Strange Taboo
Posted: April 11, 2012 Filed under: Other, Radar magazine | Tags: Digbeth, Radar magazine, Taboo adult cinema Leave a comment »An article I wrote for the 1st anniversary issue of Radar magazine is now available online
The article discusses the Taboo adult cinema in Digbeth, and the possible reasons for its continued existence.
Riots and Royalty
Posted: January 14, 2012 Filed under: Other | Tags: Birmingham, Camp Hill, civil war, diamond jubilee, kings norton, riots Leave a comment »On the edge of Kings Norton Park, at the opposite end to the church, is a big old pub called The Camp. I have driven past there any number of times, but only recently found out that it takes its name from the fact that there was a Royalist army encampment here in 1643, during the Civil War, when Queen Henrietta Maria and over five thousand troops passed through the area on their way south to meet up with the king.
The circumstances of the visit make an odd contrast to the most recent appearance of royalty in Birmingham, when newly-weds Kate and William came to Winson Green last summer as part of their tour of areas affected by the riots.
When Queen Henrietta Maria arrived, the town had also recently suffered from looting and worse, but on that occasion it was at the hands of Royalist soldiers.
Despite the fact that Britain’s past is peppered with periods of bloodshed and brutality, the Civil War still stands out as a truly jaw-dropping episode. At its most basic it was a conflict between the Royalist ‘Cavaliers’, who believed that King Charles had a divine right to impose his will on Parliament, and the Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ who thought otherwise.
In reality this conflict was overlaid with a myriad of others – Protestant against Catholic, Puritan Protestant against moderate, Scots against English, Highland Scots against Lowlanders, one Highland clan against another.
It was as if every grievance that had been grumbling along in the background of life erupted all at once, and all against a backdrop of famine and plague.
Birmingham at the time was only a small town, but one which was developing a reputation both as a hotbed of Puritanism and as a manufacturer of weapons, which were being supplied to the Parliamentarians.
The town was duly identified as a target by the Royalists, and one that would have to be dealt with in order to clear a path for the Queen on her journey down from York. In April 1643, Birmingham was attacked by a Royalist force of almost two thousand, led by Prince Rupert, the Laughing Cavalier himself. Despite being outnumbered ten to one, the Parliamentarians put up strong resistance behind makeshift defences at Camp Hill, before eventually being overrun. The Royalists went on to burn and plunder the town at will.
There are no landmarks or memorials to remind us of any of this today, and in fact why should there be?
When the royals go on an offensive today it is of the charm variety, and the belief that they were appointed by God himself has long since disappeared.
But even in twenty first century Britain, vestiges of the sovereign’s ‘divine’ powers still remain. Any MP who refuses to take an oath of allegiance to our unelected monarch will find themselves barred from entering the House of Commons. And surely royal visits, such as that by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridgeshire, are meaningless unless there is still some background level of belief that the royal family are, for whatever reason, simply better than the rest of us?
With the Queen’s diamond jubilee due to be celebrated later this year, maybe it is not too curmudgeonly after all to suggest that we ought to remember that the fledgling Birmingham was once torn apart by marauding soldiers trying to instil exactly this belief in blue-blooded superiority into the local population.
An Early Resolution
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Other | Tags: Birmingham, culture, events, market, Stirchley Leave a comment »A few days ago I took my eleven-year-old son along to the Stirchley Community Market, at the United Working Men’s Club on Hazelwell Street. The market is held there every month, but we had never quite gotten around to going until now.
There were about a dozen stalls packed into the main room in the club, plus one or two more outside in the car park.
We had mainly gone along out of curiosity rather than with the idea of buying very much, but I still came away bearing some interesting Christmas gifts for my girlfriend.
We also bought a few things for our own immediate gratification. My son got a ‘friendly’ Christmas hand grenade made from soft felt. We got his sister a couple of badges from illustrator Liz Lunney’s stall, which both featured cartoon rabbits. One bears the slogan ‘sour rabbit cares about you,’ which seems encouraging.
We also bought some cup cakes from the Cupcake Bistro, chatted to a guy from the Friends of Hazelwell Park, mooched around the rest of the stalls, which sold everything from jewellery to tea towels to second hand records, listened to medieval Carols sung live, and generally had a good time of it.
There was a cosy, relaxed atmosphere – a sense of a small community of local artists and businesses coming together to support one another.
We’ve lived in Stirchley for over five years but I’ve only recently become aware of the place as having its own cultural scene, independent of the nearby, well-established vibrancy of Moseley and Kings Heath.
For anyone who wants to keep up to date with local goings-on, the tweets emanating from @stirchleyhaps, and their accompanying website, are good places to start. They provide regular details of upcoming events, and also the kind of trivia about the everyday lives of Stirchley-ites which helps to flesh out the place and bring it to life.
Earlier this year Stirchley briefly had its own squatted social centre at the Whit Marley building, which held a couple of art exhibitions and an open mic night, amongst other things. This has now closed, but there are still regular comedy nights at the British Oak, a traveling cinema, and gigs at the Roadhouse.
There are co-operatively run businesses such as the Bike Foundry, Loaf online, and the South Birmingham Food Co-op, all of which sound very useful, but not one of which I really know much about yet.
When I first came to Birmingham, about twenty years ago, I was involved in a couple of workers co-operatives – a vegetarian cafe over in Saltley, and a small housing co-op, both of which long ago bit the dust. These days, when it can sometimes seem as if we are all capitalists by default, its nice to know that those alternative ideas are still around and being put into practice.
I write a lot about places outside of Birmingham where I happen to end up through work. Maybe I should make it a New Years Resolution to find out more about the stuff that’s going on on my doorstep.
Fearful Pleasures
Posted: November 7, 2011 Filed under: Other | Tags: Birmingham, fantasy, fear, fetish, kidnappings, Radar magazine Leave a comment »An article I wrote for the November issue of Radar magazine about fantasy kidnappings and other fear-related fetishes is now available online at www.theradarmagazine.co.uk
Nighttime in Highbury Park
Posted: October 26, 2011 Filed under: Other | Tags: Birmingham, Highbury park, Kings Heath, Stirchley Leave a comment »When we first got our dog, Charlie, from the Dogs Home in Digbeth, he had not yet been neutered. This meant that we got into the habit of walking him late in the evening when there were fewer other dogs around for him to force his attentions upon.
However, even though he has now been ‘snipped’, the late night habit has continued. If anything his walks have become later still, and the average number of family members coming along has decreased. Most nights it is just the dog and me in the darkness of Highbury park.
As soon as we arrive I let him off his lead, at which point he usually disappears to do his own thing. Sometimes I can see him as the faintest of shadows against other shadows. Sometimes he will hurtle past me on a mad dash to nowhere in particular. But most of the time all I have is the vague idea that he is around somewhere.
Highbury park is a big old place, big enough to get away from the sound of traffic and light of street lamps.
Occasionally, for no clear reason, the darkness will spook me and for a minute or two I will find myself constantly resisting the temptation to look around me for the approach of unknown assailants. But mostly it is a relaxing emptiness, free from other people, or the expectation of them, and free from the plethora of sights and sounds that fill almost every part of the city in the daytime.
I am using these walks to learn about the stars. I have an app. on my phone which provides me with a 3D view of the night sky from my current location, with all the planets and constellations labelled. I have started from the Great Bear ( the one that looks like a saucepan, and the only one I already recognised ) and worked outwards.
On cloudy nights I just stroll along. With so little sensory input, small changes become instantly noticeable. Now that Autumn is underway, the leaves on one particular tree have become dry enough to rattle softly in the breeze as I walk past.
Once in a while there are other people. One night I passed a trio of silhouettes on a bench by the river. Low muttering tones and the hiss of an opening can suggested street drinkers who had nowhere better to be.
Once I heard, but didn’t see, younger drunken people in the distance, at least one man and one woman. At one point the woman’s voice rose in screaming fear while the man shouted his hatred back at her. A few moments later they were united again in harsh raucous laughter, receding away into the night.
A couple of days ago the police were searching the park in pairs, their white torch beams bobbing up and down as they looked for a couple of guys whose appearance they were unable to describe to me other than that they were carrying JD Sports bags. For a few minutes the park seemed transformed into a vast dark arena where some primeval hunting game was being played out.
But these nights are the rare exceptions. Almost always it is just the dog and me, which, I think, suits both of us fine.
The Art of Unnecessary Innovation
Posted: September 18, 2009 Filed under: Other | Tags: IS 220, keyless ignition, Lexus Leave a comment »Yesterday I collected a Lexus IS 220 from a compound near Coventry to take home for the night and then deliver to a dealership in Oldbury this morning. I had never driven this model before and when I was handed the key I realised, with a certain sinking feeling, that it was not a key at all, just a small black plastic fob.
There are several makes of car nowadays that have ‘keyless’ ignition systems. Some require the fob to be fitted into a slot in the dashboard somewhere, before a button can be pressed to start the engine. Some will not let you start the engine at all unless you have your foot on the clutch, or the brake pedal. Others will only start if you press the button for the right length of time – press it for too long and you will instigate an ‘instrument check’, which involves a few seconds of flashing lights and messages on the dashboard before the whole thing goes dark again. The only thing that all of these systems have in common is that even when you have figured out exactly what hoops you have to jump through in order to start the vehicle it will never be any quicker or easier than just putting a key in the ignition and then turning it.
(In case you’re wondering, the combination for the Lexus turned out to be a foot on the clutch and then one quick press of the start button.)
It’s hard not to think that there are a lot of people employed in car design these days who have run out of ideas for making genuine improvements and who have resorted to endless tinkering and tampering instead in the hope that their superiors might not realise that they are no longer performing any useful function.
I recently picked up a vehicle, whose make I can no longer remember, and was driving through Birmingham with my bag on the passenger seat. At one point, as I rounded a bend, my bag moved slightly. This caused a hidden sensor somewhere to deduce that my bag was a living, breathing passenger, who ought to be wearing a seat belt. This in turn set off a flashing red light on the dashboard and a loud continuous pinging. There was nowhere to pull over and so the only way to stop the alarm was to reach across, while driving, and fasten a seat belt around an inanimate object.
I wonder if this uber-safety measure has yet resulted in anyone becoming safely embedded in the front of an oncoming vehicle.
On another occasion I was driving north to Scotland along the M6. It was very early in the morning and the road were deserted. Let’s just say I may have been traveling in excess of 70mph. In the distance I spotted a police patrol car on a bridge and immediately braked hard, hoping that I had slowed down quickly enough to be able to glide inconspicuously past the officers. But the car turned out to contain an on-board nanny which had other ideas. It decided that everyone in the vicinity needed to be aware of how sharply I had braked, and automatically put on the hazard warning lights. By the time I had realised what had happened, and then found the button to turn them off again, the bridge with the patrol car on it was already in my rear view mirror.
Yesterday, I arrived home with the Lexus, pressed the button on the fob to lock it, and nothing happened. I tried pressing the button just once, then double-clicking it and then holding it down, and yet the vehicle remained resolutely unlocked. I eventually concluded that since there was nothing of value in there and no visible buttons on the doors to show that they were open, I didn’t really need to solve the mystery and left it unlocked.
I returned to it this morning to find that it would not start – the battery was drained to the point where even the dash lights would not come on. The AA man who eventually arrived to jump-start it suggested that it had probably been picking up a signal from the fob in the house and that this all-night communication had been enough to run the battery down.
Of course there are ways around all of these pointless innovations – make sure you always put a seat belt around anything on the passenger seat, and make sure you know where the hazard warning light switch is. And, if you are determined to buy a Lexus IS 220, all you have to do is buy another car as well so that you can transport the fob to another address a safe distance away every night and then retrieve it in the morning. Just make sure this extra car isn’t also a Lexus, otherwise the process will never end.
The Strange World of Forex
Posted: September 11, 2009 Filed under: Other | Tags: forex Leave a comment »The wage I get for working as a trade plater varies a lot depending on how many vehicles I deliver and how many miles I drive, but generally it ranges from adequate to abysmal. For a while now I’ve been doing other bits and pieces to top up my earnings. Recently, the main one of these extra-curricular activities has been ‘matched betting’, a system by which you take advantage of the free bets and other bonuses that bookmakers offer as incentives to open an account with them. There are ways of guaranteeing yourself a profit from these regardless of the outcome of the events that you bet on. The only problem with this is that you eventually start to run out of new bookmakers to sign up with (I now have accounts with over fifty of them.)
As a possible replacement for this I have been learning about spread betting on the foreign exchange markets (forex). This basically involves betting on whether the pound will rise or fall in value against another currency. For each point that it moves in your chosen direction you win a certain amount, and for each point that it moves in the other direction you lose that same amount.
I know nothing about economics, and whilst researching forex I’ve come across some odd facts. Did you know that seventy percent of Britain’s Gross Domestic Product now comes from ‘servicing’ ? I’m still not sure exactly what this means but we are clearly no longer a nation that spends much time making anything anymore.
On an average day over three trillion dollars is traded in forex – more than twenty times the total of all the other financial markets put together. Here’s another odd fact – ninety percent of this trading is not done by institutions or individuals who have any use for the currency they are buying or selling, instead it is pure speculation. And another – most of this speculative trading is not carried out by human beings but is executed automatically by ‘bots’ – software which analyses previous price movements and then predicts future ones.
With stocks and shares it’s possible for the big traders, hedge funds etc, to influence prices to suit their own ends, but this cannot be done with forex, the market is just too large. This lack of control makes it more likely that exchange rates will move up and down in recognisable patterns making it possible, apparently, to consistently make money if you adopt a system that suits the currencies and timeframes you are trading in.
So, if it’s that easy why isn’t everyone doing it? Most likely it will turn out not to be that easy. But on the other hand there clearly are a lot of people already doing it. It’s worth noting that even in the ‘mugs game’ of conventional gambling there are systems such as arbitrage and each-way thieving which are reliable enough in the long run that if a bookmaker realises what you are doing they will usually pay you the compliment of closing your account.
There is a part of me that wants this plan to work well enough for me to be able to give up plating and be free from the downsides of the job – the stress of dealing with my stressed-out controller, a vindictive public transport system, those staff at car dealerships who save their charm for the people who might want to buy something from them, and those middle class homeowners who can’t wait to ask me for some identification when I arrive on their doorsteps to collect their vehicles.
Imagine if I could make a living just sitting at home trading currencies? I would never have to pretend to like anyone again.
But as a former know-it-all left wing activist there is also a part of me that is uneasy about the idea of making money without actually doing anything to earn it. And where would the money really come from? If I made £100 in the forex markets would I have won it from some other speculator who made the wrong guess, or does the whole of this great tide of speculation have some wider impact? Would I be a smart gambler or a small time capitalist?
But anyway, all I’ve achieved in three months of trading with a demo account is to lose one hundred and ten pretend pounds, so maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about the moral dilemmas of joining the idle rich just yet.
