)
Location:Birmingham
Peace in multiethnic Brum
I'm sitting in a peaceful café in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter where people of different ethnicities and probably nationalities (at least two Germans, I'm married to one :-) ) are enjoying their coffees. 10 minutes walk away the extremists of the so-called English Defence League are vocalising their inability to cope with living in a country where not everyone is exactly the same as them. Sad, and stupid, and dangerous if they're given any leeway.
There have been a number of attacks on mosques reported since the awful killing of Lee Rigby. It's all so wrong. Most people want to live on peace, to enjoy an afternoon off without violence and hate-filled demonstrating or attacks.
Birmingham is made by its mix, of peoples and cultures and backgrounds, it always has been, it'd be so much poorer without. Extreme groups want to damage and destroy the mix, reduce all to one narrow strand, to their narrow minded view of what makes us who we are.
No way.
Extremists, you are not my England, and I don't want your defence. Count me out of your league, of hate and violence and phobia.
Leave us to live in peace with our diversity and variety and the rich mix that makes Birmingham.
There have been a number of attacks on mosques reported since the awful killing of Lee Rigby. It's all so wrong. Most people want to live on peace, to enjoy an afternoon off without violence and hate-filled demonstrating or attacks.
Birmingham is made by its mix, of peoples and cultures and backgrounds, it always has been, it'd be so much poorer without. Extreme groups want to damage and destroy the mix, reduce all to one narrow strand, to their narrow minded view of what makes us who we are.
No way.
Extremists, you are not my England, and I don't want your defence. Count me out of your league, of hate and violence and phobia.
Leave us to live in peace with our diversity and variety and the rich mix that makes Birmingham.
Location:Birmingham
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