Moi Dah Owt in Burmingum

You will have gathered from my perfect rendering of the West Midlands accent that I have spent the day in the nation’s third major city. Mother was visiting an antiques fair at the NEC and it seemed worth tagging along. I was pleased not to be in the office today as Doesntgetme was really pissed off with me for some reason when I got back from the course yesterday. I thought she was in a mood but she was fine with everyone else. The only thing I could find that I’d done wrong was not delete a handful of emails from the team mail box but even she couldn’t overreact to that extent over a few read but not deleted messages, could she? She’s one of those people that thinks she’s perfect and simply loves to point out the failings of others. Thank goodness Supervisor is there to take the piss out of her more or less constantly. But enough of that, I didn’t study the West Midlands accent in such depth just to talk about the people I like and don’t like at work. I did shopping. That’s much more important.

The Past

When ostensibly studying at university I used to bob to Birmingham once or so each term. It was easy enough from Coventry station, doubly so if you got off the university bus early rather than walking in from the town centre. Over the course of my three years I made a remarkable number of trips with other people. Normally a solo shopper due to my erratic method of rushing round at random and hoping I find what I don’t yet know I’m looking for. But I can distinctly remember trips in with H, my housemates, course chum Nys and others. By contrast I don’t really remember ever going round Coventry with anyone. I also recall an ill-advised trip to Birmingham on a Saturday afternoon which was hell on toast. Me being me I can remember I bought a Space 1999 video that day from Debenhams. Or was it BHS? Possibly Littlewoods. Anyway, it was somewhere that you wouldn’t normally go for your recommended daily allowance of pompous science fiction. Since leaving the halls of academe I have been back three or four times for a wander round. The last time saw me acquire Bloodtide on CD and two rare Alicia Silverstone videos. Again with the peculiar memory.

The Journey

It used to take the best part of three hours to get from home to the NEC. This time it took two. I can only think that the new toll road has cut out much of the crap and, if this is indeed the case, then I’m all for it. Perhaps I could suggest an improvement – not just a toll but perhaps make it members only? That way we could keep the wrong sort out and keep it even clearer for people like us. Even the service station seemed less grotty. Possibly because it’s brand new but possibly because not every Tom, Rick or Harry is stopping there. Though three pounds for a toll is as nought compared to the prices in such oases. And, loathed as I am to admit to possessing the same prejudices as everyone else, there was a woman on the staff who had an erratically cropped, two tone mullet which I’m afraid to say did cry out Dyke! She had a nice bottom and I wouldn’t have minded following her for a while and maybe testing my theory. But there were toilets to visit and over priced beverages to rush so no time for insane lusting after women with eccentric hair.

The Station

Birmingham International Station is an oddly named place. I guess it is named in honour of the airport to which it is connected. But it doesn’t take a mind as pedantic and irritating as mine to point out that it is extremely difficult for a British railway station to be international. There is the channel tunnel some hundreds of miles away which is theoretically connected but really. That is on a par with "Community Hygiene Officer" as a polite job title for a dustman in the pretension stakes. But I didn’t have time to mock the dismal little station’s woeful name as I needed a ticket in a hurry. A grotty prole scurried in front of me as we both approached the one lone solo only open ticket window. But he didn’t want a ticket from the ticket seller. No – he wanted (give me Prisoner titles style reverb) information. He wanted to know the best train (on an unspecified future date) to get him from Birmingham to Manchester. Then he wanted to know how much it would cost. Then he wanted it all written down for him. Then he had other questions. And other questions. And other questions. He’d obviously seen that there was a big board with train details on it some feet away and an information desk and a thing called the inter-fucking-net but none of that would’ve satisfied his yearning for sadism. Eventually he fucked the hell off and I enacted my return ticket transaction in around ten of your English seconds. I hate people.

The Old

Last time I was in Birmingham I noticed the view from the entrance to New Street Station for the first time. Mainly because it was the first time there had been a view from the entrance to New Street Station. For most of the past handful of decades Birmingham has been blighted by a monstrosity called the Bullring. Possibly it was named by someone who considered all the horrific spectacles that go on in the so called developed world and thought that the ritual slaughter of bulls by the barbaric Spanish was the best metaphor for a ghastly, ugly, dirty, concrete shit hole in the centre of the city. I’m really not an architecture snob – I love Coventry – but the Bullring was revolting. I only went in it twice – once to see if it was as bad inside as out (it was worse – the whole place was no-name shops, most of them selling everything for a pound) and once by accident. The latter time I did stumble across Forbidden Planet but found they had succumbed to Bullring fever and they kept most of their stock on the floor. If ever there was a building which was the physical embodiment of clinical depression it is the old Bullring. It had literally nothing to recommend it. So they eventually destroyed it to death.

The New

The new Bullring opened to a blaze of publicity owing to what appears on first glance to be a hundred foot insect eye (or possibly tumour) growing out of it. Inside and out it is very much like every other modern shopping centre – it’s light, it has an HMV and there are lots of young people with too many phones and too much flesh hanging out. But unlike most shopping centres it does spread outside. You never quite know which level you are on unless you look up and down at a stairwell. I’m surprised they kept the name as (a) it is ugly and (b) it is synonymous with ugly. But had they been able to follow that logic, Birmingham would’ve been renamed ages ago.

The Improved

Great swathes of Brum have been pedestrianised. This is a huge improvement as nothing sullies the air (especially on a hot day like today) like the plumes of smoke which accompany a caravan of double-decker buses. It also allows the proles to spread out more as they wander around and stops them getting in my way to quite such an extent. The downside is that some people are stupid enough to forget that there are roads and so wander across in front of a bus and annoy the driver. I drive a Micra and can only imagine how hard it is to drive a bus, let alone with unpleasant and under dressed tarts ambling in front of you.

The Grotty

I could happily pass a day in the sheltered, clean and car free portion of Birmingham were it not for Virgin Megastore. I had an idea how to get there – it is rather out of the way and only experience kept me on the right track – and yet was struck at the decline in the environment over such a relatively short distance. I would later see that Virgin are soon to open a big store in a mall near the new and improved Bullring centre and I can quite understand why. Their current store is surrounded by railings, shops which cash cheques and "buy gold" and subway passages which I wouldn’t go down if you gave me chocolate. It is a dirty and depressing part of the city and hopefully this was the last time I’ll have to go there. They made my journey worth while though as they had Inspector Morse DVDs in their 3-for-£20 offer so I got six Morse movies for twenty quid. I made sure I got the adaptation of the one novel I’ve already read because I was curious as to how they would do it. I’ve already forgotten most of the details so I suspect it will come as a surprise.

The Verdict

Our city centres are finally waking up to the fact that they are depressing and dirty places. Manchester is in a constant state of renovation – partly caused by the IRA bomb but there is also a lot of regeneration ongoing – Coventry has already replaced the most vile part of its shopping centre with a sparkly new twenty first century mall, Birmingham is to be patted on the back for vaporising perhaps the last true monument to Hitler’s bombing campaigns and even sunny Stockport is seeing nasty old and run down buildings renovated into nice shoppy places. The motivation seems to be threefold – to fight back against the out of town malls, to fight back against the rise in internet shopping and to create areas which can be closed en masse at night to stop vandalism. Furthermore, these new areas are owned by someone – someone (in the private sector usually) who will take responsibility for ensuring that what is bright and new today keeps looking bright and new in the future.