The Twelve* ‘Indies’ of Xmas — a last minute Brum ‘indy’ shoppers’ guide

You’ve left it to the last minute to get Christmas gifts, but you’re still a hipster do-gooder at heart. You need independence, it’s a guarantee of thought and quirkiness and doing good for your local community. The fact that there isn’t more than two other shops with the same name is that guarantee. Forget the supply chain, feel the font. Hoist up your beard, batten down your red trousers, tighten your bird-adorned victory rolls, and head out quickly to do your present buying. These shops are all fully recommended by Paradise Circus and will be open on Christmas Eve until late**.

Actually need a present quick? Why not try the new Birmingham: It’s Not Shit the book, or 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World still time to order for Christmas.

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We didn’t just invent Cluedo, you know: 11 Brum Board Games for Xmas

After Christmas dinner cognitive abilities are low and methane levels are high. No wonder then that a fair proportion of people choose not to move from in front of the TV: some just can’t, others think that watching Downton Abbey or Doctor Who is just a bit common. They’re right. And in lieu of any stimulating debate, here’s some recommended Bham-based board games you might want to gather the family round the table for:

Stuck for a present? Why not try the new Birmingham: It’s Not Shit the book, or 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World.

Escape from Weoley Castle the Board Game

weoley

Take on the role of an inner city kid: stripped of all of your life chances you face years of brutal class attacks and vicious austerity cuts! OR you can chose to be a Tory politician, producing policies to end social mobility!

Tories must spend the entire game in another room eating lobsters bought with withdrawn EMA grants, ignoring the desperate cries for help from those in the room next door.

Kids must trudge around the board distracting themselves with cheap poppers and pictures of Tulisa in Nuts or Heat. Escape is possible only if a Villa scout sees them put two past Burton Albion for Tamworth, if they put out a dubstep album, or they get past the audition stage of a reality show. Those who are unsuccessful at music and football must pin their hopes on completing a challenge from a Springsteen Card in the final round.

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Your Local TV Christmas listings

In mid 2014 Birmingham got it’s own local TV channel. Chances are that they might not make it all the way to next Christmas, so luckily we’ve been able to get a listing of their test schedule for this year…get out your highlighters now.

Stuck for a present? Why not try the new Birmingham: It’s Not Shit the book, or 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World.

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Thinking of you at Christmastime

a christmas offering

You open an envelope that is slightly bulkier than the average Christmas card to discover that it doesn’t contain money, only a folded couple of A4 sheets in twelve point Times New Roman. It’s the scourge of the festive season: the round robin, typed pages of sickening boasting and cloying chuckles from people you don’t really care for. A yearly reminder of just why you don’t see them from one card to the next.

That’s what happens to us every year in Great Barr, in Yardley Wood and in Witton: seasonal joy tempered with bile at the sheer entitlement of it. Or at least that’s how you’d think it would be if you read the Guardian, the Sunday Times Magazine or listen to the more magaziney programmes on Radio Four: for they are the only places that ever seem to mention them. It’s as if round robins are a strain of virus only spread aerially at tennis clubs or by physical contact at charity fundraising ‘slave’ auctions hosted in chain hotels by networking groups. It’s a disease of the home counties and of certain areas of north London, one the we are mercifully immune to.

But with the media centric as it is, when W1 sneezes the rest of the country catches a cold. Or at least has to wrap up warm.

It’s not Sports Personality of the Year that really kicks off media Christmas for me, nor is it the publication of the bumper Radio Times—it’s the first time I read or hear a bitter think piece about how the joy of others cannot be tolerated in Yuletide A4 form.

If a Christmas card I opened contained a letter with well wishes and news, I would read it and feel grateful. Grateful the senders were thinking of me; not just enough to write “To Jon from all at number 42” but enough to take time to compose a letter and that they assumed I would care as much about their lives as they obviously did about mine. Had I cared enough to send a card or write a letter, that is.

Maybe it was a perfect storm of people with geographically wider social networks, access to typewriters and photocopiers when the boss was out and, yes, a little bit of middle class entitlement. Given the same access, the working class would produce punk fanzines and reboot the publishing world, the middle class just got something new to moan about in their existing media outlets.

And then we all became middle class, according to Tony Blair and John Major, but we didn’t get the tennis clubs or typewriters we just got equal access to the hatred across the airwaves and in the broadsheets. We got to be complicit in the snideness without ever quite understanding what we were supposed to be getting riled about. Reading a Sunday newspaper magazine is much like squinting at a 1890s Punch cartoon tying to guess the references and working out if it has anything to say about your life.

This festive season, let’s give thanks that to the people of Paradise Circus it means thinking of others. And that means people outside our social norms and postcodes too.

To that end we’ve written Birmingham’s own round robin. Feel free to forward it to a city near you.

 

Photo CC: Stephen Mackenzie

Barry Norman is Away

As every schoolchild knows, it was Birmingham that gave the world Christmas. This year, in a move to recognise that inalienable fact, and to say Thank You to the city of Birmingham for this annual feast of gluttony, tat-buying and enforced jollity, TV schedulers in the UK have joined together and themed their Christmas movie selection around the city that started it all. Here is the Paradise Circus round-up of the best films that Christmas TV 2013 has to offer:

TV Christmas

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