January 29th – The wind and rain drag on. The day started decent enough, but by midday, dissolved into a morass of squally showers and buffeting winds. With an eye to the wind direction, I got the train back to Walsall and let the wind blow me home, which it did wonderfully. Bullings Heath – the old name for the area around the Black Cock pub and bridge in Walsall Wood glistened in the drizzle, the light reflecting off the wet asphalt.

In a way, it was beautiful, but I wish the rain would stop for a while.

January 28th – The weather continues to be warm and windy. Fighting it coming home from work, it was hard to believe that only a few days before, it was sub-zero temperatures and ling snow. No trace remained as I hauled the bike over Shire Oak Hill. The lights of the pub looked welcoming, and the temptation to pop in for a swift pint was strong.

January 28th – Marbles. I go on about them repeatedly, with good reason. The roads are absolutely covered right now in debris – bits of wood, bits of vehicle, grit residue and gravel, left behind by the snow and ide. This material gathers in hollows and patches on the roads, and passing traffic grinds and polishes it ind it’s wheels. The result is a loose material with very low friction, that lurks on bends and junctions, ready to snatch your wheels from under you. It’s particularly bad in backlanes, but even busy roads like the Chester Road are affected. 

Motorbikers call this debris ‘marbles’ due to the similarity to riding on glass beads. The problem will remain until either the road is swept, or heavy rains wash the worst away.Take extra care, please.

January 28th – Birmingham New Street Station is undergoing huge alterations at the moment, and is overrun buy people involved in the reconstruction. Sometimes, they almost seem to match in number the passengers; they emerge from hatches and previously unnoticed doorways, often surveying, taking measurements or gazing at ceilings. There’s clearly a lot of thought going on.

I keep noticing these tiny target symbols in odd locations about the station. About 20mm square, they have a precision cross-hair on them and a unique number , and they’re printed on reflective material. They’re vital to operations here, but I suspect few ever notice them.

They’re measurement datums. A theodolite – either placed in position by an engineer, or permanently sited in an out of the way spot – will focus on this target, and accurate geometrical measurements can be made, indicating if the target, or the wall it’s attached to, has moved, or to precisely locate some other measurement. Automatic systems will do this across multiple visible datums repeatedly, unattended, and alert engineers if there’s any change.

I suspect this is part of an automatic monitoring system as it’s above normal working, and therefore, crowd height, just to the left of the telephone kiosk roof.

Civil engineering is getting more and more sophisticated.

January 27th – The snow, thanks to heavy rain and a sudden ramp in temperature – had gone. Only the remnants of snowmen remained, melancholy mementoes of the whiteness of the week before. The consequent darkness around St. James Church shocked me in it’s foreboding.

I’d been to drop something off to a friend, and the weather was wet, warm and inclement. I cycled up the dark pathway from School Avenue, up past the cemeteries and churchyard, and the church itself was unoccupied at 5:45pm on a Sunday, which I found oddly sad. Brownhills Church is one I’ve always had difficulty with architecturally; It’s not ugly, and it’s not remarkable. Apart from an odd spire and hideous extension, it’s pretty plain, really. It’s position, however, is excellent. It’s like the centre of the town was built around it, and the warren of streets take curious right angles around the grounds.

January 26th – Had a wry laugh at this one. Noticed yesterday that the sign was still up trumpeting the new Pier Street footbridge, over the canal in central Brownhills. The bridge is a fine thing indeed, linking as it does Clayhanger and Brownhills in style, replacing a steep-stepped footbridge that was awful, frankly.

I was unaware of Walsall Council’s ‘Drive to regenerate Brownhills District Centre’ – wonder how that’s going?

Would the last business to leave the town please switch the lights off and feed the deer? Cheers.

January 26 – I’d prayed to Thor, the god of meltwalter, but not much happened. We had heavy rain, then it refroze; but skipping out mid day for a sandwich and a brew, there was a sharp ramp-up in temperature, and the thaw set in with some urgency. It actually felt tropical.

I had to admire the British stoicism of the picnickers with flask and camera. They didn’t even have a dog.

Even the sailing club got their boats out.

The riding was terribly poor; the ice on the paths around Chasewater was unridable as it was too mobile; it was like riding on pea gravel.

The bird life is booming at Chasewater; we recently had the largest gull roost in many years, with upwards of 10,000 birds, and the waterfowl on the boating lake are as persistent as ever. I love the domestic white geese and the way they hector me for food.

The water level continues it’s inexorable rise; on January 11th, the water was at 75com from the top of the scale, it’s now 64cm, a rise of 11cm or just over 4 inches. With the huge increase in lake surface area, that’s a immense amount of water.

The 9-foot pool has now joined the main lake through the new bridge, and it won’t be long until the water overtops the weir into the spillway – that is, if it’s allowed to.

It’ll be interesting to see the effects of the thaw.

January 25th – This is one that’s been annoying me all week, but haven’t managed to catch well on video until Friday night at Rushall Square junction. As well as seeing moppets driving around peering out of a small aperture in an otherwise frosted up windscreen, the failure to clean snow from your roof is lazy and dangerous. Three times this week I’ve been overtaken by people – all three in Little Aston, as it happened – who, with the burst of speed – cleared snow of their roofs into me or my path. At 20MPH it’s not funny.

It’s also against the law. When it snows again, be a treasure and wipe the snow from your roof, eh?

January 25th – I wanted to get asian snacks in for my workmates as a treat. The best place near to Tyseley is Mukhtar’s, in Small Heath, so on the way to work this morning I hopped off the train one stop early. I discovered the shop didn’t take debit card payments, so dived onto Small Heath High Street to use the ATM. I was struck – as I always am here – by the imperious nature of the architecture, repurposed for mundane shops and bedsits. 

Today, Small Heath is a bustling, busy, inner city suburb, teaming with life and a very, very diverse population. But when these places were built, what was it like then? Genteel? Gentrified? Semi Rural?
Look at the wrought iron, arches and architraves. Appreciate the gables, towers and bays.

Curse the fact that few ever look up and notice.

January 24th – The thaw started today, just a little. Fragments of the day were almost spring-like, if one avoided the snow. The melting wasn’t dramatic, but it formed long, threatening Damacles daggers that hung ominously from gutters and eaves. By the time of the sunset, it was well below freezing once more. The sunset itself was beautiful and dramatic, and I caught it hurriedly, rushing for the train at Tyseley. Some times, it’s hard to beat a good, urban sundown.

I got to Brum about 4:45pm. And it was still light, more or less. We really are opening out now.