the albert memorial is still there

comment on the news of the day & other things

Bullring Open Market, 1154-2010, R.I.P.

Posted on by simon

Today I officially pronounce the Bullring fruit and vegetable market to be dead.

It had a good innings – nobody can complain about a run of 856 years and it being curtailed; I remember when plans to demolish the 1960′s market and shopping centre area were being consulted on how most of the traders predicted the market wouldn’t survive, but – the soul having been ripped out of the place notwithstanding – most of the stalls made it through that redevelopment.

Then there are the current fears that the move of the Wholesale Markets from right next to the Bullring Market will cause major hassle – Jon Bounds has commented on the silliness of the image of traders wheeling trolleys full of cabbages half way across town half way through the trading day, but there’s the very real concern of how produce will be then transported, coupled with the new uncertainty surrounding when the move will actually happen.

But to me, what has finally killed the market is the combination of the serious drop in quality of the produce on sale, combined with the scourge of the man from the weights and the measures, the Poundabowl.

Now don’t get me entirely wrong – where the typical shopper might think more in terms of a number of items rather than a weight of items, there’s nothing wrong with it; but it still makes price comparisons difficult, because you don’t know how much you’re getting for your pound from different traders – you may well even be getting a different amount from the same trader each time you buy!

Until recently, produce from the market always tended to have what supermarket fruit and veg well and truly lacked – flavour. I still remember like it was yesterday my reintroduction to the market (after being horrified by reading Felicity Lawrence’s supermarket exposé, Not on the Label) and rediscovering that an onion is an actual real vegetable with a texture and a flavour, rather than some white thing which goes in the dinner for I’m-not-really-sure-what-it’s-adding. The market produce was the blemished, funny shaped stuff which the supermarket bland-o-matic rejected as being Not Possible To Bland.

But of late I’ve noticed that the flavour is less noticeably different from the supermarket, but more critically, the quality has gone right down the pan. It’s no use buying four or five peppers for a pound rather than three or four peppers for £1.50 if you only get to actually use two of them because the rest have become a putrifying blob of mush after a couple of days. I already decided a couple of weeks ago to stop getting my onions from the market because basically half of them were rotten even on the day I bought them.

Today, when I went to my usual stall for getting peppers, I was saddened to see they too have gone over to poundabowl. Rather than hand-picking the precise peppers I wanted (ie, the ones which looked the least off) I would have been forced to accept the ones in the bowl. I usually get a mix of colours, but these bowls were all monochrome – when I asked the assistant for a mix, her reply was “no, I’m not allowed to do that”. So I walked away and found another stall.

The other stall was also poundabowl, but at least when I asked if he could do a mix he said yes. When I checked in the bag to see how mixed he’d done it (just one red to five greens – I wanted three reds and three greens), I saw that two of the peppers were a putrifying blob of mush already.

If I can’t even rely on what I buy being of merchantable quality on the day I buy it, I’m not sure I can be bothered going all the way down there to buy in the first place. So for that reason, I’m out.

Twelve ways to cook mince

Posted on by simon

I’ve got some mince which I took out of the freezer yesterday to cook. Normally, when I cook with mince it’s a case of either chilli or spaghetti bolognese. Imaginative, huh? I once made home-made burgers too, which were nice, but given the slight level of faffiness compared with simply opening a packet of Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference UltimoBurgers, it’s not something I’m likely to do often.

I decided I wanted to do something different on this occasion, so my first thought was to ask on Twitter – expecting just a couple of answers.

Who would have thought there were so many possibilities of how to cook mince!

The football penalty shoot-out – my solution

Posted on by simon

Because I don’t actually care about the football, it was only subsequently that I learned the news that England had won its game against (who was it again?), meaning they get to go through to the next round in the World Cup. This is the phase where teams start to get knocked out when they lose.

It’s also the phase where traditionally England always loses, because the game always ends the first 90 minutes with a draw, then ends the 30 minutes of extra time still with a draw, then ends with England losing because whoever is the current star striker misses one more crucial penalty than the other side.

Notwithstanding the fact that I don’t care about the football, I’ve always thought the penalty shoot out to be an unfair method of resolving an unresolved game where a decisive end is necessary. Nobody ‘wins’ on penalties, the losing team only loses on them. The winners don’t win because they’re a better team, and the losers don’t win because they’re a worse one – it’s nothing more than a matter of luck which striker or goalie happens to make the first mistake first. They might just as fairly settle the issue by tossing a coin.

I’ve always thought they should take a leaf out of the world of pinball.

Photo by ktpupp on Flickr

I love pinball – even though I’ve never been able to properly see the balls, it’s something that – whilst I’ve never been very good at – I’m not a total disaster at. I like the way it’s an analogue game, with real physics, and intrigued by the variety of games possible with just a table, a steel ball, some flippers, and some boingy things.

I think the world of football, when it has reached deadlock at the end of extra time, should introduce multiball:

Image based on a picture by lillith-ivory on Flickr

What they could do after the 30 minutes extra time has elapsed is just keep playing as normal, and chuck an extra ball on to the pitch. Every five minutes, they chuck another one on, and just keep on playing until the first team scores.

I think that would be a much better test of the skill of the players – of all of the players, both attack and defence, than the current penalty shoot-out method. It’d be much more fun to watch, too!

Has anybody got Sepp Blatter’s email address?

The last remaining socially acceptable form of racism

Posted on by simon

Whilst there’s no denying that racism still exists in Britain, it is fair to say that by and large, racism is now considered socially unacceptable. Except, that is, racism against one particular group – and no, I don’t mean people with ginger hair:

An emergency notice has been served on an illegal gipsy camp, which was set up at the weekend on greenbelt land in Meriden. It is believed the travellers had purchased the plot of land from a landowner but did not have permission to build on the site.

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Travellers bulldozing a field in a peaceful Solihull village to create a caravan site have been ordered to stop work by the authorities. Angry residents set up a road block with farming trucks stopping lorries taking building materials to the site.

This is not, as is often the case, travellers just moving onto a piece of common land and setting up, or even a case of them moving on to somebody else’s land without permission. This piece of land, they have legally bought.

Admittedly, they haven’t got planning permission to set up a camp on the land – intending instead to try to gain retrospective planning permission part way through the work. This is of course still illegal – but is a common practice carried out by big time developers and small time homeowners for their rear extensions alike. Overwhelmingly, when applied for, retrospective planning permission is granted.

But in this case, planning permission for the travellers’ site probably won’t be granted – even though it probably would have been for a block of nice little boxes on the hillside flats for rich people. And had it been flats for rich people, the people of Meriden almost certainly wouldn’t have turned out in force to block the road.

Why?

Because racism against travellers is the one remaining socially acceptable form of racism. Not only is it acceptable, it’s almost mandatory. Call somebody a nigger, wop, or paki and you’ll be quite rightly castigated for it. Call them a gypo or a pikey and your friends will laugh approvingly; take somebody to task for using the word gypo and they’ll tell you not to be so sensitive, that it’s Political Correctness Gone Mad(tm).

Now it’s true that many illegal traveller encampments need an awful lot of clearing up when they are eventually evicted. It’s also true that they shouldn’t move in illegally in the first place.

But if councils met their obligations to provide a certain number of travellers’ sites in the first place, there would be less of a problem of ‘illegal’ encampments. And ultimately, if you treat people like pariahs, then like pariahs they will behave.

So when can we see the end of this last socially acceptable form of racism?

The rubbishness of public transport

Posted on by simon

I’m writing this starting at 10:05 sat on a stationary train headed for Rugby. Not – as I should be – walking through the streets of Coventry having got off the train five minutes ago, heading towards a meeting which is due to start at 10:30.

It is of course entirely my own fault. I mean, silly me – I made the stupid error of assuming that because every single other train to London stops first at Birmingham International, then at Coventry, the journey taking a mere 20 minutes, that the 09:42 from Birmingham New Street would also stop first at Birmingham International, then at Coventry. So naturally it didn’t occur to me to stand there for some minutes whilst the display scrolled round to confirm my assuption. Why would I need to? Apparently my quickest way to Coventry now is to get off at Rugby and then get a bus; the ticket man didn’t say whether it was a rail-replacement bus from the station or whether I’d have to wander around looking for some other information about buses – and pay for a bus fare on top of my train fare. So, I’ll be lucky to get to the meeting which finishes at 4pm by lunchtime, making the value of my attendance now questionable. The cost of this exercise in time wasting so far – around £10, including the rail ticket and the extortionately priced coffee and breakfast sandwich. To put that into perspective, the cost of my night on Broad Street last night with some good friends was, including my meal, only £14.

Last Saturday public transport let me down too – I had to attend a meeting in Cotteridge, thinking the 10 minute train ride from Five Ways to Kings Norton would be a doddle. Sadly there had been a power failure at New Street first thing in the morning which had stuffed things up, but when the Network Rail website at 3pm was giving the impression things were nearly back to normal I thought it seemed better than the bus. After about half an hour at Five Ways with no sign of when a train might come I re-evaluated that decision and opted to risk my life on the 8A Inner Circle to then pick up the 45 at Pershore Road. Arriving at the 8 bus stop over the road from Five Ways I found a sign giving me all the information I might need to know about locations of city centre bus stops, but nothing to tell me when the bus which went past this stop might be expected to arrive, or even how frequent it was. After 15 minutes I gave up and started walking. My return journey at 7pm wasn’t much better – at Kings Norton station the trains were still stuffed up with no indication of when one might come on the screens, and the man on the end of the loudspeaker-box on the platform was still saying my train hadn’t left Longbridge (and he didn’t know when it would do) literally as it pulled up at the platform 20.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the principle of public transport; it annoys me massively when, with the planet on the brink of environmental catastrophe and the city on the brink of total gridlock, that catastrophe and gridlock is being exascerbated by people with bus stops outside their houses get in cars to drive to workplaces with bus stops outside their offices.

But when I, as an occasional public transport user (I’m fortunate enough to be able to walk to most places I need to get to) who believes in it has such a poor experience of it three times out of every four, who can blame them?

Elections – do your candidates want you to vote for them?

Posted on by simon

Over here in Ladywood, if it wasn’t for the televised party leaders’ debates, we wouldn’t actually know there’s an election going on. Barely any posters can be seen (I’ve seen just two, in the same site on Summer Row), there have been no cars driving around with megaphones, few of us have had any leaflets dropped through our letter boxes, and apart from one event organised before the campaign kicked off that was just for residents of one tower block, there don’t seem to have been any elections hustings organised – or at least, none that we’ve been made aware of.

This does seem strange – in terms of the General Election, by all accounts with the retirement of Clare Short it could go either of two ways between Labour and Liberal Democrat, and even the local Conservatives think they’re in with a fighting chance. So you would think all of the candidates would be bending over backwards to try and persuade us to vote for them?

You might reasonably ask, if the candidates – both local and general – can’t be bothered to come to us and campaign to us, why should we be bother to turn out to vote for them? There was one occasion recently where the control of a whole council changed on the basis of the flip of a coin – the two main parties in the council had an equal number of councilors, and the last ward to be decided had the two main contenders with an equal number of votes, so the tie was resolved by a coin. I’ll bet there were a number of people the next day who were regretting staying away from the polling station.

Certainly, I would always recommend people attend the polling station on election day – as is often pointed out, the right to vote was a hard won right, and those campaigners’ memories deserve respect.

But equally, the right not to vote, or the right to attend the polling station and spoil one’s ballot paper choosing nobody, is also an important right – to be forced to attend a polling station and make a choice between nobody who seems to represent your views particularly well is as much an insult to democracy as to have no vote.

At the end of the day, political candidates don’t have a right to our vote – they must earn it. If they can’t be bothered fighting for it, they don’t deserve it.