Mute magazine – Culture and politics after the net – Thanks to Andy Mabbett for pointing me to this article by Cooper James in Mute Magazine – a lovely little reflection on the Custard Factory of past and present:
We never had Bird’s Angel Delight when I was a kid because my Dad wouldn’t eat it. He worked nights in the Digbeth factory where it was made, emptying two hundred-weight sacks of flour into vast hoppers. “If you saw what went into those hoppers along with the flour, you wouldn’t eat it either,” he used to tell me, hinting at ingredients such as human blood and bits of rat.
There are two reasons why this story is still interesting to me today. The first is that my Dad is a 100% genuine originator of an urban myth, a rare thing to be. And the second is that the factory in which he worked is no longer home to gloopy instant desserts but to some of the key people in Birmingham’s thriving digital arts scene.
