You’ve heard of ‘Wife Swap’, how about ‘Prime Minister Swap’.

It transpires that at this moment, whilst Tony Blair is on holiday in Barbados, the prime minister of Barbados is not only on holiday over here, but actually having his honeymoon here in Birmingham!

“Britain is as good a place as any to have a honeymoon, and Birmingham is a charming city”, he apparently said.

Whereas living here Birmingham doesn’t obviously occur to me as a natural honeymoon destination, when one thinks it through it’s not that daft – after all, many people often go on holiday to places such as Dublin, Edinburgh, London, or Paris, so looking at it objectively, what’s the difference between those cities and this one?

Not only is there all the culture here of Symphony Hall, the CBSO, the Royal Ballet, three major theatres, the city’s museum & art gallery (as well as the science and technology museum, ThinkTank, down at Millennium Point), but there’s also the major shopping centre of the BullRing if you like that sort of thing, the canals – a couple of friends of mine for their honeymoon recently took a canal trip from London to Bishops Stortford and back – the urban village attractions of Bournville, Sarehole Mill and others, not to mention the actual real life countryside in the city such as Woodgate Valley Country Park, and the Lickey Hills. If you don’t want to stay in the posh city centre hotels such as the Hyatt, the Copthorne, or the Holiday Inn, there are plenty of nice hotels and guest houses further out. The Birmingham of the Crossroads Motel was swept away in the late 80s / early 90s – if indeed it ever existed at all.

I’ve been meaning for ages to do a page for one of my websites detailing all the things one could do during a week’s holiday in Birmingham, broken down as a suggested itinerary; a friend of mine once shared an idea he had for a reality tv programme where people would be given a sum of money to stay in a hotel in their home town / city, not allowed to contact anybody from their daily lives, and they have to spend the week exploring all the attractions there which they spend their lives ignoring. The results could be interesting.