I was recently walking through the Pallasades shopping centre when i noticed this poster, advertising the Pallasades Gift Card:

The perfect present every time, indeed; whose face couldn’t possibly fail to light up at receiving such a kind & thoughtful gift, when the gift of choice includes wares from these fine emporiums:

One is – quite literally – spoilt for choice.

Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?

“Gordon Brown is said to be ‘very concerned’ about allegations ex minister Elliot Morley claimed £16,000 expenses on a loan he had already paid. Mr Morley has said it was a ‘mistake’ and has paid the money back – but his future as a Labour MP may be in doubt”.

Birmingham photographer Karen Strunks has been running a project for a while going round Birmingham at 4am. She recently had the idea to open it out to everybody, with the interesting twist of making it 4am on 4 April. So at the appointed hour a group of about 30 of us met at the Bull sculpture in Birmingham City Centre for a photo walk to New Street Station, then on to the Wholesale Markets.

Here are my pictures:

The event became a global phenomenon, with over 1300 images taken!