Poor possum & the wired up WIRES lady

This poor fellow was sighted recently in a nearby street. He was rather badly inured, and seemed to have been in a fight, maybe with a cat or a dog.

He was a ring tailed possum, he was looking very sorry for himself, and was dragging his injured limbs around on the grass verge.

"What can we do? What can we do?" I was asked. "This is a case for WIRES" I responded confidently.

WIRES stands for Wildlife Information Rescue & Education Service. It's a very fine organisation, with over 2000 volunteers within its NSW branch. Its mission statement is:

Mission Statement

WIRES aims to actively rehabilitate and preserve Australian wildlife and inspire others to do the same

which sounds good to me.

As a temporary measure we put a cardboard box over our patient, to immobilise him, then we waited for the cavalry to arrive.

Enter WIRES volunteer Sandra, always at the ready. She'd been on her way to work when she got our call, but her higher duty prevailed, and within minutes she'd returned home, collected her kit and caboodle - special possum cage, special possum handling blanket no doubt - and here she was striding purposefully up, transferring patient to the possum ambulance, and heading off to the possum-friendly vet. She carefully noted the exact location, so the volunteer possum-friendly vet could return it to its home turf once it was fully recovered. Then Sandra headed off to her other work. A very impressive operation all round.

 

Naturally we inquired later as to the health of our possum. Maybe we  could even witness its return to the wild? "It died", she told us. "It had too many internal injuries". I guess it's often like that.

Something fishy about this Sauce

Worcestershire's got sauce. Lots of it, mostly in a display cabinet at the Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum, which I visited during my recent stay in Birmingham. I like esoteric little exhibits like this.

The 'Original and genuine Lea & Perrins sauce' was first manufactured in 1838 in Worcester, after a recipe was brought home by someone from the East India Company, who'd discovered the sauce, or something similar, in Bengal. Or so says Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce   (What would we do without Wikipedia? I might even donate something to it. It's not a multibillion dollar company, like it could be. It's a charity, basically.) Later they moved production to Birmingham, where it is still made to this day. Lea & Perrins was later owned by HP Foods, the Imperial Tobacco Co, and now by Heinz. The sauce's ingredients include tamarind, molasses and anchovies, so it's essentially an Indian fish sauce.

 What else do you see in Worcester Museum? You see a very big fish that once swam up the River Severn, you see a rather nice cafe, you see a display about the Worcestershire Regiment, and down the road, on the banks of the flooded River Severn, lots and lots of swans.

Wet day in London town

It was time for a break from Birmingham's subtle charms, so I decided to take myself off on a day trip to London.

I wanted to avoid crowds, and somehow decided that New Year's Eve (a Tuesday and not a public holiday) might be a good bet. In the evening there would be people congregating for the midnight fireworks show, but I'd be back in Birmingham by then. Besides, it was cold and wet and winter, so how many tourists were likely to be about?

Wrong, very wrong. I arrived at Euston station and was confronted by massive queues at the Underground ticket booths and machines. Not to worry, I can stroll along the street to St Pancras station, thus doing a useful recce for my forthcoming Eurostar journey of the following week. I'd get my day's transport ticket there.

St Pancras was even worse. Literally hundreds of international travellers were jammed into there, all trying to get their London experiences started. It was going to cost them hours off their precious day, just to get going! I strolled off again, eventually finding Euston Square station, and a usefully functioning ticket counter (not their machines though - a forlorn Dutchman was standing at one, warning us that his machine had just taken his £20 note and given him nothing).

I made my way to Queensway, and did my usual wet walk across Kensington Gardens, past Round Pond, the Albert Memorial, and the Royal Albert Hall. I checked out good old Imperial College, noting all the changes. Several shiny colourful buildings had appeared since my last inspection, and whole new enterprises started, like the Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

It was still raining, and the closed-for-the-holidays college hadn't presented any opportunities for sheltering or drying out (or lunching), so the next option was the museums. South Kensington's museums had never let me down. Warm, dry, interesting. I'd be able to while away several happy hours in the Science Museum, or the Natural History Museum. Or even the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Alas, there were huge queues at the museums too. It was going to take me a couple of hours even to get into one and out of the wet! I concluded that my London day trip strategy was all wrong. Lots of people were in town town today. Maybe they were heading for the fireworks but had decided to make a whole day of it, and when it had rained they'd all hit on the museum idea, not just me. Forget this.

I headed off again, had a soggy lunch outside a Pret a Manger outlet, and then trudged off via Knightsbridge, towards the parks and Serpentines and things that lead you to eventually to Whitehall, Westminster, and the Embankment.

On the way, while passing Harrods in fact, I remembered Julian Assange and the Ecuadorian embassy. He's been holed up there for over a year, and by all accounts the UK government had spent a fortune on their efforts to block his movements and maybe arrest him if he set foot on the street. (They've spent $8 million  according to one recent report! http://rt.com/news/assange-cost-uk-8m-765/  )  Sure enough, there were FOUR police vehicles parked outside the embassy! Presumably this goes on around the clock, and has done for all this time. All ostensibly because the Swedish government wants to ask him whether he'd used a condom or not during his stay in Sweden.

In Whitehall I stumbled on the one saving grace of the day, the Churchill War Rooms, http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms  This is a museum consisting of the underground complex, under Whitehall, where Churchill and his World War 2 war cabinet largely ran the war from. You get to see the Cabinet room, communication rooms, private quarters, all kinds of dimly lit wonders. And it's all real. I used to tell people the only things Britain did well were the pubs and the TV. Then the TV went downhill, so it was just the pubs. Maybe WW2 nostalgia has risen to become the other thing they do well. Sad really, but it was indeed rather good.



When I eventually made it to the Embankment at Westminster at about 6 pm, the crowds were already building up alarmingly for the fireworks. I asked a volunteer whether there was an early show as well as the midnight one. (Sydney does two early shows now, as well as the big one.) No, they said, the midnight show's enough.They were beginning to barricade the viewing areas off, to limit the number of those entering, but also presumably preventing those there from escaping! I thought I'd better withdraw quickly, make my way back to Euston, and head back to Birmingham to watch the show on TV.

Scenic England

Yes, England can indeed be quite a scenic place, in its own sometimes watery way. And as you can see, the sun did actually come out from time to time for me.




 


Views here are of Tewkesbury Abbey, the village of Ruscombe in the Cotswolds, more Tewkesbury buildings, and a top walker at, fittingly enough, the Walker Hall in Evesham. (I didn't notice that at the time.)

Baron Austin of Longbridge (& Melbourne!)

I've learnt a little about Sir Herbert Austin recently. Later Baron Austin of Longbridge, he was the man who more than anyone else shaped the landscape of the part of Birmingham where I grew up.

During my youth the car manufacturing plant he founded employed about 25,000 people and covered several square kilometres. Gee, were we proud of it.

All good things come to an end though, and mediocre things too. The cars it produced became more and more mediocre, and the once mighty company shrank, merged, changed its name of few times, got taken over by others from around the world, and eventually gave up the ghost entirely.

Out of the ashes though......  what a business opportunity. What a huge expanse of real estate. Above is a plan of the redevelopment currently underway, stolen from the website www.newsteelconstruction.com   There's going to be housing, shops, parks, commercial and industrial areas galore.  There's already a fair few things there, like the shiny new technical college (whose roof partly blew off while I was there!), and the comfortable and spacious Sainsburys supermarket (whose coffee shop provided a welcome respite from the cold, wet weather outside). There's even an Austin Park, with memorial to the good Lord, and a blow by blow account of the rise and fall of his company. 

One unexpected finding during my extensive research this evening (ie. I read the Wikipedia entry): He spent several formative years in Australia! Between 1884 and 1893 he was here, based in Melbourne, and later Sydney. He married a Melbourne girl, and he was involved in designing and building printing equipment, gas engines, locomotive boilers, gold mining equipment, and eventually a sheep shearing machine! The latter enterprise was with one Frederick Wolseley, who was also later to give his name to a car brand. It was only after his return to England that Austin became interested in motor cars.

He was born in south east England, but buried in a church cemetery in the Lickey Hills.

Picture of the 5,000,000th Mini stolen from www.libraryofmotoring.info 

More Birmingham

The Post Office Tower (aka BT Tower, or 'Beast of Birmingham')

Ferris wheel & temporary Christmas ice skating rink

Canal era bridge, Dudley Canal

One of the stalls in the enormous German Christmas Market, direct from sister city Frankfurt

Mothers and babies dance troupe - something to do with the German Market?

German food obviously not compulsory - this way please!

A second city and a tale of two libraries

Birmingham, England. European Capital of Culture. Or so I thought for a moment, after too short a piece of research. Actually it's been an applicant for the position, but never quite made it. In fact, of the four Bs, the European cities all beginning with B that I visited this trip (Bruges, Brussels, Berlin, and Birmingham), it turns out Birmingham's the ONLY one that hasn't 
achieved this high honour!

What about education? I checked the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Birmingham University rates at No.153. Which isn't bad, but it's behind an awful lot of other UK institutions, including Exeter, Warwick, Leeds, Lancaster, Sussex, Southampton, St Andrews, Glasgow, Sheffield, York, Durham, and Bristol Universities, and about half of the London University colleges.

What happened to the 'second city' thing Birmingham always bangs on about? Seems even that's contested. It might just still have a claim in respect of a second highest population methodology, but apparently lots of people have long regarded Manchester as the UK's true second city, using concepts of influence, culture, relevance, and even apparently, geographical area. Second city or second rate?

What about Birmingham's claim to being an industrial powerhouse, city of a thousand trades and a million proud artisans? As opposed to, say, Liverpool, which traditionally served mainly as the setting of TV sitcoms, dramas and documentaries about dole bludgers, cheats, conmen, and generally disfunctional layabouts. Well the big news while I was there recently was the Channel 4 documentary 'Benefits Street', filmed, horror of horrors, in the BIRMINGHAM suburb of Winson Green, all about the allegedly hopeless, almost universally welfare dependent residents of a local street. It was clear the show was actually a dreadful piece of gutter journalism, and exploited horribly the co-operation of the residents it portrayed, but it was interesting to see the fine old city relegated to this role.

There, I've said it. Birmingham's a legend in its own lunchbox only. Now I won't be able to visit the place again for a long time. I'm a marked man. Them's the breaks!

So what's that amazing blingy building in the picture at top? With sightseeing visitors all over its glass elevators, viewing platforms, enormous atriums, and rather starnge exterior cladding. It even has a few books inside. That's Birmingham's new central library. It cost almost £200 million, and was opened in a blaze of international publicity by Malala Yousafzai, the brave Pakistani schoolgirl who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, and said "Let us not forget that even one book, one pen, one teacher can change the world".

I'm glad Birmingham built that library. It's not a waste of money. Birmingham does need to find a bit of spare change though, to adequately fund its bread and butter services out in its suburbs. Look at the state of West Heath library, as it was two months ago! Actually, West Heath library has since been put out of its misery - closed down suddenly for 'health and safety' reasons. What's to go in its place? Well, what indeed?