The Blog of Dave

My pal Dave Metcalfe now has a proper, non-MySpace blog called 'Fast Broads'. I imagine that must be a quaint North Yorkshire colloquialism for a reliable Internet connection.

This is Dave:

Davey was raised on a diet of netto white cider, wotsits and comics in the darkest depths of north yorkshire. he escaped and hid in the bradford underground until he decided to see the sights of the uk by moving around for no other reason than he fancies it. he has a severe aversion to capital letters correct punctuation and the font comic sans. he currently resides in birmingham where he lives off a diet of netto white cider, wotsits, comics and salad - well, you've got to do your five a day haven't you?

You can find it here.

As you were, soldier.

Brum Tig: I'm "It" Now

I've been tagged by my new pal, the smart and feisty local Blogging journo Joanna Geary. I suppose I should explain what the Hell that means.

Jon Bounds of the excellent Birmingham: It's Not Shit website (they of the recent Spotted Dog Pub Landlord John Tighe-winning Brummie of the Year Awards) has come up with a novel way to help promote this fine city's thriving community of bloggers. It's called Brum Blog Tig and Jon's rules are as follows:

• Each player starts with an odd, but fun, fact about Brum and one odd, but fun, fact about their blog.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose two people to get tagged and list their names.
• Tag your post “birminghamUK” and “brumblogtig” (the second one is a memetag).
• People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (with their version of the post) and post these rules (or link to them here). They can tie it in with their particular subject if they so wish.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  

So - without any further ado - here's My fact about Brum:

The Digbeth area has long been known as the spiritual home to the city's Irish community, but did you know that one of Ireland's most famous literary sons - a certain James Augustine Aloysius Joyce - once resided there?

James Joyce and his lover Nora Barnacle arrived in Birmingham in 1920. They were about to embark on a new life in Paris after their lengthy self-imposed exile in Trieste, and in those days Digbeth's Coach & Horse Station was a common stopover point for journeys between the the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. This involved a time-consuming 1,300 mile detour, which was - at the time - a common feature of short-haul European travel, despite the fact that SatNavs had not been invented yet.

Joyce - an Irish emigre with a fondness for booze, lock-ins and a thriving live music scene - immediately felt at home in Digbeth. Nora, by contrast, instantly despised the area. After years of living in impoverished exile she longed for the style, sophistication and readily available boeuf bourguignon of the fashionable Parisian scene. According to contemporary eyewitness reports, she tried to drag her suitcases onto a Paris-bound coach and insisted that Joyce should get her "the Hell away from this fecking shithole". Joyce stubbornly refused, and tried to drag her suitcases out of the Coach Station and into a nearby pub. This luggage-based tug-of-war soon escalated into characteristically violent confrontation between the hot-tempered lovers which lasted just over a fortnight. According to Richard Ellmann, the row only ended after Joyce - who by this stage was suffering from a cut lip and broken spectacles - hastily composed a conciliatory lyrical poem to Nora entitled "In the Coach Station at Digbeth":

O cracked lookingglass
The flesh of lip now parted
By repeated blows to my skull
From your suitcase

Following the fight, Joyce and Nora left the coach station and found lodgings at a nearby public house called The Dislocated Arms, and it was there that Joyce set about forming his first and last band. According to Joyce scholar Hugh Jenner's definitive study of this period (C'mon Feel The Joyze, 1988), the resulting band - 'Molly and Her Bloomers' - were pioneers of the interwar industrial music scene. Unfortunately, their bulky musical instruments - which included heavyweight manufacturing equipment like conveyor belts, steel rolling mills and even a viaduct - prevented them from getting booked into adequately sized venues and made touring prohibitively expensive.

Frustrated by these setbacks to his fledgling musical career, Joyce submitted to Nora's persistent demands and decided to leave Birmingham and resume their journey to Paris. Before they left, though, Joyce indulged himself in a mammoth pub-crawl of the area. This event was recorded in his personal journals and - according to Ellmann and others - formed the basis of his masterpiece Finnegans Wake:

Riverrun, past the Adam and Eve, from Pershore Street to bend of Rea, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Ceol Castle and environs.

That's my Brum Fact. Here's my Blog Fact:

Not everything I write here is absolutely true.


I'm tagging Pete Ashton and Dave Metcalfe.