Jubal's Adventures In Birmingham

[Jubal]

Right, in case any of you want my ramblings about the far off West Midlands:

I suppose I'm mostly writing this because it helps me as much as anything else; the farms and fenlands of East Anglia are very much my home and have been so for the vast majority of my life. This summer has been somewhat disrupted, too, in many ways by many things; as such, I feel that I'm rather being spat out in an unfamiliar place. We shall see how that goes! And so it is that I find myself, still entirely disorentated by life, sitting in 317 Tiverton Road, Selly Oak, Birmingham, having just moved in.

Tiverton Road is a calmly dilapidated, once carefully planned, bolt-straight street of Victorian terraced housing; at my end there are a few trees, though the northern half of the street is rather more bare. Many houses are unoccupied, bits of wire frequently poke alarmingly from the fronts of them, and a forest of "to let" signs can be seen a short way above head height right down the street. That said, the houses themselves are well built, part of a perhaps now lost idea that decoration was an important part of inexpensive housing architecture; panels declaring that a pair of houses are X, Y, or Z "villas" can often be seen, and rose decoration in the brickwork is also a common feature. The majority of occupied houses seem to be student lets, which probably explains much of the dilapidation; some remnants of the planning of the victorian era survive particularly in the rather grander brick-built local amenities, such as the swimming pool which still declares itself in the brickwork to be "public baths" and the primary school a little further down the road. At the north end of the road lies the centre of Selly Oak; it's hardly the most cute or glamorous of locations, but it has something of a hum about it, and there are a few cafes that look worth visiting.

Number three hundred and seventeen, my new home, is just another terraced house amongst terraced houses, but it's nice in its way. I have a room near the door downstairs, with a street view; there's a long thin kitchen, one bathroom, a living room, and three other bedrooms upstairs occupied by my housemates. The garden is a little unkempt, the grass a tad unrule, but there are four whole trees in it which is better than a lot of the unsightly pure gravel gardens around here. Better still, two of them are apple trees, so I shall have to work out whether we're allowed to use those. My room is a lot smaller than the ones I'm used to, but then I doubt I shall be having societies meet in it much and there's always the living room for things here.

OK, and I'm half unpacked and too tired to do any more. And so to bed!

[Pentagathus]

Sounds nice, unfortunately you've let slip your full address in this hive of villainy though so you might want to move again soon.

[comrade_general]

The package has already been sent.

[Jubal]

So, some more thoughts after a few more days:

Birmingham campus is an interesting place - it's a huge, sprawling mess of buildings, with a red-brick Victorian core around a huge free-standing clock tower. Outside this core (which includes my own department) a concrete shell of laboratories, study areas, libraries, and accommodation blocks rings the university. It's very much like Isengard (which I believe the clock tower was at least apocryphally the inspiration for). The best view of the old university is from the south, which is conveniently my first view of it in the morning as I walk up from Selly Oak.

Selly Oak is not pretty but practical, for the most part - it's noisy, student-heavy, and a little run down. There are some gorgeous architectural pieces of exhausted-looking Victorian optimism that the place could be a perfected model community, nonetheless. The swimming pool and library, both of which declare their existence in large chiselled letters, are good examples of this. There are some decent but not wonderful pubs (Glaurung would be thoroughly disappointed by the lack of well crafted alcohol, and even I am slightly noticing the lower quality of the tap ciders, though the prices are also a darn sight lower than in Cambridge). There are some good cafes and some decent small supermarkets (and it's not a long walk to a huge Sainsbury's for anything a bit less common).

I shall update again soon with some thoughts on my department and perhaps some societies and stuff - am off to funeral tomorrow evening (it's on Friday but I've got to travel across the country in time for it).

[Pentagathus]

Hope the funeral goes well/is good/you know what I mean.

[Jubal]

Funeral has happened. I think it was all a good tribute to him - we're having a more full memorial event thingy in spring as well, at Gibraltar Point (which was his first nature reserve, and the blueprint for basically how we think of nature reserves now, as places that strongly mix science, public access, and conservation).

It was nice to see that he was not only well remembered by so many people but had kept in contact with them, particularly the current generation of conservationists - the CEO of the Wildlife Trusts was there and clearly very much missed him, she last visited him only a month or so before he died (and he was still taking her to task on what was going on with the organisations at that stage!)

Also a random old lady turned up who seemed to have not known him at all but just had a habit of turning up to funerals, which was a tad odd but I guess she got to talk to people and got some free food out of it.