Winter flânerie

Once I was on the road I could cycle into town. It's the pavements that are slippery in the cold. I had a meeting with Martyn Allison. He'd contacted me a few months ago:

I am now national advisor for culture and sport at the IDeA. We are doing some interesting work in political and managerial leadership and I wondered if you were still in the market...We are running a leadership programme for managers from the culture and sport sector in conjunction with City University ... I wondered if you might be interested in discussing the opportunity of making a contribution.

This morning, over coffee near Birmingham Council House, Martyn and I enjoyed working up a programme on Managing in a political environment next February, drawing on some of my Australian experience, finishing with a snack at the German Market, editing the draft by e-mail once we'd got home.

I cycled around the crowded city centre, then headed back up the Walsall Road feeling content. It was cold but crisp. Good to be outdoors pedalling by the familiar confused architecture of Handsworth and Lozells. Richard took this photo the other day of boarded condemned tower blocks on the edge of the dual carriageway - managing to convey something of what I like about these unpromising structures.

He'd help to remind me how unlikely things can be beautiful. The last memory of an event I have in connection with these grim buildings was a bottle being hurled from one and missing me by several feet as it shattered on the surface of the bus lane on which I was cycling. You could hardly imagine Birchfield towers in any poem of Wordsworth's, yet cycling one morning across the Hockley Flyover on a winter morning a rising sun turned two such blocks into upright bars of shimmering gold - all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Richard caught the setting winter sun reflecting from shop windows onto the edge of the subway and with some editing shared what he saw.

At one point several police cars and a police wagon came hurrying down the Lozells Road lights flashing, sirens sounding, then dispersed down side streets, one car rushing back the way I was going. Another day. I spent an hour in the Red Cross Shop in Newtown looking for bargain books, for myself - The Education of Hyman Kaplan - some gifts for others. I like that shop - to buy things; to donate things too. Lin, who goes there a lot, has been known to buy things back I thought I'd got rid of there.

I cycled via paths between houses to the Lozells Road. Treated myself to a veggie samosa, and gazed some more. Flâneur. I was happy but irritated before I turned homewards down Hamstead Road to discover that the Villa Road Post Office stopped trading last Saturday.

Villa Road, Handsworth

Danica Radovanovic has written in Digital Serendipities about the social web campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to top the charts against the expected topper - the winner of the X-factor - in Christmas week. Lyric includes:

Killing in the name of! Killing in the name of. And now you do what they told ya. And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control. And now you do what they told ya! Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites. You justify those that died by wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites. ... Come on! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Motherfucker! Ugggh! [music starts at 4.00 on this 9 minute YouTube]

Danica sees this apparently trivial event (she doesn't watch TV) attesting to the 'power of social web' creating 'not only the public sphere in political, economic and global context after all' but also 'influencing the music business industry where corruption’s time is coming to an end.' Lin's tidied up Amy's old bedroom so we have room for Danica to stay with us over Christmas.

* * *

Documentation from COP15 and The Accord: Decision -/CP.15.

A guide to the acronyms. 'CMP refers to 'the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties'.

** ** **

An e-mail via the family from Vaggelis Chronis dated Monday 21 December:

I regret to advise you that Yiannis Moralis passed away yesterday...his funeral is taking place this morning at 11.30 at a cemetery in Athens...

Yiannis Moralis had been husband to my Greek step-mother Maria Roussen before she met and, later married, my dad. I only met Yiannis Moralis once (as I wrote here) but he’s someone whose art has run through my life. I’m glad to have even a very distant connection with him through the family. He was and will remain a great artist who lived a long good life. I've promised myself one day soon to visit his birthtown Arta and see its beautiful bridge across the Aracthus.

** ** ** Christos Lambrakis died today [back to the future 4 January 2010 obit]

Radnor Road Pilot Intervention Area

Radnor Road Pilot Intervention Area
Originally uploaded by Sibad.

A neighbour asked me to let him know the content and outcome of a meeting at the Barton Arms Pub, in Newtown, last Thursday evening. I have sent him this map plus my marginal scribblings. The meeting was under Chatham House Rule so I've not passed on the the names of anyone but our host.

Dear M. Give me a call. In brief, a group of about nine local people gathered at the Barton Arms on Thursday evening. We were asked by the Chief Executive to say what should happen quickly to help the realization of a plan by Midland Heart to intervene in the Radnor Road Area. What's the biggest obstacle to success, and what yardsticks would we use in two years time to judge success? We should all know there was no government money for this intervention. Material resources for improvement must come from increased value of the houses that MH and others owned in the area.

Ask me about a park or allotments and I could have answered such questions. Put to me I realised only my inadequacy, but I said MH should make the plan to improve the area well known to as many as possible; that Heathfield Road physically and psychologically divides an area that is also divided historically (servants of the north lived in the south in the early 20th C), and my yardstick would be that in two years time I knew and understood the area in ways that are currently beyond me. Best, Simon

Rain in Brittany

From here to Perros-Guirec where we headed this morning to catch a sight of the famous pink granite the long showers drove in from the sea. If I can be outdoors in the right wear I like this weather as much as any, but Lin was a younger version of Giles’ gran in the rain – all in black, damp and pleasurably morose. We picnic’d in the car by a jetty at Grande isle, near Trébeurden, where we’d found a boulangerie open over lunch. I said small bakers were gone, but skeuomorphs survive as breadshops by having bread delivered each day from a regional bread oven, and selling patisserie, crêpes and chocolate and sometimes serving tea and coffee.

Dot and Arthur ever cheerful spoke now and then of ‘a break in the cloud’. It never came until we headed home and found roads beyond Morlaix quite dry. ‘I said we should have gone west’ grumbled Lin. By 5.00pm the sun’s shining brightly through the clouds. Dot’s well into on ‘Bleak House’. Lin’s nearly finished ‘Eleni’ and Arthur’s snoozing. I’m enjoying Robert Wilson’s ‘Hidden Assassins’ but I’ll go into Pol in a moment and use the WiFi and get some washing liquid. Durrell doesn’t go into details of the washing but the other humans in his households – not just select guests – are always in his plots, enjoined to conversation, questioned, listened to, teased, seduced, charmed; part of his enduring curiosity.

Yesterday was sunny. I suggested the dunes at Ker Emma – thirteen miles west. On the way I held to my opinion that there were no more ‘locals’ in the new Brittany. Lin, normally contrarian, agreed, then Dot said ‘There’s one’ and pointed to a silver haired dame on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle with a shopping basket on her handlebars peddling south in the traffic. ‘They have hundreds of these paid extras working for the tourist authority. There’ll be a priest along in a moment’ but the relaxed gendarme guiding traffic at the crossroads in St.Pol was dressed in a forage cap and light blue overalls – the new Brittany police working in partnership with the other Agences des Secours attending courses of the kind I run at home. A suitable extra would have come straight from ‘Maigret’ in dark blue with cape and kepi.

We found a spot on soft sand by two upturned dinghies where we could survey a crowdless beach, while enjoying Dot’s picnic. The horizon was hazed and bare; the traffic of the times rumbling above marking their passage with contrails that weft and warped into a diffuse weave of high cirrus.

Later, continental school time, brought a few parents with children and romping dogs to enjoy the strand. ‘It’s no good’ I said, playing to my misanthropy, ‘there are ten people within a mile of us!’. By the shore an oldish couple fished in the pale blue shallows, reeling in clumps of seaweed at intervals and chatting now and then. After she’d landed a reasonable flatfish they left.

We drove back to the old port at Roscoff, where crabs were being sold from a boat and dropped into plastic bags for a cluster of customers on the quay. At home I boiled an artichoke. ‘OK’ said Lin who’d melted my butter ‘but not special. It needs more cooking’. While the rest played cards I cycled to St.Pol de Leon, oriented this time by a bright setting sun and the Kreisker Tower. The WiFi at Hotel de France, where I had a coffee and cognac, revealed, via the BBC, a forecast of rain and cloud.

Perhaps, like the crowds, politics has gone somewhere else. ‘Youth bulge’, territorial injustice, global interpenetration of populations and their ideologies means war is diffusely retailed from conspicuous and distracting hotspots. Do atrocious things with bombs to most populations and instead of turning on each other as the theory of terrorism claims we should, something else happens. I’m not sure what, but it’s as if a heating pot just won’t boil over like unwatched milk. Some of ingredients for repeating history – only worse – seem present but it’s as though we’ve seen so far into the heart of our own darkness in the last hundred years, and taught so many of our children what’s there, that we are now enjoying the equivalent of vaccination against the pox of war. Academic research into the roots of war and the means of peace may even have had an effect. Perhaps the recipe needs a spice more charisma or a big dollop of unemployment and perhaps my words could sound like that sentence at the end of the confident 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on 'anti-semitism' which suggests that the worst of this pathological social phenomenon is now past.

What would happen if there was a collapse of our economy is another matter - immunisation thwarted by virulent strains of resistant virus. Violence, including self-harm, is rampant in the homes and streets of prosperous economies, but it’s difficult, for those who’d like this, to spread it beyond localised gangs into wider collective aggression. What spreads on the web doesn’t easily download to the street – notwithstanding the radio DJ-spread phone-in rumours that helped ignite the short burst of violence in Lozells in 2005. There seem to be forgivers around – among people with every cause to be unforgiving, as well as those ready to apologise for historical wrongs. People demonstrate for conciliation carrying billboards that say PACE, hanging rainbow flags from balconies. We are earnestly concerned about domestic violence. We try hard to stop bullying at school and work – striving to understand its causes. The penetration of the state is strong, - CCTV, ID, DNA - its intelligence improving, but this penetration is not unpopular.

Alertness to state incursion may be paranoia and may not be. Look at me. I’m a friend in court to a bookseller, Lindsay H., arrested for showing a poster in his window saying ‘Death to the Invader’ and I’m to be a friend at a disciplinary panel to an interpreter accused of unprofessional behaviour in a case involving the Serious Organised Crime Agency. I report local cases of possible criminality to an e-mail network that has effectively substituted for Neighbourhood Watch and my daughter hopes to join the Police. In my professional life I earn money aiding a culture of coordination between the police and the fire and rescue services – one of whose senior managers told me a couple of years ago, before the tube atrocities, that his agency was effectively on ‘war alert’. My friend Lindsay sees this co-ordination as the new face of emergent fascism. He says, in the kindest way, that I’m one of their useful idiots.

My history of the founding of Handsworth Park

The Earl of Dartmouth opens the Victoria Park Extension on 30 March 1898

O My history of the founding of Handsworth Park Originally uploaded by Sibad.

This afternoon, I did another history tour of Handsworth Park - initially titled Victoria Park - but the chilly wet weather was too much for all but my friend Zarina, so we strolled round the pond in the wind and the rain for over an hour, meeting one of the rangers and the boatman and some people measuring the Canada Geese population ("There are too many" said one, while another wrestled a bird to the ground to ring it), sheltering under trees, gazing at the views, and chatting about lots of things - geese and whether its cruel to pierce their eggs, Guantanamo, that 'heavenly body' and the uses of sheep according to Lawrence Durrell in Prospero's Cell, the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Hunters Road, Mr Smiley's houses, plans for Aston and Lozells, the gate the developers want removed from the masterplan linking the park and the new houses on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, the workings of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, discarded gum and cigarette butts, details of Austin Line's and Charles Palmer's lovingly restored fountains ("You know Palmer was a keen cyclist"), what to do about dog mess, the boats which were out again yesterday, the hoped for return of fish to the pond, the unmarked pauper's graves in St.Mary's Churchyard and the thinking of the people who created Handsworth Park - "so people like us could talk in a public place on a rainy day?" Strolled home to tea and coffee with Lin. Had a good afternoon yesterday attending a friend’s wedding where the pastor has been for 50 years and is struggling a bit with rituals - checking stage directions sotto voce. My friend M, arrived 50 minutes late, having struggled, she told me later, to get the clingiest of pale pink wedding dresses around her slender figure. She's now married twice - well actually thrice if you count yesterday. She divorced a while ago. Yesterday, having plighted their troths and sworn the vows the pastor started over “Do you – sorry remind me of your name – yes, right – OK - do you M take ... ?“ and so we went round again, everyone, including bride and groom, smiling and laughing at a joyful and hilarious piece of double knot-tying to the music of ‘Greensleeves’, through Handel’s ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ and the singing of ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘When Jesus Washed – Oh happy day’, a Lesson from Ephesians 5, 20-33, some vibrant preaching with the tale of Paul shipwrecked on Malta surviving a snake bite - ‘for his destiny was Rome’ - and a convivial blend of black and white. Someone whispered to me later that the ‘pastor was past his best’ - yet he founded this church and saw its congregation through hard years of settling in England – years about which the Anglican communion in Birmingham has reproached itself for being less than welcoming to Christians from the Caribbean. It will be decades or more before a faltering secularist like me can compete with this sort of thing. Around 4.30 I was at The Village Cafe over from the Arcadian Centre with Richard and Amy enjoying noodle soup with roast duck. R took the car to work in Broad Street. Amy and I walked home via Bennetts Hill, the Jewellery Quarter into Hylton Street where a shoulder-width alley between workshops leads to Key Hill and the closed post office on Hockley Hill. By a bus stop among broken bottles lay the glossy cardboard packaging of a legless headless torso branded 'Heavenly Body'. We threaded the low tunnels and non-agora under Hockley flyover, up the sidewalk, past flytipping, past the nearly completed Gurdwara Babe-Ke - "Hey the fibreglass dome is rotating!" - down Naden Street (more an alley) where we were asked to a boombox enhanced block BBQ in the car park behind the redbrick flats overlooking Soho Hill. Along Hunter's Road, with the exception of the Catholic church and St.Mary’s Convent with their flowered frontages, a street of fine buildings has suffered low-budget private renovation. We walked on to the top of the hill and the tripartite junction of Weston Road, Hunters Road and Barker Street, wondering why some roads are called 'streets' and v.v., passing The Observatory Pub in the bow of one junction, and walking up Barker Street to the acutely angled Villa Cross, its identity mishapened by the disorder of the 1980s, losing us a cinema (already a bingo hall), pub (a drug market), shops (uninsurable) and gaining us a carpark, boarded up buildings and grant-funded offices with frontages attracting fly-posting as a cul-de-sac attracts flytipping, prompting traffic to pass rather than arrive. How titanic a task to draw in the involvement of its present and future population in reshaping this place and its surroundings. It can be done. People are working at it. We do meet and strive to get our minds around many tasks. It helps to have lots of cups of tea and biscuits. Promise exists - despite the acronyms of planning - in the Aston, Newtown and Lozells Area Action Plan (AAP) Issues and Options Report handed out at the Ward Area Committee last week. Comments need to go by 15 June 07 or phone 0800 694 3100. This plan will be part of the Local Development Framework (LDF) replacing the Unitary Development Plan (UDP). It's about the interconnection of housing, jobs, architecture, green space, health, education, transport, sustainability. It's about the circuitry of the area – IT, lighting, energy and water. It's about places to buy and sell, to worship, to play, to grow, to sit and talk, to listen, to eat, to associate, to read and view. It's about museums, gardens, smallholdings and trees and all with an eye to the broader changes that transform the practices and objects of one era so they become incomprehensible or impractical in another. Coming down Heathfield Road we came across three quite new brick houses in this dystopian place. They’d been built with such care and skill I wanted to clasp the hand of their builder. Amy took a picture she hasn't given me yet of a carved plaque in the wall of one house, saying it was built and designed by a man called Anthony E. Smile in 1998. Of course I’ve seen these many times but never asked about them. We strolled down Heathfield Avenue under trees and peered at the backs of the houses through iron gates. With a 'peep' of its horn an estate drove up. A lady introduced herself as Mrs.Smile. I shook her hand. "When you see your son please pass to him my deepest respect. He is a craftsman!" Smiley's houses are hope in brick. Mrs Smiley said "See the Lodge at the top of North Drive. My son worked on that." We did. This was the Lodge at an entrance to James Watt's Heathfield Estate, the original house demolished and what would now be called executive homes built in eclectic styles in the 1930s and now made more eclectic by prosperous newcomers who instead of flying to the suburbs on making their wealth have stayed in wicked Handsworth. The rawness of some renovations, such as the giant rampant gilt lions on one frontage, has not yet been moderated by the patina with which time can moderate the flamboyant impulses of new money. We walked on down North Drive, turning left along Gibson Road cursing the non-planning that had permitted the placing of several ill-proportioned new houses, still fenced off with paling and barbed wire, much too close to the pavement with diminutive back yards taken from gardens in North Drive. "It's someone in North Drive who's built them" said Amy. Greed in brick. So we came home, having enjoyed several little adventures. (see this entry 13 Dec'11 on a proposed Heritage Trail for Handsworth and Lozells)