December 12th – Walsall’s Christmas lights are not ostentatious these days, but Walsall always looks sort of Christmassy at night anyway.
Whether it’s Bridge Street or Leicester Street, the street lighting, vehicles, building lights and architecture combine to make something quite festive and magical.
For all the stick it gets, Walsall isn’t a bad old place.
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December 12th – The Christmas tree in Walsall is usually very nicely done. After a few grim yers in the early 2000s when lighting contractors synthesised something akin to a tree from a lighting column to universal derision, then a year or two without, we now get a pretty decent tree in the square between the bus station, bank and the Crossing at St. Pauls.
This year’s tree is excellent – but following blustery weather, developed an unfortunate tilt. It’s now fixed, but still not quite plum.
I think it adds character.
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December 11th – A fowl night again found me returning home in heavy rain. Really heavy, almost torrential.
Photography was near impossible, so I grabbed a couple of flying shots of the downtown Christmas lights of Brownhills with my phone.
I actually. like these, they’re atmospheric and exactly how the night felt.
I really will need treatment for webbed toes soon, I feel.
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December 10th – Christmas trees in Walsall Borough have to be externally funded and the council won’t pay for them. In the district centres where they are present, someone has either usually been generous individually (like the three councillors who personally pay for Walsall Wood’s tree) or the public have come together to pay for them.
Setting an early example in the public subscription stakes has always been Rushall, whose community work hard every year to raise the money required to pay for a tree to be erected on the square outside the ‘Village Hub’ – the old library – and jolly festive it looks too.
Contrast that with the pitiful string of lights thrown on a random tree every year on the public open space in Shelfield, on the corner of Four Crosses Road and Lichfield Road.
I really don’t know why they bother there, I really don’t.
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December 10th – I spend a lot of time waiting at traffic lights, and of all of them, I think I like the ones on the Arboretum Junction on Walsall’s new ring road least of all.
Ostensibly heuristic and adaptive, the loop sensors here don’t always pick up my bike, and often I watch a whole cycle take place before the lights allow me to go.
Tonight was just such a night – because the controller didn’t find me, my phase of the lights was completely absent first time around.
Nothing to do but shuffle the bike on the loop and swear…
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December 7th – Christmas is starting to ramp up now and I find myself increasingly on errands and trips to sort things out for the upcoming holiday, and so it was this evening when I had to visit Shenstone, to collect some stuff I’d ordered and check out a present in the huge, soulless garden centre there.
Shenstone and the lanes between there and home were gorgeous in the night, same as they ever were: From the welcoming dignity of the pubs to the beauty of the old workhouse. And then, the gothic horror of the church, which I’m still not used to seeing without it’s massive, stately yew.
It was nice to be in these lanes on a relatively dry night for a change. They made a pleasant contrast to the consumer hell of a garden centre that seemed to specialise in everything except … gardening.
Am I turning into The Grinch? I think I might be.
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December 6th – Every year I swear will be my last visit to Birmingham’s annual Frankfurt German Market. After catching an almost identical one in Leeds in 2018, I’d concluded that these things were just a concoction for tourists selling all the same tat every year.
However, whenever I’m presented with the reality – the smell of food, the noise, the colour and spectacle – my heart melts and I really enjoy a potter around. I’ve found the best time to go is at night, midweek: Busy enough to be fun, calm enough to be tolerable.
I never buy much – save for the obligatory meaty and sweet treats – but I enjoy the frenetic beauty of it.
I must say, the people who lit it and New Street this year did a cracking job.
Merry Christmas Birmingham!
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December 6th – I had to pop to the Touchwood Centre in Solihull, a place I’ve only been once or twice: In fact, I rarely visit the town at all.
I left in the afternoon, and as usual of late, the trains were messed up and the journey was horrible. But Solihull had some interesting views in the early evening gloom.
That underpass was stunning in the dark.
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December 5th – Working late saw me get back to Brownhills in a very quiet hour; there was little traffic and as I pulled onto the pavement at Anchor Bridge the only real noise was of wind in the trees and dead gass on the canal bank.
I hate December and the run up to Christmas: The nights are darkest, the work is hard in preparation for a new year and everything seems grey and lifeless.
At least one of my favourite views is fairy changeless, the canal from Anchor Bridge.
Roll on Christmas!
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December 4th – Returning home along the canal, it made a change to be at least on a dry evening. Unusually, the sky had only a light layer of beautifully textured cloud.
This is what I’ve missed this year: Bright, cold evenings.
Let’s hope the weather clears soon and there’s more of this.
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