There’s a surprising amount of animal life on the urban streets of Digbeth. So much so, I made a map out of it with the help of Pete Ashton’s photography:
I wasn’t expecting to find much faunography in Belfast. How wrong I was. Imagine my delight at discovering Belfast Castle’s Cat Garden, a testament to an old story that a white cat has always lived there. It’s a beautifully kept garden with 9 felines – mosaic cats, sculptured cats, hedge cats…
It was upon visiting this garden and getting near deafened by mine and Karen’s high-pitched squeals that our poor taxi tour driver learnt the difference between us lesser-spotted bloggers and the more common-garden, journalist-on-a-press-trip fodder. It’s a garden full of cats.KITTEHS. Belfast wins.
‘Digbeth police station evacuated,’ reads the Birmingham Mail, ‘after suspicious package was discovered inside…A cordon was placed around the station and a number of roads were closed off.’
However to Twitter addicts such as myself this news was, like, so last hour. We’d been discussing the road blocks, traffic jams, suspicious package and bomb squad for hours. So much so that, after viewing the search results, Pete Ashton went and wondered aloud if Digbeth could become top-rating, trending Twitter topic for the day.
It was like a red rag to a bull. If you tweeted, you simply had to mention Digbeth. Even if, like Antonio Gould, it was to say you weren’t sure what to say about Digbeth.
Pete Ashton’s blogged about the internetty aspects of today’s little exercise, so let’s get on with the important stuff:
But if you’re sticking to strict anagramming like Shona McQuillan you get THE BIG D, which is still pretty cool.
There are Killer Badgers in Digbeth according to Emma Jones. In the Police Station, apparently. Part of the Anti-Terrorism Act, I think. They’re better at extracting intelligence than bog-standard dogs. I shall be risking life and limb David Attenborough-style to get pictures of them for the Faunography trail.
Me and that bloke down the pub aren’t the only ones who think Digbeth is derived from DUCK BATH. Andy Mabbett says so too, so it must be true.
As you can see, our efforts weren’t in vain and it all left me rather distracted and excited this afternoon. Oh yeah, there was some stuff on Winterval as well, which made Simon Gray wonder if that could be a trending topic too. Go on, Tweethearts: you know what to do.
When Harry Palmer suggested I write an article for the forthcoming edition of Eccentric City, I decided to expand upon a blog post idea I already had in mind – a trail of Digbeth animal life, both real and painted/sculpted. This I did with the help of Pete Ashton’s great photography, and it looks like my words are finally going to appear in hard copy print!
It was great fun to do and we ended up stumbling across far more than I was aware of, or could include in the article. I gave poor Pete the fright of his life when I suddenly pointed and screamed, “THERE’S A GORILLA!” And I really enjoyed getting to meet the sheep in Mr Meat Ltd up close. Guardoggy was unfortunately not at home. I felt the inevitable google map of the trail warranted its own page, so click on the Faunography tab to see it. Let me know if I’ve left any of your furry friends out.
