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One Mile Away

Four years ago I wrote this, a slightly hysterical but solid blog post about the film 1 Day. 1 Day is a grime musical starring actual members plucked from Birmingham’s rival gangs, the Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew.

The article was written during a time where I was working in a Pupil Referral Unit in north Birmingham with kids that were gang members or vulnerable to them. The posts trepidation to the film coming out is an echo to my higher-ups absolute panic about the film which they (wrongly) thought would cause another spike in violence between these two gangs.

I eventually left the unit, and a large portion of me leaving was down to not being able to fully leave work at work, you get to know the kids and through that you are afforded small peeks into their worlds. Eventually this, and the sheer hard work it took to connect with them, wore me down.

The opportunity came for someone from PC to go watch a press screening of the documentary One Mile Away in which members of both gangs try to broker a truce through the director Penny Woolcock who became a trusted during the making of 1 Day. I couldn’t pass it up, so exhausted and still a little hungover from the weekend I dragged myself to Aston.

In a room that is normally used as a nursery I eat my chicken and drink urn brewed tea as three or four unassuming black guys mill around and press buttons on their laptops. We soon settle down and the documentary starts.

Continue reading “One Mile Away”

Heard it through the…

Brian Homer and the Central Library edition of Grapevine

Grapevine was a community newspaper established in the 1970s. Launched in Handsworth, it masqueraded as a listings magazine (to encourage readership) but was conceived as a space which could address the gap in coverage of community issues in the city. Looking back at projects like this remind us that the issues that Birmingham’s burgeoning hyperlocal scene are engaging with are not new, and that their work is part of an ongoing canon of alternative media work. It’s worth folk looking back over this history to make the links.

The team who published Grapevine went on to develop a range of other community media projects including the Handsworth Self Portrait.

Pictured is Grapevine’s Brian Homer with an edition of the magazine that highlighted the controversy around library redevelopment projects some 40 years ago – another issue which resonates within contemporary Birmingham. To read their coverage of the Birmingham Central Library, see the digitised pages in the Scribd viewer below.

Grapevine 73 by Brian Homer

The Stirrer has a time-bending review of Grapevine’s final issue if you’d like to get a sense of what the magazine was about.

Letter from Stirchley: A New River

As a home worker I need excuses to get out of the house so, despite not being that interested in food other than as fuel, I’ve been volunteering at Stirchley Stores, doing shifts and running errands a few times a week. As well as the essential contact with other people it also gives me a commute, of a kind. It’s just a walk through Hazelwell Park and over the River Rea, five minutes at most, and it’s given me a real appreciation of these small, local parks which cover the Birmingham sprawl.

Functional and unpretentious, Hazelwell Park is a typical community resource. A large rectangle with space for ball sports (as I believe they’re known), enclosed on four sides by a terrace, a patch of woodland, some allotmments and the mighty Rea. Like other parks along the river its path forms part of the National Cycle Route 5, a pastoral bypass to the noisy Pershore Road used by pedestrians and cyclists alike. It also houses a vast murder of crows which, remarkable as they are, are not the subject of this letter.

I want to tell you about a new river which I believe has emerged in Hazelwell Park, one of many minor tributaries of the Rea but one which I’m pretty sure was not so obvious last year.
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Lennon’s Guide to the Mythical Fauna of the English Midlands Pt2

Part one is here.

Wump-Tay

The Wump-Tay (pronounced ‘wump-tay’) is a large, ectoplasmic spirit-form with shape-shifting powers that enable it to take the form of any object it desires, so long as it’s a noun. It can grow to the size of a double-decker bus and usually assumes the style, shape and mannerisms of a double-decker bus.

A notoriously mischievous spirit, the Wump-Tay will often lie in wait at bus stops preying on rush-hour commuters and other gullible types. Typically, a would-be passenger will glimpse the diabolical double-decker parked some distance ahead and make a frantic dash for it. The creature will watch the hapless victim approach, and—at the very last moment—slam its doors shut in the poor schmuck’s face and drive off at great speed, often without signalling. A similar tactic occurs late at night. Shrouded in mist, the Wump-Tay will slowly and seductively approach a desperate-looking soul waiting for the last bus home. As the victim clumsily fumbles for the right change, the mist will clear revealing an ominous text scrawled on the Wump-Tay’s destination blind: Sorry – Not in Service.

For a number of years the Wump-Tay was absent from Birmingham’s streets after the local council sold it for an undisclosed fee to the Toho Film Company of Japan. It went on to star in several popular monster movies of the period including Godzilla vs. Wumpt-Tay the Ghost Bus (1973) and Destroy All Buses! (1974). The Wump-Tay eventually returned to the West Midlands after being fired from the set of 1977’s Mecha-Bus vs. Omni-Bus ’77 (1977) for allegedly slamming its doors shut in the face of a studio head.

The origin of the Wump-Tay remains a mystery. One popular legend claims it was the vengeful ghost of a classic 1965 Daimler Fleetline double-decker whose life was, quite literally, cut short following a surprise altercation with a low-bridge.

Continue reading “Lennon’s Guide to the Mythical Fauna of the English Midlands Pt2”

Lennon’s Guide to the Mythical Fauna of the English Midlands Pt1

The city of Birmingham is famous throughout the world for its rich industrial heritage, its vast canal network, and its large population of supernatural creatures. The following is a brief overview of some of its more popular and enduring myths. People from Birmingham often call themselves ‘Brummies’, a word etymologists claim can be traced back to the ancient Midlands art of preserving dead bodies known as Brummification. The origin of the word ‘etymologist’ however, still remains shrouded in mystery.

The original Brummies were dead local aristocrats whose bodies were painstakingly preserved using bandages, motor oil and a secret recipe containing 11 herbs and spices. This, of course, was something only the super-rich could afford due to their innate ability to keep up with monthly repayments over several thousand years.

The practice was introduced to Birmingham by ancient Egyptian undertakers at a time when the city still had strong commercial links with the Ptolemaic dynasty. Writing in the 1st century AD, the Roman historian Tacitus described a large British settlement “some CXII miles north of Londinium, so long as you leave the M XLII at Junction VIII.” He scornfully referred to it as “The Pyramidlands” although reluctantly acknowledged that the area “had more camels than Venice.”

Birmingham’s links with ancient Egypt remain visible to this day. Many public spaces still feature ornate statues of sphinxes, obelisks and dog-headed industrialists. The area now known as the Balti Triangle, for instance, once had a third dimension and formed a massive pyramid. In Victorian times, the construction of the city’s famous canal network was only made possible thanks to a generous donation of water by the river Nile.

It was during the Victorian era that ancient Brummie remains first became a regular feature at local museums. Unfortunately, many of these exhibition pieces were accidentally brought back to life by clumsy trainee curators out to impress their bosses. These bandage-wrapped fat-cats would inevitably embark on a violent campaign of destruction, often fuelled by rage, sour grapes and a frustrated sense of entitlement. “These days just about anyone can call themselves a Brummie,” said one embittered 19th century Tutan-ka-Hooligan who preferred to remain bandaged.

It’s worth remembering, of course, that the 1867 Municipal Titles Act famously abolished the archaic property restrictions that prevented ordinary folk from calling themselves ‘Brummies’. Sadly—due to the institutionalised misogyny of the patriarchal ruling elite—the legislation forgot to include women. This situation was only partially alleviated by the 1918 repeal of the Institutionalised Misogyny Act.

A detailed account of a more contemporary resurrection rampage appears in Sarcopha Guy (Rameses House, 2004), the autobiography of revived Brummie bad-boy Ozzy Mandias. Unfortunately, the book has yet to be translated from its original hieroglyphics.

Continue reading “Lennon’s Guide to the Mythical Fauna of the English Midlands Pt1”

What on earth are you doing here?

Vous êtes ici

Here’s a question I get asked a lot:

“What on earth are you doing here?”.

I wasn’t born here, in Birmingham, but here I am now: a grown man, a wife, a house, kids and a cat. A responsible job even. Birmingham has me, has me locked in tight.

“But why Birmingham, of all places?”

I didn’t grow up here, in Brum, but here I stand, here and now. I’m part of this place, it’s part of me.

“How did you end up here?”

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Matthew McConaughey on the High St

A bored looking teenager says something, he’s not really looking at me so doesn’t see my earphones are in. all I see is his lips moving and a hole in his nose where a piercing usually goes.

Realising my rudeness in one smooth movement I tug on the wires and the buds pop out of my ears which I catch in one hand. No I haven’t practised that, shut up.

“Sorry, what?” my apology breaks his reverie and he snaps back into his own head.

“Would you be interested in this DVD we’re offering today for only five pounds?’ he says on reflex. The DVD is terrible rom-com Failure to Launch starring the equine Sarah Jessica Parker and annoyingly likeable Matthew McConaughey, it is the exact opposite of a film I would willingly watch. I’m fairly certain on hell’s television there is a channel that plays that film on loop. Still feeling bad about having my headphones in I bite down my disgust with a “No, thank you” but also try and pack so much human inflection and actual connection into those three words ‘sorry’ I want to say ‘I recognise you ARE a real person and deserve all my attention, look how much we are connecting now’. It comes out weird, like a crazy person.

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What happened next?

For a time, this was an allowable method of attempting to staunch the flow of disappearances. But it soon extended much further than one shelf of the ‘D’ sequence. In fact within a year everything was gone.

This is the story of that encroaching nothing.

Shelf of books from 'D' Sequence gone missing. Does any staff know where books have gone?

 

For a time, this was an allowable method of attempting to stanch the flow of disappearances. But it soon extended much further than one shelf of the ‘D’ sequence. In fact within a year everything was gone. This is the story of that encroaching nothing.

So what happened next? Add to the collaborative story with the next steps.

Answers on a postcard to:

Paradise Circus
C/O Jon Hickman, B322 Baker Building,
BCU City North Campus,
Perry Barr,
B42 2SU

Try Touchnote as a quick and cool way of sending them.

You can also look inside

On a clear morning you can see forever. As long as forever is the tower blocks of Perry Barr being pushed into the centre by the surrounding hills, as long as forever is the take away detritus huddling against itself and the kerbs of Broad Street, as long as forever is taken to mean Alpha Tower not angular enough against the skyline.

You can also look inside.

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