Results tagged “birminghamuk” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery used to have a local history room, there were old police uniforms and a button you could press to hear a snatch of "I can't find old Brummagem". That and the papier-mâché T-Rex is pretty much all I can remember of the museum from my childhood, which is odd because we went there a lot -- it was a cheap day out.

Since then the local history responsibility has been covered a bit by Thinktank, a bit by more local museums such as Soho House -- but that's about to change with a £300,000 grant which BMAG will use to create a new gallery showing the history of Brum from "medieval times to the present day".

A great opportunity. The museum has a wealth of artefacts that would suit this -- many at its collections centre that gets popular but infrequent open days -- and there are some pieces at Thinktank that could do with bringing back into context a little. There are also pieces such as the Baskerville collection at Central Library that it would be great to see in a proper setting.

I've been collecting ideas of what else the museum should have: some have been serious "A retrospective of the old adverts that encouraged families to move from Birmingham into the new towns.", some not so -- but interesting all the same -- "Camp Hill Flyover".

My best times at the old local history museum were when my old granddad would tell me more about (giving the human side) some of the things there. It's a fine line that has to be trod between the kind of interactive, but child-focussed, exhibits seen at Thinktank - and the dry exhibition of artifacts. A local museum has a perfect opportunity to create an experience that not only engages people, but draws on the experience of its potential visitors about the subject.

What price a sort of "wiki-museum" where the public could pop in and add/correct information and even drop off stuff that that they think contributes to the story?

News in the Mail that yet another canal-side development is planned for Brum shouldn't be a shock, but the proposed 'Baskerville Wharf' has upset me. For this "exciting mixed-use development" will mean the closure of one of Birmingham's most important music venues.

The Flapper and Firkin (formerly the Longboat) has seen thousands of tiny, sweaty, gigs over the years. It's one of the few places in Birmingham that a new band might be able to get on the bill, supporting a band that are on a national tour. Much needed practise, exposure, and ultimately culture for the city. After the loss of the similar venue The Jug of Ale earlier this year, it might be one blow too many for the local music scene to cope with.

I'm not anti-regeneration, I accept that on the whole the new buildings and facilities in Birmingham over the last ten years have been a good thing. But. If we remove the good stuff along with sweeping away the bad, we will become a souless city.

The city council have said that whatever the result of English Heritage's attempt to get The Central Library listed, they still intend to knock it down. It's nice to have city planners with vision, but it's important to disagree when we think they're wrong. I do here.

This post is a slightly re-worked version of this one from Birmingham: It's Not Shit, as much as I don't like crossposting I think Josh in the comments there makes an important point about The Birmingham Post being where this debate is taking place. Sorry for the very rough 'artist's impression'.

Quite a few people have raised objections, which the council have decided not listen to, but so far I don't think anyone has voiced an opinion on what should be done instead.

One of the main arguments against keeping the library is that the whole 'paradise' development cuts one side of the city centre off from the other. People do see the divide as an effort to cross, the council is always keen to have events and focus in Centenary Square and these can be sparsely attended on occasion. It's a valid point, but knocking down the library and placing another building in its place (very probably one the public will have no occasion to use) won't solve that.

The council want to be able to see the Town Hall, they think the library cramps it -- but the beauty of the library is similarly cramped by truly horrible buildings.

So, lets open it up -- and knock every bit of Paradise Circus apart from the library down.

Kenneth Wolstenholme is best remembered for uttering "they think it's all over", but the line he intended for 1966 immortality was one he'd practised: "it's twelve inches high, it's made of solid gold and it means that England are World Champions". He'd never get away with it now, as a nation our minds are far too dirty, but that's not my point. A year earlier when The Rotunda was completed, that wouldn't really turn out how architect James Roberts intended either, but for Brummies it became something just as iconic.

Yesterday I attended a screening of Nic Gaunt's film 'Rotunda: 21 Stories', a film ostensibly about the building that stands, er, 21 storeys tall at the bottom of New Street. But, while the film radiates from the Rotunda at its central core, it pushes far beyond that to be a film about identity, family, and how the built environment can help shape the way we feel.

Apart from possibly being the cinematic work that contains the word "round" most often, the film takes time to talk about how Birmingham has been shaped by its architecture and by using only the voices of Brummies and those involved in the building means that it's thankfully free of theories, instead focusing on emotion.

The 21 stories range from the base and James Roberts, with tales of how the building grew taller almost on a whim, to the top, restoration, and a young carpenter who's too scared to work alone in the basement. In between are a host of people talking about, confessing almost, their relationship with a huge pile of concrete and glass and by extension their lives.

A cross-party group of Christian MPs released a report this week that suggested that people were going wrong in striving to be happy. While the non-believers may question their motives, and yes they did suggest that an "erosion of religious values" was a cause of unhappiness, are we as a society happy? How can we tell?

It seems that social scientists measure happiness by just asking people to rate their happiness on a scale of 1-10. Governmental scales take more variables into account, crime figures, health, and even economics. Clearly, while money doesn't make you happy you need enough for the grind of existence not to make you unhappy.

There's an almost standard move to blame "progress". Each new invention ties us more closely to our employers meaning we can't even hide. Each new labour-saving device ends up creating more work, as anyone who's attempted to clean a smoothie maker will testify. At the other end, there are claims (like here on the New Generation Arts blog) that technology will be what sets us free.

But what if technology could help, in the first instance at least let us work out just how happy we are. The measurements used now don't really get near enough for me, they're too general too subjective, and too slow to allow us to work out what effect events have.

These days there is much more information floating around that can be used to help measure happiness, we can look a news headlines, what people write on their blogs, even the "ambient information streams" that are tweets. So, is it possible to snatch a bunch of this as it passes, look at how people are feeling and work out if Birmingham is happy?

Before I had a child I assumed the challenges of being a working mum could pretty much be resolved through good childcare.
If you had enough money, I figured, you could pay for someone you trusted to look after your baby while you worked, had your legs waxed, or did whatever was needed to keep heart and home together.
What I hadn't accounted for was the ferocity of that tug that defies rationality and yanks you to your kin leaving a trail of scattered papers, ringing phones and unfinished work in its wake.
Take yesterday as an example. It was a day I would normally have been at home with Arch, my not-yet-two-year-year-old, but it so happened that I needed to be at a conference.
I arranged for him to be with a friend, whom he knows well and who has a little boy of a similar age that he plays with often - my godson.
They were to go to the Sealife Centre in the morning, have a picnic lunch and go to the park in the afternoon. Sorted.
The hitch in the plans was that the day before Arch had been unaccountably sad. He was still sad yesterday, so when I left him with our friends it was with the niggling doubt that what he really needed was his mum.
I went to the conference.

The thing that worries me most about Birmingham City getting relegated to the Championship is that I might have to go and watch them every week. Even an average Premier League team is on television enough to make it possible to see every goal and costly individual error without setting foot in the ground, but if we go down I might have to go down and that isn't going to be fun.

Up until a few years ago I had a season ticket in the main stand at St Andrews, and was in the habit of meeting the guys I went with around two hours before kick-off in The Sportsman on Garrison Lane. A few pints in a pub shorn of all its furniture to pack more people in, at least I assume that's what happened -- I never went in when there wasn't a game on so the pub could possibly just have had no chairs or tables at all.

A combination of Brady et al deciding to evict a section of the people that sat in the main stand, in favour of people who could pay for padded seats and access to a bar offering us much worse tickets as replacements, and the spiralling price of watching poor football meant that I stopped going to every game. Once out of the routine it's difficult to rouse yourself to go and watch on a cold Tuesday night, or a cold Sunday at four o'clock especially when the game is on TV. Much of my footballing budget was transferred in to watching England more regularly, and while I'm not sure the standard of play was any higher (and the frustration levels are much the same) at least I got to go to Frankfurt or Barcelona rather than Small Heath.

I still go to St Andrews and in truth it probably costs more to do it the way I do (£40 to watch us throw away a two goal lead against Liverpool, £40 to watch Agent Ridgewell put through his own net against the Villa), but this year I've seen almost every game home and away -- through a combination of pixelated internet feeds and darkened rooms in pubs.

On the face of it the Encyclopaedia Britannica's decision to open up free web access seems like the ultimate victory for Wikipedia, or at least for the free over the expensive, but neither are perfect. There's just not enough information in them.

In a way Britannica's shortcomings are more understandable, they can't cover everything for reasons of space and editorial costs. The restrictions of the paper format and having to pay the editors, although most contributors are unpaid, gave rise to decisions about the relative merits of different subjects - information you could infer rather than read (Birmingham's entry gets 1271 words, Manchester's 5257, hmm). Wikipedia has no such constraints, but while it (or rather the community that controls it) doesn't seem to stop huge long posts on obscure topics - 5875 words on Star Trek as a franchise, not counting pages on each series or film - it does seem to have a downer on which topics are included.

Add an entry on Mr Egg, the café rather than the Scottish Musician, and it will soon be deleted with a message something like " Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed". This is because, while it's often called an uncontrollable lawless place by its critics, Wikipedia has a whole wiki full of rules (don't think you'll be able to edit those either).

It's that gate-keeping of what's considered important that stops Wikipedia becoming the free sprawling Hitchhikers' Guide of geek imagination. Where as Britannica carries restrictions of size (and even the Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy willont - that's why Earth was "mostly harmless" after all) Wikipedia doesn't have that excuse - which is sort of why, for the truly local interest there's Brum Guide.

It's been almost two weeks since my last posting - sorry about that - but I've been ill.
And being ill when you've got a not-yet-two-year-old in the house is, I've discovered, an art in itself.
There was l lying motionless in the back room when my husband slipped me a cup of tea. "Arch doesn't know you're here," he whispered.
I knew that my chances of resting would be blown as soon as the ever-perceptive toddler heard an untoward noise, so I hid, listening out for the best opportunity to sneak to the loo.
Being sick with a child, proved to be about balancing the difficulty of keeping cover against the stress of being kissed and jumped on and pulled,
By the afternoon, I decided I just about had enough strength to sing Wind the Bobbin Up and allowed myself to be discovered.
I've no doubt my recuperation was hindered as a result, but what can you do? Any tips on being poorly when you've got a little one will be gratefully received.
Meanwhile I see it is a condition worthy of psychological study. A paper has been written "Drawing on social construction theory, we explore the meaning of being an ill parent, highlighting the tension of being a parent and patient."
That's some consolation. But I just want to know how to sleep with one eye open.

It's one of the dread phrases in human conversation. No, not "please welcome our special guest Robbie Williams", but "why don't you come and see our holiday snaps?". The crushing boredom of other people's pictures was a sitcom staple for many a year, so why is one of the biggest activities on the internet photo sharing?

The boom in digital cameras, and the increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, has created a glut of photos that sit on hard drives across the world. It's now easy to take 20 photos where years ago you'd have taken one carefully-posed snap, counting down from 24 and wishing you'd have paid the extra for the 36 exposure film for your holiday. All these photos have got to go somewhere, but online sharing is so much more that the digital equivalent of a battered shoebox in the loft.

Flickr, the most famous photo-sharing website, is four years old this week and hosts over two billion photos. Facebook holds even more, over four billion they say, but most are visible only to friends. So, given that they're mostly the kinds of photos that we'd have faked a prior engagement to avoid, is the whole thing so popular?

The women in our antenatal group, including myself, would claim we were not competitive.
We would all agree that children develop at their own paces and that it is invidious to make comparisons between them.
And yet when would meet up, with nothing in common other than our infants mewling and puking in our arms, there was nothing else to do but say things like: "My baby has a lot of wax in her ears, does yours?"
Before we knew it, what we had intended to be a friendly gathering of women who had all had their first babies at the same time became a subtle kind of competition - all done with a middle-class niceness that could not possibly be faulted.
I would love to say that I was immune from making these comparisons and the subsequent pride of anxiety that they evoked, but I was not.
However much I wish it otherwise, there is evidently an insecure part of me that is exposed when I'm amongst women with children the same age as mine.
There is no shortage of those complaining about competitive parenting syndrome but really the problem is not with this antenatal group or that particular preschool. Most of the time we can not avoid those gatherings anyway.
If we truly felt at home in ourselves, the progress of our children's peers would be a cause not of concern, but delight. If it isn't, it's time to go gently and remember how honored and loved we really are.

The names people give to their pets can open the door to their minds just a crack - my dad named his cats Sid and Nancy, revealing a love of punk that I wouldn't have suspected from his James Taylor-heavy record collection. I've known a man with a dog called Colin, this amused me as much as anyone popping down to the Registrar and jotting 'Spot' down in the forename box for their newborn.

As a person obsessed by cats and the internet, I'm now a little tired of the hilarious act of having a kitten called Chairman Meow. Beware a person with such a self-consciously wacky name for anything, it's a short hop from Chairman Meow to loud Hawaiian shirts and and stickers that read "You don't have to be emotionally empty to work here, but I am".

Pets' names aren't broadcast around the neighbourhood, except when you're calling your dog across the park, but the name you give to your WiFi network is. I care about these things, and I've been writing them down.

All but his most hardened fans may have given up waiting for a return to his "funny ones", but no-one mythologises a city like Woody. If you take a trip to New York there's a scene from a film at every intersection, but it's Woody's Manhattan that uses the city as a character, the narration making it okay to be "too romantic" about what's really just some bricks and some people.

London is casually used as a backdrop and there now seems to be a whole industry in making films about late seventies Manchester, but not it seems Birmingham.

Supposed worst film ever The Sex Lives of the Potato Men was set, but not filmed, in Brum, Cliff Richard sang and bargee-d around the canals in Take Me High, but these are not the stuff myths are made of. The closest we come to a classic is The Italian Job, the drain the Minis race down is actually the Birmingham-Coventry Tithebarn main sewer and even that was up the Coventry end.

Mike Whitby's favourite slogan - "A Global City with a Local Heart" - seems to be getting about a bit.

It was recently spotted in connection with the Best Bar None award, a scheme set up by the Home Office to promote sensible drinking and all that. But according to Vale Mail "Birmingham organisers are setting their entrants an extra task. Landlords have to explain, in no more than 250 words, how their establishment contributes to Birmingham's vision of being "a global city with a local heart".

Cue publicans scratching their heads as they wonder exactly what that means, something some of us have been trying to figure out for a while now. Let's have a go.

Did anyone really think that the Oscars would not go ahead this year? I mean really, really think that the event would not happen?
Let me run an idea by you, take one of the biggest, flashiest, money orientated industries, give them a six hour advert broadcast to tens of millions around the world, media domination for weeks before and days after, millions of dollars added to the box office take of the winners.
Now ask yourself does this sound like something that Hollywood would pass up?

The writer's strike may have cast a giant shadow over all of the arrangements for the biggest show of the awards season, but was it ever really in doubt? All of the industry knew that if you cancelled every awards show from the golden globes to the best actor in your local primary school play, the Oscars had to go ahead.
The significance of the Oscars ceremony cannot be down played, its importance to the US movie industry both trade and consumer, love it or hate it, it's something that we cannot get away from, everyday the latest twists and turns in the dispute were headline news, actors boycotted, shows were cancelled, pundits expressed concerns and the public lapped it up.

This feels like first day at school.

I've done enough public speaking to know that one should never start with an apology, so here's an admission instead: I'm a blogging virgin. I love a challenge and when this opportunity came up, I figured "What's the worst that can happen? I lose what little street-cred I had and people I've never met take issue with what I've posted on-line?" Hey, I'm already on Facebook.

So, a bit about me: I originally hail from a great city with a chip on its shoulder about its second city status (that's Glasgow by the way) but have called Brum home for the last nine years. Living in Moseley and now Kings Heath, Birmingham has got under my skin. I run Indigo Ltd, a marketing and fundraising consultancy which works to help companies maximise their income (usually in the arts and cultural sector), and I'm also quite active in Birmingham's business community, spending much of last year as Chairman of Birmingham Future.

Frank Skinner used to say that you can replace the word "local" in any sentence with the word "crap" and it would still make sense.

I think what he was getting at, in between football and sex references, was that the more important anything is the more national or international it becomes.

So why, when we can get access to news from around the globe instantly, would we be be interested in what local papers or local websites like mine have to say?

Even if you're interested it can require the tenacity of a American TV cop solving a crime his way (and if the pen-pushers at City Hall don't like it...), skim reading page after page - or on the internet clicking 'back' after every time you land on a page about Birmingham, Alabama "the magic city".

Mark your calendars for July 11-13 2008, for this year's installment of what Plan B magazine called "the best organised and most wisely curated festival".

We're talking about the Supersonic festival of course.

2008 sees Supersonic, now in its sixth year, go from strength to strength: adding new stages and more opportunities to see bands you've never heard of alongside established performers.

The festival takes place in the urban setting of Birmingham's Custard Factory offering a firm ground underfoot as you take advantage of the Capsule duo (Jenny Moore and Lisa Meyer)'s highly eclectic booking policy.

Along with the critically acclaimed musical side of the festival, there will be more film programming, more art based endeavours, more stalls and more cake.

In the two minutes it takes to dash to the washing machine from the bathroom with a reeking bucket of poohy nappies, Arch has managed to open the child-proof cap on the big bottle of mouthwash and drink its contents.

As I dither trying to decide whether my priority is to comfort him, make him sick or wash my hands, I recall a newsletter from a company called Real Coaching Solutions saying women are natural multitaskers. Ho ho ho! In my dreams.....

How I wish I was the kind of woman that could indeed type a report, negotiate a deal, plan dinner for the family and remember to wash the football kits all at the same time. Motherhood would be a breeze if I could. Even watching Arch and washing nappies simultaneously has me flummoxed.

Given that I'm that kind of person, in my 21 months of being a wing-and-a-prayer mum, I have tried to give up multitasking whereever I can.

"We want a bit of a CV," said the commissioning editor.

Very dodgy propositions these days, as I'm sure you're aware, either as readers or writers of same.

Now, from the Himalayan perspective of pensionerhood (a tributary of the great River of Life otherwise known as a creek that rhymes with grit) I can toss off a dozen very impressive sides of A4.

But let's keep it short. Don't worry, I only do the Powerpoint presentation stuff on a second or third interview.

I shudder to record that I know of people who these days hand CV memory sticks to their interviewers as they leave the inquisition room.

So, to dispense with all the meaningless bollocks about exam grades, my two Oxbridge degrees and my Yale doctorate, my time in the darker reaches of the intelligence service and my skills as a part-time gigolo, let's just say I've spent a long working life as a hack.