How do vegetarians get fat? – By eating like pigs, but not pigs, in the Friends of the Earth Warehouse Cafe on Allison Street, according to Paul Fulford in the Evening Mail.
Digbeth Olympics Ridiculous River Rea Raft Race – John Mostyn, Adam Crossley and some unconvincing-sounding Welsh guy travel down the River Rea in rubber dingies and manage to emerge with all their skin intact.
Gigbeth competition – This competition for free weekend tickets is such a fantastic idea: ‘Gigbeth is looking for entrants to create their own version of The Sugarhill Gang classic ‘Rappers Delight’ and post them on a specially created You Tube page. Entrants are invited to come up with the best and most original alternative music video to the ground breaking hit, or to produce their very own recorded performance of the song.’ If like me, you just fancy giggling at the entries rather than making one, all entries will be posted on Gigbeth’s YouTube.
Pub Crawl – The Final Leg – Bull Ring and Digbeth – A guy and his camera in the Bull Ring and ‘Digbeth, dusty, dirty, noisy Digbeth’. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, his camera died as soon soon as he hit The Dubliner. This may be a good time to tell you that me and Antonio Gould are planning to do a repeat of last year’s Digbeth pub crawl for our birthdays on Saturday 10th January 2009. We plan to make it bigger, better and bloggier, photographing and twittering our locations and drunkeness levels. All are welcome, especially if you’re wearing a flat cap – stick it in your diaries!
My friend Antonio Gould once said that ‘living round here can be hard sometimes.’ He’s not wrong. I find Saturday mornings the hardest, when I’m torn between my love of lazy lie-ins and the Saturday Guardian, which sells out pretty early in the small local shops. I’ve found a compromise of sorts – going to the Alcester Street newsagents’ in my pyjamas when I awaken to buy a Guardian and one of their great bacon butties to take back to bed with me.
I usually indulge in flicking through the trashy magazines whilst they’re cooking up my sandwich. I almost dropped my paper last Saturday after opening Pick Me Up to find Pip McKnight staring back at me. Pip is a Custard Factory tenant – one half of 7 Inch Cinema, the other half being her husband Ian Francis ‘with his trendy jeans and scruffy hair.’ He’s only gone and run off with her mother.
Okay, so no he hasn’t. She was actually talking about her Stitches and Hos knitting group. Woke me up, though.
Thank God! After a year of stuffing paper into the one overflowing recycling bin and farcical cycling trips to bottle banks further afield with beer bottles smashing out of the front basket, we finally have proper recycling bins on our doorstep on Cheapside. Here’s me celebrating on them in a blurry photo taken by Antonio Gould.
Digbeth may be short on green leafy spaces but, like the rest of Birmingham, there is quick and easy access to the canals, so when I get a touch of the blues I can bike them away. My favourite route is a circular one, joining the Digbeth Branch Canal on Fazeley Street, carrying on into The Grand Union Canal until I hit under Spaggetti Junction. After a quick giggle at the ‘beach’ I turn back towards town on the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal, either re-joining the Digbeth Branch Canal when I hit Aston to end up where I started or carrying on into the city centre. Which is what I did Friday night to catch Blade Runner at my local cinema The Electric’s first showing on their new second screen.
Whilst I was in there some thug fiddled with my brakes so they faced the sky rather than the floor. Nice one. So yesterday morning I had to wheel it to the bike shop to be repaired.
On Your Bike on Bradford Street is the nearest, but I’ve found they can be a tad elitist. When I took my old boneshaker there for a service I got told by a rather dour Australian that my bike wasn’t worth spending any money on and I should just buy a new one, so it seems that unless you own quite a high-end mountain bike machine, they may not want to touch it. However Antonio, who owns a gorgeous Gary Fisher, assures me they’re very good.
Sprocket’s Cycles on Allison Street is a different story. They love doing up old battered bikes to sell secondhand and were always willing to tweak my old 70’s German town bike. So when I found myself after a newer model, I bought a shiny Dawes hybrid through them.
Sprocket’s is a tenant of the Friends of the Earth Warehouse, a gorgeous large red-brick building. It somehow seems idyllically back in time and whenever I go there I always feel like I’m in some middle England village rather than industrial Digbeth. The Warehouse is also home to CND West Midlands, whole food store the One Earth Shop and vegetarian restaurant the Warehouse Cafe.
The Warehouse Cafe is large, taking up the whole upper floor of The Warehouse. It has a very wholesome-hippy feel to it, with bare wooden floorboards and matching furniture, art to view and buy on the walls and copies of The Good News on the tables. Their food is quite simple but good and I can never resist a spot of lunch in there after dropping the bike off for fixing. I keep meaning to make Sunday lunch with all the trimmings there and perhaps one day I will.
But not today. Today I paid a visit to a rather drowned-out Sunday Flea market at The Custard Factory, walking away with a ‘vintage’ brolly to save me from the rain and a box of pretty cupcakes from Wonderleague for dinner. Not quite as healthy as The Warehouse Cafe’s organic fare, but tasty all the same.
