Images

February 9th – At the junction of Coppice Road and Brownhills Road in Walsall Wood, the junction is being remodelled for the new leisure centre, now nearing completion. It’ll be interesting to see what the finished road layout looks like, and how it functions. This is a horrid junction for pedestrians, cyclists and small vehicles, and it seems a bad one for corner cutting and being cut off from the right – particularly when turning left into Brownhills Road. 

I’m watching this one with interest. I hate this junction and I hope the changes improve it as much as possible.

February 9th – Sad to note that at the south end of Victoria Park in Darlaston, beyond the railway bridge, flytippers have been at work. What is normally an fairly clean marshy area beloved of birds and bugs, a quantity of tyres have been dumped, clearly thrown down the embankment from the car-park above.

Only the lowest of the low do this. Scum.

February 8th – This was supposed to be a photo of the statue of Sister Dorothy Pattison, heroine of Walsall and a great personal hero of mine, moodily lit in a windswept town at closing time.

On that score it failed miserably. The old girl is out of focus, and the light doesn’t do her justice at all, which is sad. She was the mother of modern healthcare in Walsall and gave her heart, soul and life to caring for the Victorian sick, injured and infirm.

It does, however, show the atmosphere on The Bridge as I passed through. I’d had a dreadful commute again – driving rain and a headwind ion the way in that morning, and on the way back, the tailwind, although decent, wasn’t the engine-substitute I’d laboured against earlier.

A nasty gale was whipping up though, and there was a sense of increasing desertion and of collar-up, head down scurrying home.

It was fascinating and I wish I’d hung around a bit longer.

February 5th – Yet again on a Friday, I found myself cruising down from Shire Oak into Brownhills. The wind had indeed been evil, but was at least now more or less at my back. I had to stop to answer the phone on Anchor Bridge, and while I was chatting I noticed the view, from the very bridge I was contemplating the night before. This slope here is more or less continuous from Shire Oak, and the road here is wide. Where I was stood in years gone by would have been a toll house, and when I was a kid there would have been grim maisonettes here and over the road, a large tower block. Now, it’s new build and an old folk’s home.

These days, this view seems utterly familiar, but twelve or so years ago, it would have been totally different. It struck me as I put the phone away that change is ongoing, and so granular that one hardly notices it happening.

February 4th – I came back to Brownhills late, and hopped on the canal from Walsall Wood. Leaving the towpath at the Anchor Bridge, I realised how odd the landscape is here. The canal, of course, remains level (473ft above mean sea level for the anoraks out there), yet the landscape rises above it gently, and the Chester Road crosses above with barely and undulation.

It made me wonder if the canal was channelled out here and what the landscape of the late 1700s looked like before it arrived. 

The night was chilly and blustery and I was tired. I suddenly realised I’d been stood for five minutes or more in pitch darkness contemplating the physical geography here absent mindedly, whilst freezing cold.

Cycling catches you like that sometimes.

January 29th – I came home fairly late and had to pop into Stonnall. Coming back up the hill was hard – I have a cold and my energy was nearly gone. But there’s something about reaching the Shire Oak junction – maybe it’s just being at the top of the hill, or the fact that it’s all downhill to Brownhills from here, or maybe just the welcoming lights from the pub – that’s almost cathartic.

The working week ended here, and it was a soft roll down into the weekend, sleep and a good deal of rest.

Bring it on.

January 24th – An awful image, snatched at dusk through a hedgerow at Newtown, Brownhills: four red deer females loafing and grazing in the field between the canal and Chase Road.

After years of seeing them around Brownhills, I’m still not over the frisson of noticing them: they feel so out of place and exotic, even though this is their home.

A lovely thing on an otherwise dull day.