Robert Hampton

For the first few years of the blog’s existence there aren’t many records of trips out, because – well, I didn’t like to leave the house. More recently, however, I’ve taken the advice, “you need to get out more,” to heart. I’ve ventured out more and more.

London features regularly – in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The last trip was with my friend Scott and seemed to involve hanging around the Abercrombie & Fitch store and then going to see West End Bares, a charity burlesque show. If this gives the impression that we enjoy looking at naked men, that is… accurate.

I like London, with its Oyster cards and palaces and whatnot. I think it helps that I have loads of friends who live there, so I can avoid expensive hotel bills by imposing on their generosity. In fact, I’ve just completed another London trip (this time with my friend Ian). It’s waiting to be written up, once these retro-blogs are out of the way…

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So, a couple of weeks ago I was in Birmingham.

It was a destination chosen mainly for practical reasons. I was meeting with my friends Scott and Ian for a day of high-jinks. Ian lives in London, Scott lives in Birkenhead. Birmingham was roughly in the middle, and London Midland‘s Great Escape offer enabled us to reach there for just £15.

Aside from Moor Street station (which everybody spent a lot of time coo-ing over), my companions complained about how rubbish everything was. In fairness, we did seem to see only the very worst of the city: the dank caverns that are New Street and Snow Hill stations; the horrendous, pedestrian-unfriendly gridlocked roads that surround said stations; the Midland Metro with its unrelenting window views of derelict factories. We ended up in Wolverhampton, where a drunk man shouted obscenities at the people disembarking from the tram.

Birmingham gets a bad press. It’s the UK’s second city, with over a million inhabitants, and yet it is sneered at. It’s unfairly portrayed as a concrete mess of ugly 60s architecture, populated by Black Country simpletons with rubbish accents.

I can’t join in with the Birmingham mockery, however. This is mainly because I live in Liverpool, which is probably the one English city which gets more of a slating than Birmingham. I live and breathe Liverpool every day, and I know that the image of thieving and yobbery is untrue and unfair (except, perhaps, when the Mathew Street Festival is on). By the same token, I refuse to believe the stereotype that Birmingham is all concrete and ugliness. Over a million people choose to live there – it must be doing something right.

Instead, I will point you to my Birmingham blog from 2011 and supplement it by saying that Equator Bar is a fun place to while away an hour or so while waiting for your train.

The tram system is a bit rubbish, though.

2011 will surely be remembered as the year I lost my blogging mojo. Certainly from August until mid-December, there has been a dearth of postings. Well, it has been a quiet time in the world, after all.

The lack of activity here on the site is in stark contrast to the activity in my life. There’s been a hell of a lot going on for me – I just, er, didn’t tell you about it.

Travel was on the agenda: this was the year I left the UK for the first time in 25 years, when I visited visited Estonia. Less exotically, I started my Station Master blog (currently in hibernation, but back with a bang in 2012, I promise). I also found time in September to celebrate my birthday with a weekend in London, and had a smashing day out in, er, Birmingham.

Yes, 2011 was the year I got out and about a lot. I didn’t even allow the swiping of my iPhone, by an expert pickpocket, to dissaude me.

I got up close and personal(ish) with McFly at their Liverpool concert, after my friend Andrew got tickets. I also saw Beautiful Thing, in its original stage incarnation, in Manchester. I failed, however, to get tickets to the Olympics.

An event which required no tickets was Liverpool Pride, which was great fun despite a funding shortfall which enforced a change of location. 2011 was really the year when “gay” really did mean “happy” for me. The cap on it all came in the Autumn, when I gained and then lost a boyfriend (it lasted only a few months, but the important thing is it happened).

Finally, with only days to go, I fulfilled one of my new year resolutions for 2011, by doing a videoblog – believe it or not, this grainy, poorly-lit video promises great things for the future.

So that was 2011. Hopefully 2012 will be just as, if not more rewarding for me. Maybe I’ll even write a blog post or two about it. Or not. Happy New Year everybody!

London has experienced days of rioting in various parts of the city, there was disorder in Liverpool last night, while tonight Birmingham and Manchester are under attack.

From watching the near-continuous news coverage, I have come to a terrifying conclusion: our notion of “law and order” only works if most people behave themselves without intervention. Once you have a sufficiently large group of people with no respect for authority, the system breaks down and the police are easily overwhelmed.

The chickens are coming home to roost. For decades, social issues have been left to fester, leaving us with areas of high unemployment and high crime, where many people exist without any purpose or direction in life. This situation has been perpetuated by successive Conservative governments (who simply didn’t care) and Labour governments (who cared deeply, but failed to get to grips with the problem).

Now to compound the problem the Government is pushing through vicious budget cuts: not just to front-line services like the police and fire brigade, but also to services like youth clubs and other community organisations. And then they act surprised when it blows up in their faces.

Tough-sounding soundbites from Theresa May and David Cameron won’t solve this: it requires long-term thinking. Unfortunately this sort of thinking is not favoured by politicians and their friends in the tabloid press. We will see demands for the return of National Service, calls for water cannons to be turned on the rioters, and wails about the Human Rights Act. The actual root causes will not be addressed, and the problems will be stored up again for next time. Repeat ad infinitum…

“You’re going where?”

Such was the reaction from my friends when I told them I was planning to visit Birmingham on Monday. I think I would have earned a less scornful reaction had I organised a weekend break in Basra.

Lots of people say things about Birmingham: it’s a dump, it’s ugly, the local accent is like fingernails on a blackboard. But then again, lots of people say similar things about Liverpool. I was more than prepared, therefore, to give Birmingham the benefit of the doubt; as far as I was concerned it was a place that fulfilled my three criteria for a day out: it was cheap, it was somewhere I’d never been, and I could get there easily from Liverpool South Parkway.

Regular readers will have noted that I was recently forcibly separated from my mobile phone. That was a bit of a downer, and I certainly missed the distraction of music, internet and games during the 93 minute train journey. I had to look out of the WINDOW, for heaven’s sake!

On the other hand, it was strangely liberating to not have the pressure to Tweet my whimsical observations on Britain’s second city every five minutes. I was able to relax and enjoy myself, and save my outpourings for one big enjoyable spurt.

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