adelheid and stanrandom are doing a writeup for the club magazine, so this is just the highlights.Birmingham is celebrated throughout the UK for its charming old-world city centre, its delightful parks and streams, and the peaceful alleys and walkways which surround the central district. Not.
Which makes it an ideal place to slouch. To quote from the Guide, "Have you seen the scenery?"
I drove up, through the delightful suburbs of Sparkhill and Digbeth, and parked in the Bullring carpark. I walked from there to New Street Station, where the slouchers were to assemble at 1pm.
adelheid and stanrandom arrived shortly after me, and Claire WINOLJ turned up shortly afterwards.Claire told us that Darrel would be arriving soon, we would recognise him from his long hair, beard and denim jacket. We stood around. We looked at the clock. We wondered where Darrel was. We bought cookies, we played shoe-hockey with the one we dropped. Still no Darrel.
Then Claire yelped. A single, fairly high-pitched squeak. Apparently her mobile phone was on vibrate. She spoke briefly into the phone, and then told us that Darrel was waiting upstairs -- she'd told him to come down. And so, moments later, we saw the tall and lean figure of
We did shopping. Assorted shopping, in assorted shops, both in the Pallisaides and the Bullring. The bullring being the bullring, there's a bull outside -- something which made
adelheid very happy, but left stanrandom unmoved.The outside of the recently-redeveloped Bullring is really quite strange, being compared by some to the the blue things in Yelow Submarine, and by others to third-stage Guild navigators from the film Dune. It looks even more odd when juxtaposed with some of the older buildings nearby.
Later, we visited the Custard Factory, where I spent entirely too much money, and where we saw two very interesting sculptures.
And then we retired to a pub, where
stanrandom took the opportunity to unpack some of his shopping and play with it.There's stuff in the meetings book -- I'll apologise for that now, I wasn't in full control of what got written there.
Boffo. A good one.
