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.

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.

• @isemann suggested bobotjie,
• @iskandarv and @ladyspooks suggested enchiladas,
• @pureartifice suggested Thai noodles with beef mince and lemon grass and lime leaves and chilli,
• @dianebrewster suggested with mushroom, vegetables, tomato, paprika, served with rice and yoghurt – and calling it Hungarian,
• @theaardvark suggested Yuk Sung,
• @bryonyevens suggested Shah Pilaf – onion, mince, raisins, orange zest, and rice,
• @pezholio, @natmandu, and @andyderrickmus suggested cottage pie,
• @mikelcu suggested mousaka, lasagne, and shepherd’s pie,
• @graphiquillan suggested stuffed peppers,
• and I’ve also thought of meat and potato pie.

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

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?

I’m writing to complain to you in the strongest possible terms about the lack of gritting along the towpath of the Farmer’s Bridge lock flight, Birmingham City Centre.

This morning, between the top lock and lock number seven (where I disembark) walking along it to work I slipped and fell over not once but four times; I was reduced to descending the lock ramps by squatting & sliding myself down with my hands behind me for balance. You can imagine I’m sure the dangers inherent in slipping on the ice next to a lock, especially if one fell into the frozen lock itself.

I appreciate that British Waterways can control neither the weather nor the temperature, and that there’s little you can do to ensure passage for boats when the canal itself freezes over. However, you can control the pedestrian environment, with the application of salt / grit to ensure key strategic pedestrian routes such as this are safe for the people who use them regularly; the nature of that section of towpath route is such that once one has started going that way you are pretty much committed, as leaving the towpath to take a different route isn’t so simple. Once I reached the normal pavement – which the council is responsible for – my passage was completely fine, so if the council manages to grit the pavement, how can British Waterways not manage to grit the city centre towpath ?

Fortunately neither myself nor my laptop and phone were damaged in my four falls due to British Waterways’ negligence in failing to make the towpath safe, however be assured that had anything been damaged, I would be holding you liable. In this age of no-win-no-fee personal accident law firms advertising on television, I urge you to arrange for the key strategic pedestrian routes in Birmingham to be gritted and made safe as soon as possible, before another member of the public has a more serious accident, and my British Waterways licence money has to be used to pay out on a hefty compensation claim rather than its proper use of paying for the maintenance of the network.

in Friendship,

In the greenwash department, this carton of Sainsbury’s apple juice speaks for itself, really.

Over the last few days I’ve watched this skip, on King Edwards Drive near where I live, gradually fill up.

Not your usual house clearance though – the skip contains a brand new futon, brand new bed, brand new clothes, brand new microwave oven, brand new designer chairs, even a brand new washing machine (though I noted that was liberated – not by me – within just a few hours of being deposited).

I can’t help wondering about the story behind the skip; it seems unusual for so much new stuff to be chucked out.

The obvious prediction is an eviction of some kind – the tenant couldn’t keep up with the rent, so was chucked out by the landlord at short notice. Or worse still, the tenant was keeping up with their rent perfectly fine, but the landlord themself weren’t keeping up their mortgage payments – leaving the tenant, immorally unprotected in these instances, put out on the street with nowhere to go.

Perhaps there was foul play involved? Maybe a drug deal went wrong, and the tenant found themselves having to skip the country at short notice?

Or perhaps it is for a nice reason – the tenant has just inherited a wopping legacy, or had a substantial payrise, and is having a total clearout, a replacement of new stuff. Perhaps they’ve moved out because they’ve just embarked on a new phase of a relationship and moved in with a partner, who has better and even newer (or perhaps older, pricelessly antique) stuff?

Whatever the story, what a criminal waste, chucking out all these perfectly good household items, especially in an area where just a few hundred yards away lies some of the worst deprivation in the country. Freecycle, the Ladywood Furniture Project, eBay, the British Heart Foundation shop in Northfield, or even friends would make much better use of these items than the council tip.

Go read the rest of Stef’s article, and see if you think he’s not the only one in that situation…