Tag: change

#365daysofbiking National pride

April 23rd – Something odd is happening. Well, lots of odd things really with the current pandemic that has seen changes that just six months ago would have been unthinkable.

But what’s interesting me is small, almost unnoticed shifts in national opinion.

The outpouring of wholly justified love and respect for the NHS is one such case in point. Rewinding that six months, I bet lots of folk in love with it now would have been at best ambivalent towards out state healthcare system back then..

Years of attrition from some political quarters had let to our National Health Service – something that’s saved my life on three occasions and I have always been a staunch advocate for – being treated as a Cinderella, and something to be improved or that was inadequate, or failing.

In a heartbeat, that’s all changed. Pro-NHS sentiment and memes are spilling off social media into real life. The UK is once again, painfully aware of the value of what we have and what we need to protect.

Here at the old Duckhams Bridge near Stubbers Green, an anonymous hand is echoing a love we all now share.

At a stroke, some political positions have become untenable overnight.

If nothing else about this awful time is positive, this new found regard for those who work to care for us and the service they work within may well be.

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#365daysofbiking On the waterfront

April 16th – Life may be on hold at the moment, but Brownhills has been steadily changing and improving for a few years now, and I can’t see that process slowing up much, even with the current unpleasantness caused by coronavirus.

A few short years ago the view up the canal from Silver Street towards Catshill Junction would have been blighted by the empty market place and waste ground where Silver Court Gardens once stood, a set of five tenement blocks that really were quite grim.

But now the view of houses and trees in blossom over limpid, peaceful water is a world away from those bad days.

And I continue to watch my community evolve.

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#365daysofbiking The wind and the willows

February 29th – it seems odd this is the third February 29th in the history of this nearly nine year old journal, but it’s just the way the dates fall I guess.

On the canal at Walsall Wood, another subtle sign of spring – pussy willow catkins. Like the hazel ones, the male flower of the smaller willows.

Bedraggled, wind-buffeted, but in some proliferation. As I’ve noted all week, spring is coming, it’s not holding back. It just needs some decent weather to accelerate the process.

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#365daysofbiking Things that happen when you’re not looking

February 14th – I haven’t been to Birmingham much this winter, and the first time passing though overground since Christmas in daylight made me stop in surprise at a building growing in the Colmore Row business area.

This office block has grown on the site of John Madin’s now demolished brutalist gem 103 Colmore Row: The former Birmingham Natwest Tower.

103 had passed its time and it is right, I guess that it has gone and change is happening. But I do miss it, it was a startlingly beautiful bit of brutalist design – a priapic monument to mammon.

The building replacing it is so far unknown to me: But it seems huge. In my head 103 fitted perfectly, in a forest of towers, but it clearly never was so, and the rising of a replacement is somehow shocking in size and imposition.

This is what change looks like. I’ll be interested to see this develop.

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#365daysofbiking Starting to show


January 24th – It’s happening, it really is happening.

In Kings Hill Park on a wet, grey morning, flowers are coming – from humble, enduring daisies to the first crocuses (yellow. Why are yellow always the first?) with the taller, bolder spring flowers now developing well too.

Spring is showing. It’s starting to come now, and whatever happens in the next month, soon it will be here, with it’s warmer, lighter days, flowers and green.

I am so ready for it.

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#365daysofbiking On the waterfront

January 18th -Whatever happens, Brownhills is always in my heart. The old place has it’s problems – like those of any post industrial town – but I love the canals, the open spaces, the countryside and the frontier feel of a town on the fringe between the West Midlands Conurbation and the rolling countryside of South Staffordshire.

On a cold, clear evening, returning from errands I came along the canal at Silver Street and over the bridge.

I love the Peter Saville efeect of the railings on that bridge, and the great views from it. But I also love the friendly feel of the new housing and occasional moored boat.

I take photos here lots… but it’s so photogenic at night. I love this place with all of my heart.

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#365daysofbiking Disappearing from sight

January 6th – On a weary, late return from work, mercifully with the wind behind me, I stopped on cresting the remarkably steep Black Cock Bridge, and looked downhill towards the Coppice Road, as I’ve done many, many times before.

It looks like a great downhill, but parked vehicles, a T junction at the bottom and an abundance of cats and kids in summer make it too risky to pile in.

One thing I noted tonight was the orange of the sodium streetlights. That will soon go, as the local council have now announced a plan to replace all Walsall’s old style lights for new, white energy efficient ones, which it has to be said are better for visibility, with less light pollution and lower energy.

But sadly without the comfy, warm orange glow that glistens so well on tarmac.

Oh well.

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#365daysofbiking Submission

October 23rd – Another fine autumn day, and I must say, as it usually does, Autumn is starting to rest easy with me. It usually takes me a while to get over the loss of warmth, sun and light evenings, but when I do finally cave in, I find the season gorgeous.

In central Darlaston, the tree-lined roads, fallen leaves and sun-dapped scenery are beautiful and really enjoyable to ride through.

Yeah, go on. I can do this now. I’m ready.

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#365daysofbiking Motortown

October 21st – Nipping over to Bilston mid afternoon on a gloomy, grey Monday, I crossed the Black Country Route near Moxley.

There’s no dobt these new roads of the late 80s and early 90s helped to revive the fortunes of areas like Moxley, suffering huge loss of manufacturing industry, but they did leave many of them feeling like isolated islands in a see of ebbing and flowing traffic.

Moxley church still looks imperious, as it always has done. But now, it lords over a dial carriageway and the frantic hubbub of the daily grind, which I find beautiful and sad.

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#365daysofbiking Toadily over

September 16th – It’s all about autumn now. The change seems to have been very rapid, but in reality it’s been actually quite slow and by almost imperceptible daily degrees.

There are fewer and fewer flowers now, and those that are left are the world-weary late summer soldiers, hanging on for a bit of late pollination – willow herb, dandelions, ragwort, evening primrose, bindweed and like this bedraggled specimen, butter and egg or toadflax.

Beautiful but sad, I bid them farewell for another year and look forward to regaining the colour with the spring. That seems like a lifetime away right now.

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