October 16th – It’s all about the autumn colour right now. I was going to split these images down into two separate posts, but they’re all the same set, really. It’s been gusty and chilly, and the leaves have really started to fall now. I noticed council workmen sweeping them up in Acocks Green, and they’re turning even the most mundane alleyways into emerald gold arcades. How fantastic is autumn? Beautiful – but winter is such a price to pay…
October 15th – Returning along Green Lane, Walsall Wood at dusk, something caught my eye on the verge near Shelfield School. I stopped to take a look at what seemed to be small peaches, and found they were actually really nice, perfect little crab apples. These would probably make a decent wine or jam – whilst too acid for conventional culinary purposes, these tiny apples are highly prized amongst jam-makers and home brewers. I’m surprised nobody has picked up the windfalls, to be honest…
October 15th – One of the things about riding a bike is that you get to study vehicles in a way that most folk don’t. I’ve spent large amounts of time behind cars, wondering how the bodywork was fitted together, of behind weird and wonderful lorries, working out just what everything on them does. It was while I was waiting in the queue at the Shire Oak junction today that I noticed this interesting feature on a tipper lorry. Tucked in the back, below the main body, is a camera and light, clearly for reversing purposes. It must be a fairly common feature, but I’d not noticed one before – presumably, it’s monitored by the driver. Only snag is, there’s no automatic lens cleaning, and it must get pretty mucky under there. Wonder if the driver was munching on a Yorkie and watching me whilst he waited?
October 14th – The fungi seems to be doing well, too. This is possibly the most perfect specimen of fly agaric I’ve ever seen. This is the classic, spotty toadstool of fairy tales, and is considered toxic, and possibly hallucinogenic. This proud fellow was growing beneath silver birches, as they often do, in a front garden in Hilton, near Wall. The second one is a mystery to me: I know not what it is, but it’s massive. A foot in diameter, the stalk is thicker than my forearm. It’s clearly quite aged, and seems to be host to several sorts of insect. It was growing on a verge in Summerhill. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large toadstool.
October 14th – At the junction of Woodhouses Road and Lichfield Road at Edial, near Burntwood, there’s an imperious horse chestnut tree, and this season it has fruited in abundance. I have never seen so many conkers littering the ground. I mentioned my love of the brown, shiny nuts a week or so ago. I just had to stop and take a few home. Just instinct.
October 13th – As if to hammer home my point, Town Wharf, across the basin from the New Art Gallery. This is a new hotel. It looks like something thrown up in Tito’s Yugoslavia. It’s hideous, cheap and nasty. It opens in a couple of weeks – why not come and stay? Affording excellent views of the derelict and burnt out factory over the water, it’s sure to be a big tourist draw…
Walsall deserves so much better than this shit.
October 13th – My town, for better or worse.
I have a strange relationship with Walsall these days. Pass through it regularly, love almost all of it, but bits I used to know like the back of my hand are now alien to me. Certainly, shopping there is a grim experience these days. I was in town anyway, and wanted to see the Damien Hirst exhibition at the New Art Gallery. I like Hirst a lot, but the exhibition left me cold – I really wanted to see stuff like Mother and Child Divided again, yet what was here seemed to be the odds and ends of the artist’s work. The way it had been mixed in with the Garman Ryan collection was clever, though, and I did admire the guile of the people responsible for doing that, particularly the placement of the wallpaper.
I hadn’t been in the Gallery for a long while, and not on the roof terrace since the building opened a decade before, as when I’d visited, it had always been shut. Today, it was open, and I took photographs of my town – the place I once haunted like a skinny, music-obsessed ghost. I knew every shop, every bar, every alleyway, every cafe. Yet getting older dragged me away, and Walsall befell the same fate as other such post-industrial towns; ravaged by the inexorable rise of out-of-town and fringe retail developments, atrocious town planning and the encroachment of internet shopping, it now holds little for me. The independent shops have gone, replaced by nail-bars, hairdressers, pound shops and money lenders. Many of the heritage buildings I could see from this view ten years ago are gone, lost to the arsonists that seem intent on depriving us of a cultural past. The bad planning goes on, the retail sheds obscuring or wrecking formerly decent vistas.
I still love this place with all my heart – as Bill Caddick put it, ‘Sore abused, but not yet dead’, but I fear I’m losing it forever. What’s gone, cannot be put pack, and there just doesn’t seem to be the breadth of vision, or cast of hand to build something new. Stuck in a kind of decay-limbo. I could cry.
I did what I always do at times when Walsall, and my past, makes me feel like this: I got back on my bike, cycled up to Caldmore, and reminded myself what community was about.
That’s my Walsall, right there.
October 12th – It was a beautiful sunny, golden autumn day. It wasn’t warm, but the sun shone and made everything precious. I was glad of it – after the soaking of the day before, it was blessed recovery. The day was beautiful both in Acocks Green, which I passed through on my way to Tyseley, and back at Shenstone and Stonnall on my return. A fine day, and we don’t get many of those at the moment. I’ve included some of the best pictures on my main blog.
October 12th – Not enough stations have proper clocks anymore. They’ve all got those boring digital things, but few have real, wooden cased analogue clocks. Come to that, few stations are like Birmingham Moor Street, and all should be. Spacious, airy, light, it’s a gorgeous place to wait for a train. Clocks of this style were mainly made by JB Joyce & Co., of Whitchurch, Shropshire, possibly the country’s oldest clockmakers, and often bore the name ‘Joyce, Whitchurch’. This leads to an in-joke amongst railway buffs who often use ‘Joyce Whitchurch’ as a pseudonym on internet forums etc.
They really should get out more.
October 11th – Still, not everyone hates it. Near the top of Shire Oak Hill, my lights picked up a familiar silhouette: that of a toad sat on the footpath, nose as high as he could get it, enjoying the rain on his skin, motionless. He was having a ball.
He made me smile, if nothing else. He seems to be smiling, too.
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