What I did at the weekend....

Trip to Birmingham - off to Nostalgia & Comics...

and the Birmingham Zine Festival.....

Full reports over at the FPI blog

missing gigs again.....

That Petrol Emotion are touring again. And it's one of those tours where I'm going to find it so difficult to make it to any of them. Not good. Either too far away on a weekend or on a school night. Bother. And this is after missing out on the Kraftwerk gig in Manchester happening in July. (I could get tickets from ebay but I haven't got the 300 quid or so that they're going for.)

It's something I really miss about living in Birmingham, having gigs on the doorstep that I could walk to and walk home from. Now I have only the choice of York or Leeds, driving to gigs and sriving home. it's just not the same. last year I was really lucky to be able to get to see That Petrol Emotion in the summer holidays and Carter on a saturday, but it looks like this year I wont be so lucky. Damn.

Birmingham weekender; Rachel's 18th

This weekend we travelled down to old Birmingham for Rachel's 18th birthday party. Rachel is Louise's niece and somehow managed to convince her parents that it was a very good idea to let her hold the party at their house. This insanity was somehow validated by Rachel's numerous friends all being delightful, polite and generally lovely.

Of course, put that many 17 & 18 year olds in close proximity to alcohol and there's bound to be casualties: the first was at just 10 o'clock, as one girl passes out in the loo and gets carried upstairs to lie down. Lightweight. And after that we had lots of staggering and very polite drunkeness. Oh, the joys of being young! We were with all the family and the old folk inside the house, whilst the young people wandered between the gazebo in the garden, the toilets and the drinks.

One strange thing about all these teens; despite having beers and stupidly coloured alcopop things in the gazebo, a hell of a lot of them ended up raiding the bottles of spirits in the kitchen. So at half eleven I ran out of Gin. Luckily, Rachel has an older sister and Helen had a secret stash of Gin. Thank you Helen (your replacement bottle shall be with you soon).

Molly had a great time, was pronounced cute many, many times and rather enjoyed both the attention and staying up until 1am. Thanks very much to Rachel and family for the lovely night. I imagine they spent today clearing up the wreckage left by that many teenagers, no matter how nice!

The rest of the weekend was spent catching up with folks and visiting Birmingham. As usual, this meant a visit to Nostalgia & Comics. Lovely to see folks again and nice to actually spend some time browsing comic shelves for good stuff. Had to be very strong this time and try not to grab too much stuff. The grand plan of trying to reduce the 30+ books to review on the shelf. Did alright as well, only added four more things to the shelf.

A busy weekend but a very good one. Happy Birthday to Rachel and thanks very much for inviting us all.

Birmingham International Comic Show 2008 report

The third Birmingham Comic Show took place last weekend and I headed down to Birmingham to play along with all the other comic fans. Of course, with Molly's Holy Communion on Sunday I had to be back in pocklington for 9am Sunday morning but this wasn't going to spoil my fun.

The weekend started in the best way possible: early. I'd arranged with the head to slope off early and was in the car ready to go at 1. Made it down the beautifully quiet motorways with no holdups or trouble and got into fair Birmingham by half 3. Very good going. Check in to the hotel and feel the wave of weekend exhaustion hit me. Shower and change. Wake self up with copious water and prescription drugs for back. Head into Birmingham.

It's either me zoned out of my mind of painkillers for the back or Birmingham was even bigger and louder than last time. The provincial lifestyle I live is really bringing it home to me just how big this big city is. Lovely to visit and experience, but certainly not somewhere I really want to live anymore.

Launch Party - Friday.



Obviously - as can be expected from these things, there were an awful lot of very drunk comic people at the launch party. Above is a picture of me with my collection of drunks: L to R: Mike, Surfer Dave, Dave Hopkins (everyone's favourite Dave, manager of Nostalgia & Comics) and me. We had a large Nostalgia & Comics contingent there, and spent a large part of the night chatting to various people and then an even larger part of the night wondering who all the young people around us were. It seems that while we've been getting older, comic folk have been getting younger and younger.

Dave's wife Debbie took the photo - a rarity in that it's a photo of me that I actually quite like.

The bands were all good, although sadly we got there too late to see Hunt Emerson this year. In the end us old folks left the younger Nostalgia & Comics workers to it and sloped off to home / hotels early (well - 2am). On the way to the hotel I took my life in my hands and partook of pizza from some very dodgy place on the Queensway. It was lovely, but a huge gamble that could have seen me spending all weekend in casualty.

Saturday: Birmingham International Comics Show 2008 Day One.

Amazingly, I wasn't ill on Saturday. Neither the drink or the pizza had that much effect and I actually made it down to breakfast before heading off around Birmingham, popping into Nostalgia & Comics on the way to the show.

The show was, yet again, at Millenium Point / Thinktank. It's a very imposing building housing Birmingham's Science museum (pictures from last year) and it's a really good venue for the Comic Show. Or at least it is once you can navigate the escalators / stairs / lifts to the third floor. Thinktank has an interesting idea for escalators - they seem to run them both ways. If it's going down all you need to do is wait 5 minutes and suddenly it's changed and becomes an up escalator. Or that's what it seemed to be doing. Unless the gin from the night before was having a delayed affect?

Once inside theComic Show it was straight to work. By which I mean getting round as many people as possible to say hello, introduce myself and generally have a good time. This year, as well as all the usual stuff I had another mission - get as many sketches as possible from the attending artists to start filling the sketch pad that Molly had made me get. I made a throw-away comment a while ago explaining how artists at these things would do sketches for you and Molly decided that she definitely wanted some. By midday, after just half an hour there I'd already had a couple of texts from her asking how many I'd got.

The show was bigger and better this year. The organisers had learnt from the overcrowding of 2007 and instead of cramming everyone into the main hall, they'd split the show into two rooms and moved the talks and presentations into the lecture theatre downstairs. I'd like to be able to tell you how nice the theatre was, but I had no time to get to any panels. I'll just have to take peoples word for it. (Leah Moore has pics and a good write up of the facilities).

It was lovely getting round to seeing so many people who I'd been in touch with over the past year but never met. And just as nice catching up with comic folks I already knew. So hello to all of you - Andi Watson, Paul Grist, Ian Edginton, Matt Brooker, Jas Wilson, Matthew Craig, Oliver Lambden, Laurence Powell, David Baillie, Andy Luke, Sean Azzopardi, Dan Lester, Jenika Ioffreda, Laura Howell, Phil Spence, Joel Meadows, Gary Northfield, Lew Stringer, Mark Farmer, Marc ellerby ( & his girlfriend Anna - who I'm sure was getting fed up of everyone saying how they knew who she was thanks to Marcs comics), Jamie McKelvie.

Thanks especially to those of you who I managed to get sketches from. You'll all be pleased to know that Molly loves them all; Molly's Birmingham Sketches.

And many apologies to those of you who I've either forgotten to mention or plain just didn't get around to saying hello to. Sometimes I saw you and meant to come over when something else cropped up, sometimes I made a mental note to come back when the crowd had died down around your stall, sometimes I just missed you and occasionaly I just needed to go outside and stop doing the small talk thing for a few minutes. I'm not the best at it, I don't enjoy it and, even at this advancing age there are times when my natural shyness and anti-social nature gets the better of me.

But in the end, at six o'clock, when it came time to leave, I'd had a great day. I thought the whole thing was a great success and I'm really hoping that the organisers will be announcing Birmingham International Comic Show 2009 very soon.

Of course, after that the only thing left to do was hit the bar. Except I couldn't because I had to get back to pocklington Saturday night so I could be around on Sunday for Molly's Holy Communion. Bah. No alcohol for me.

In the end I met up with Dave and Cat from Nostalgia and we went for drinks. First the Wellington, then off to the Diamond sponsored event at Malmaison. More out of curiosity than anything else. We didn't know what to expect, were bloody tired and not really in the right mood for a schmooze. Luckily, no-one else was either and the event was a bit of a washout. Tired and aching in the back, sad to say goodnight to Dave and Cat but glad to be going as well. Of course, on the way out we realised that seemingly everyone in comics had been in Malmaison's bar all along. Oh well. Another time.

I eventually made it home for 2:30am. The motorway driving policy of stopping whenever the driver damn well feels like it was observed all the way. Crawled into bed around 3am.

A great weekend. Next year I'll be there for the whole thing. Thanks especially to Shane, Andy & James for organising Birmingham International Comics Show 2008. See you all at 2009 BICS.

There's a report on the show, along with lots and lots of links to relevant blog posts on the FPI Blog - BICS 2008.

Weekend Event part 1: Birmingham International Comic Show 2008

Busy, busy weekend here at Bruton mansions. Or rather; not here at Bruton mansions. Two major events this weekend.

First up: Birmingham International Comics Show 2008.

The second one of these I've been to. And very good it was as well. However, I'm now absolutely knackered and trying to get various things done about this right now. So expect a full report on it in a couple of days.

Oh Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham......

Much shaking of head in bemused exasperation on reading this from the BBC:
Birmingham City Council has admitted sending out leaflets which showed its US namesake's skyline instead.

About 720,000 pamphlets praising Brummies for their recycling were sent around the city at a cost of £15,000.
But instead of showing landmarks such as the Rotunda and the new Selfridges building, it showed downtown Birmingham, Alabama, instead.
The council, which initially said it was a "generic skyline" and no mistake was made, later admitted the error.
The leaflet meant to thank residents for helping the city achieve its recycling targets early.

Another great example of big councils being utterly stupid. But it's not the mistake that really rankles, it's the attempt to cover it up, the assumption that we're stupid enough to fall for the "generic skyline" bollocks that really annoys. Back in the old days, living in Birmingham we had a lot of dealings with Birmingham City Council. And very, very few of them were positive and encouraging about the future of the city.

Of course, the other thing we should probably be asking is why did the council think it was a good idea to spend £15,000 to send out 720,000 pieces of paper to thank the residents for all their recycling efforts?

Birmingham thoughts

Last weekend was our first trip to Birmingham in 2008. Essentially it was all about a family party we had to get to, but we did spend a little time around the city.

I've written about going back to Birmingham before and how it seems strange to return to the city we called home for many, many years.
In fact, looking over the previous posts, I've realised it's all still relevant; go to the Birmingham category first and then back to here.

This time, on returning to it, it was everything we'd felt before but more so. Bigger, noisier, too many people and not very much like home at all. Which is exactly how it should be. After all, Pocklington is our home now and has been for nearly 2 years now. But it's still slightly sad to lose touch with the city you called home for much of your life.

Even worse, for me at least, is the feeling I get when going into Nostalgia & Comics. You have to remember that this place was part of my life for over 20 years. Whether it was as a young child shopping there or growing up whilst working there, it was very important to me all the same. Yet I go into it now and every time it seems like there are fewer and fewer staff I really know working there. Of course, the staff are all very nice but they're not the staff I knew, not my friends, not very much like family, which is what I felt about a lot of previous staff members.

It was still nice to see Dave and everyone, but it's not the same. It's not my Nostalgia & Comics. Not in the same way that it used to be. Even the layout and the stock mix has changed. It's in little things like not really knowing what is on the shelves anymore that really hits hard. Makes me realise I'm not part of it anymore.
There used to be a time when I worked there that I knew 90% or more of everything we had in stock. That was because a big part of my day's work involved sorting the shelves of comics and graphic novels out and making sure we had everything in stock that we needed to. Now I stare at the shelves in blank dismay. There's too much stock available now and it's all stuff that I don't recognise. So each time I go in there I find myself browsing just a small section of the shelves and looking at my small list of things I'm after.
But it's not the same as really being part of the furniture.

Of course, as I sit here enjoying the Pocklington sunshine, looking around outside my window at the quiet surroundings and contemplating going to pick Molly up from Pickering and the prospect of an enjoyable evening ahead of me, none of the above makes me in any way want to live anywhere else.

Back home again, Half Term week

To start off this half term we all three of us headed off down to Birmingham for a little last minute surprise family party.

Not my side of the family - I've only got Molly, Louise, Mom & Dad on my side plus an aunt and uncle and two cousins I haven't seen since I was 15 or so. This was Louise's side of the family. From back in the day when being a good Irish Catholic meant 25 years of pregnancy and if there were less than 10 children the priest wanted a written explaination for a 30 year old woman.

This was her Aunt Delia's 70th birthday party, who was one of 14? 15? brothers and sisters.
We all met at the Jeweller's Arms in the Jewellery Quarter, owned by one of Louise's uncles and met not only the surviving five brothers and sisters, but a host of relatives from all over Britain, Ireland, the US and Canada.

As is usual with all of these family events, I stay on the sidelines and pretend I remember all of these people's names. I'm actually getting very good at putting on the facade of a good memory now. Louise was particularly mpressed when I leapt up to shake one family memeber's hand, effused about the party and how wonderful Delia was looking, asked after his family etc etc. Then I sat down and casually asked Louise who the hell it was.

But apart from the identity problems, it was a very good night. All three of us went along and decamped to a hotel across town for the night.

After breakfast and a bit of shopping it was off to the parents where Molly and Louise had a great time and I sat upstairs fighting with Dad's computer and his terrifyingly bad dial up connection. I'd forgotten just how slow it used to be. Unfortunately I had no choice as it was time to do a little housekeeping on his system; new anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware and then finally, a new email program.
It took all bloody night. Download after download of updates for programs, all on dial-up. Horrible. But it is done now and hopefully all is working well. Which is good as we were all convinced that we'd get a phone call tonight complaining about something and wondering how on earth dad's managed to destroy the settings already.
This is a great skill that dad has; the ability to magically affect the settings applied to something or other. He's got a great talent for it.

But now we're all safely back home. And it's lovely to be back.
Thoughts on Birmingham tomorrow when I've woken up.

Pete Ashton - Created In Birmingham - winner Guardian Blogging Award.

Over here, Pete breaks the news that Created In Birmingham, his Birmingham listings site, has won (or jointly won) the Independent Blog award in the Media Guardian Innovation awards.

Hoorah.
Pete will now begin his long planned takeover of the world, operating via a laptop sat in the Custard Factory coffee shop demanding everyone kneel and pay him homage. Or at least buy him a tea.
Alternatively, the UK's professional blogger (that deserves a business card all of it's own surely?) will have to content himself with a bit on BBC Birmingham webpages.

This is a very good thing, well done Pete.
Created In Birmingham is an excellent arts, cultural and events blog. Hell, if I wasn't so far away I'd love it even more.

Birmingham Weekend ...... Captain Jack in Panto...

This last weekend the Bruton family took a trip to see Birmingham again.

Louise and Molly were particularly excited as they were off to the panto to see...

Aladdin this year starred John Barrowman, and not only featured a 3D genie but also had Daleks, the Grumbleweeds and Don Maclean.
(I don't recall the Daleks showing up in my memories of the Aladdin, but maybe it's just my memory at fault.)
To be honest I really don't know who was more excited at seeing the panto, Louise or Molly. I do know that they both came out of the show as flushed as schoolgirls with Louise particularly enthusing about John Barrowman, who is, I am told, absolutely gorgeous....


The adulation and schoolgirl giggling only got worse when we headed round the corner into the throng by the stage door where Captain Jack was signing autographs. Louise did the classic parent thing and thrust Molly through the crowd to get her ticket signed...


Afterwards they both came running out of the crowd, almost visibly shaking and both said how lovely he was. But I think they meant it in very different ways.
And yes, we're all aware that I have more chance of bagging the Captain than Louise does.
But it was a good pantomime.

Whilst they were at the panto I headed off to good old Nostalgia & Comics for a look round and to pick up some comics and books. Rich is still talking to me, despite what I said about The Sword. It was lovely to see the place again and chat to everyone. Of course, the staff are mostly new faces to me now and I still shudder to think of the day I head through the doors and don't actually recognise anyone working there. That will be a cold knife to the heart.

Then off to the pub for a drinky with Dave, (shop manager on his day off) & his lovely wife Debbie. Much talk of Yorkshire, holidays, comics and comic shops and then it was time to meet Louise and Molly.

Saturday evening was spent dropping Molly round at her sleepover. Ever since she started Nursery at 5 months old she's known Ellen and Louise and I have become good friends with the family. It was always one of the contacts we intended to keep up when we left for the North and we're doing very well.
Dinner at Mandy & Ellens (and a very rich but absolutely lovely Vanilla Custard and Raspberry Sauce) was followed by a night out in Birmingham with good friends Mark and Vicki.
Sunday was spent wishing Happy 17th Birthday to Louise's cousin Rachel (Happy Birthday Rachel)
Then home and back to lovely Yorkshire.

Tired now, off to bed.

Happy New Year!

Various things have struck me in the last few days about our lives up in Yorkshire.
I suppose that coming to the end of our first full year here has put my mind in reflective mode.

I'm still not completely settled into this new life. So much change and upheaval is obviously going to take an awful long time to get used to.
But in many ways, I hope I never really get used to it. That is always a possibility. Assuming a good, long life of 70+ I'll have spent half my life in the Midlands as a city boy and half my life as a rural townie up here in Pocklington. It is feasible then that a large part of me will always see myself as a city boy.
Similar, I suppose to the mental image you have of yourself, the life snapshot you take of yourself and place in your self-image section of your brain. Mine was taken sometime in 1990 or there abouts and no matter what the birth certificate says or the mirror shows, I'll always think of myself as a wide eyed 20 something.
I imagine Molly will have no such problems, as a transfer at age 7 should be considerably easier than my transfer at 36.

But whether I ever completely settle into this Yorkshire life is immaterial.
I find myself regularly amazed at the life I'm suddenly leading up here. I can't believe that just 15 months ago I was finishing up my Birmingham life, packing up 35 years of city boy living and preparing to swap it all for life in rural Pocklington.

All it takes is a little thing, looking up in the sky and seeing the gliders overhead, taking a walk around town end to end in 10 whole minutes, or maybe just looking up at night at my Yorkshire sky.

And then I realise that I'll never even think of going back, that nothing in the world could be better than the life we have up here.

There may be a part of me that is forever a city boy, but over the last year I've realised that the city boy only really needs an occasional visit to Birmingham to get his city fix. For the rest of he year I'm simply happy being the townie up here.

So Happy New Year everyone, from Bruton Mansions up here in beautiful, small, rural, idyllic, peaceful Pocklington,
My home.

Happy New Year to you all.

Pete Ashton - everyone's second favourite brummie.....

Voting has closed and the results are in for the Brummie of the Year 2007
Pete was pipped to the post at the last minute, although he's gracious in defeat.

A quick example of why I'm never going out in Dudley ever again....

I was born and bred in Dudley, became a grown up in Birmingham and fully intend to grow old here in Yorkshire. The only time I ever head back to Dudley is to go to the dentist and visit the folks. But the last time I was filled with horror at the sights and sounds of Dudley. It's a perfect model for the complete destruction of modern towns. Completely overwhelmed by out of town centres, economic and social deprivation everywhere; clearly visible on every dirty, malnourished little face being screamed at by their parents.

A while back I succumbed and joined facebook. Not because I actually want to, not because I'm ever really going to use it. But because sheer weight of numbers of people on it made me realise it would be nice to see what's going on & to let people see me - I've already had a couple of old friends get in touch through it. Which is nice.
Anyway, Jon Shakespeare is one of my friends on there - ex of Nostalgia & Comics. It appears he's joined something called Yam Yams not Brummies:

In the post: "where not brummies" (which I'm prepared to believe is an attempt to properly illustrate the dialect of Dudley), the amazing dumb-ass stupidity of your average Dudley resident comes out loud and clear:

"Y do people keep saying that the Black countfy is part of Birmingham were not we r better than the brummies because we have 2 of the founding memebers of the football league we started the industrial revelution.All the chains and the anchor from the titanic were made in the Black country. Duncan edwards was born in dudley the great Man U player there is loads more stuff that make the Black country better than the Brummies so i think that the bladk country should b mark on all maps."

A piece of writing so unbelievably bad, so lacking in basic grammar and spelling, so badly punctuated, so god awful it doesn't really need further comment.

Of course, not all of the Black Country is like this. Just the bits of Dudley I saw and this idiot. Indeed a hell of a lot of Black Country folk are delightful; warm, funny, down to earth. Like these people on "I'm not a Brummie I'm from the Black Country and proud of it", who show the great humour and warmth of the region well in the topic on dialect and sayings.
Bostin'

Of course, the greatest irony is that I'm putting this post on the Black Country in the Birmingham category. Ooops.

Brummie of the Year - Vote Now!!!

Birmingham: It's Not Shit (BINS in polite company) are running their Brummie of the year contest.
In the running .......

Pete Ashton - blogging evangelist to the creative community
Lisa Meyer & Jenny Moore of Capsule - bringing much needed gigs (and cake!) to Brum.
Carl Chinn - larger than life local historian.
Condori : Big Chief Busks With Recorder - on behalf of all our buskers and street entertainers.
Soweto Kinch - Mobo award winner and Town Hall associate artist.
Martin Mullaney - Camcorder Councillor, trying every which way to involve people in local politics.
Catherine O’Flynn - First time novelist who’s wowed the literary world this year.
Richard Pawley - Wants to build a 600 foot tower - and jump off it.
John Tighe of The Spotted Dog - Keeping Digbeth noisy, or so we hope.

Obviously because I actually know him and it's all down to him that I'm some 1000+ posts into this blog - I'm voting for Pete Ashton.
But you need to vote as well.
Go now. Vote here. You have until December 1st.

Dudley - a couple of nice things......

Of course, there are some nice things about Dudley:

We parked right next to the Library, and on a whim we popped in - memories came flooding back of hours and hours of browsing and discovering new books and music.

Dudley Public Library.
Source of the majority of my musical obsessions.

There's obviously Dudley Zoo & Castle to go to as well. Perhaps the regions finest attraction. And thankfully a lot better nowadays than it used to be. It's also a huge architectural landmark - with the entire site littered with examples of Lubetkin's modernist buildings. Crap for the animals they wanted to keep in there, but beautiful as objects.

Dudley as a town also has some beautiful architecture. The library building is just the start of a whole street's worth of beauty. The Museum and Art Gallery, the Town Hall and many of the lovely pubs and buildings are a delight.
But for every thing of beauty, there is a monstrous carbuncle. In fact, most of the experiments of the 50s and 60s are slowly decaying and falling into the ground. Masses of brutally ugly concrete shells line the streets, there's a whole underground structure and car park that used to be Sainsburys back in the 70s but is now just a void, used by skaters and tat shops.
Even things like the marvelous Town Hall and civic buildings have been extended and modernised by a team of incompetent lemmings rather than extended in sympathy with the original.

Dudley Civic Buildings

Hideous modern redevelopment not pictured

And there's also the peace and tranquility of Priory ruins and park. At least until the darkness falls, after which it becomes a haven for drinking teens and noise.

Priory Ruins

Dudley - down and out in yam-yam land*

We spent last weekend at my Mom & Dad's house in Dudley. The main reason for going down was obviously to see them and for them to see their grand-daughter. But we also had the delights of our dentist appointment.
(We're lucky that he kept us on as NHS patients - well worth the trip down!)

But unlike our usual visits to Dudley, this time we had a couple of hours to wander around the place.
God almighty it's a culture shock.

Dudley is the 19th largest settlement in the UK (York, by way of comparison is 40th)
It's home to 194919 people.
And from my birth to the age of 18 it was my home as well.

But it's changed beyond recognition from the town I grew up in. The other big thing we noticed about Dudley this time around was a general feeling that the whole place was on such a downward spiral towards economic depravity and decay.
In Pocklington the people are lovely, generally nice and pretty much intelligent and decent folks.
Dudley, not so much. The place seems like it's hemorrhaging IQ by the day.

shopping in Dudley

I bought my first sleeping bag from here, many years ago

Everywhere we went it seemed we were surrounded by crying children and screaming adults. The default parenting option seems to be shouting as loud as possible, preferably whilst dragging your child along behind you screaming and crying at the top of their lungs. Without missing a beat the parent screams back at their child, preferably without turning round to address them. The screams are then shared with everyone in the immediate area.

We have to go there every so often - some contractual thing for the grandparents and their will I think. But I don't think we'll be doing the grand tour again any time soon.

Dudley's once thriving marketplace.

And the only thing that does seem to be increasing - waistlines.
Lunch for a £1.
Heart attacks for free.

* In case you were wondering. Yam-Yam is a derogatory reference to Dudley & Black Country people. It comes from the dialect where "I am" becomes "I yam" hence yam yam.

WTF? VTP200 to land in Birmingham? architecture meets theme park it seems.

Saw this on Pete's blog and, after watching the embedded video, I can't shake the feeling that it's so impossibly cheesy, so unbelievably naff that it must just be some ridiculous Birmingham City Council made up stunt.
Because if it isn't a stunt, if it isn't just someone taking the piss then we're about to see a huge and very expensive gleaming tower of pure shit erected in the skies of Birmingham.
It's not the design that bugs the hell out of me either; I'm all for innovative buildings. No, it's the tacking on of the theme park aspects of it that really annoys. Completely trivialising and juvenilising the whole thing.

VTP200 site BBC report.

Last weekend - back to Birmingham ......

Spent the weekend just gone doing the usual mad dash round Birmingham trying to get as much stuff packed into a couple of days as possible.
Much fun all round. Did a very quick trip into Nostalgia & Comics to pick up the latest batch of comics. Wandered around the city a little being amazed as usual at how bloody big, noisy, busy and populated the place is. Which is a bit like a fish being amazed at how wet the ocean is to be honest.

The main reason for going back to the city was a friend's daughter's birthday party. As usual I resisted the temptation to buy her an Iron Man dress-up outfit, Daddy would love it, Mommy less so methinks. Can you get Iron Man dress-up for a 5 year old girl anyway? And if not, why not? Maybe when the movie comes out?

The Nostalgia & Comics trip was yet again a strange experience. I now know and have worked with just 3 members of staff. There are 4 members of staff who have started post me. This means that at some stage in the not too distant future I could walk into the shop and not know anyone. This may break my heart.

Then it was onto Molly's reason for going shopping. Somehow, despite us being extremely mean and demanding that she puts half of all monetary presents into her savings account, she'd managed to accumulate £40 in money and Entertainer vouchers. Maybe we should put her in charge of the family finances? Maybe not, the mortgage money would just end up becoming a very large cuddly toy fund.

Louise and I were staying in the Etap hotel while Molly spent Saturday night at her nursery buddies house. We only picked the Etap because we couldn't get cheap Travelodge rooms, but £38 for the room and £5 for breakfast, £3 for secure overnight parking didn't seem a bad idea.
And it wasn't. It's a pod hotel, small, functional rooms but nice, comfortable and clean.

One slight downside is the location and the obvious problem it has at times with it's clientele.
It's just past the old Dome nightclub in a not particularly nice part of town. To get into town you have to walk up to the Horsefair roundabout where you are presented with a choice; take the underpass through to Smalbrook Queensway or take to the road, using the narrow bits of kerb on the edge of the roundabout whilst looking down 40 feet at the Queensway underneath you. Not being stupid, we chose the walk of death overground. As did everyone else we saw that night.

The clientele problem didn't really become obvious until returning to the hotel later that night when we were met by the security guard and had our room number and names checked against his list. Talking to the staff and a couple of guests it became clear that the Etap was a favourite for overnighting groups of young folk who marauded up and down the corridors. But luckily, not that night.

We actually went out, just Louise and I, into Birmingham and had an extremely pleasant few hours sitting in the Lounge Bar of the Glee Club just chatting, drinking and most importantly watching. I wish I'd have taken my camera to record all of the glorious sights we saw, but I'm sure you can imagine the horrors!
Birmingham at night; noisy, too many people, a slightly threatening atmosphere but still a great place to be.
Even better when you can get to go home afterwards to a quiet little beautiful Yorkshire market town..

Custard Factory taken over, some bloke called Ashton in charge?

Pete Ashton is on his merry way to becoming the cultural blogging nexus for Birmingham. First it was the BrumBlog, then paid employment for Created in Birmingham and now he's announced his next step in world takeover is the Custard Factory's web presence.

Nice one Pete. Well done. All you creative sorts start bugging him about it now.

(And do you see what I've done with the picture - Nexus, Oh sad comic book person that I am)

Favourite Photograph May 2007

Not one of Molly this month for a change. But instead a choice of two views of the same iconic Birmingham building, as viewed from the car park over the road:

First a close up of the cage, then a view of the building itself. (The third view just gives you a better view of one of Birmingham's nicest buildings - the signal box at New St station).