I was recently involved in delivering some training for the Retooled project, working a group of ex-Rover MG employees who were made redundant when the company went bust 5 years ago and to create a resource for those facing or going through redundancy.
The two, day-long workshops were pretty amazing and I got to hear some eye-opening stories. During the afternoon of the first workshop, myself and Retooled team member John Barnett had a little look at some online material about Longbridge that’s out there, which he put into context for me in some recorded conversations. It was during one of these conversations that John, who looked after the car plant’s IT network, told me about the rats that chewed through the cabling and the army of feral cats that fed off them:
The biggest problem was rats, actually. There was actually a budget line of £10,000 per year which was called the Rat Fund, which was there for repairing cables that had been gnawed through by rats. Mainly due, bizarrely, because BMW had got rid of all the Factory Cats and the Factory Cats used to keep the rats down. But BMW didn’t like the cats. They used to look more like miniature lions than cats, and they ate all the rats. But after they got rid of the cats the rat population increased amazingly and all the fibre cables got chewed through on a regular basis.
Although the small army of ferocious, feral Factory Cats were tolerated by Rover ‘because they were really useful’, BMW in their wisdom decided to dispose of them because ‘they looked untidy and they didn’t want them there’.
If you listen to my interview with John (below) you can hear me get slightly stuck on this topic, which he mentions almost in passing. And I’ve not really stopped thinking about it since. How did BMW dispose of the cats exactly? Was it done humanely? Does anyone have any pictures of them? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE POOR FACTORY CATS?
I spent the Easter weekend in South Wales visiting my family, which meant I was at my Dad’s house in Caerphilly for the 4am project on Sunday 4th April. Now on recent visits to Caerphilly I’ve noticed an increasing amount of Tom Cooper’s dotted around the town, where he was born. It seems we have the Caerphilly-based Tommy Cooper Society to thank for this – they are capitalising on the connection despite the fact that his family moved to Exeter when he was three.
The Tommy Coper Society raised the funds for a Tommy Cooper statue in the town centre, which is what I made a beeline for at 4am. His big, beaming face grinning down at me looked downright sinister in the darkness of night. It was kind of scary.
But it wasn’t as scary as the bunny that stands at the foot of the sculpture, which was trying to crush The Courthouse pub down the road with its giant paw.
Tommy’s bunny wasn’t the only animal I came across. I met this very cold-looking cat sitting on a front doorstep.
The other beasts I saw were on bins. There seems to be a trend in Caerphilly of people decorating their wheelie bins with squirrels and the like, it’s very odd.
Those that didn’t pimp up their bins indicated the house number in the normal way with paint, but even that could look quite funky in a distressed sort of way.
This is what I love about the 4am project, it really makes you notice things in your surroundings that you just don’t tend to see in the hustle and bustle of daytime life.
The big 4am project date is barely over, but organiser Karen Strunks isn’t resting on her laurels. She’s just announced an extra special 4am outing to the Birmingham Museum Collections Centre this Saturday, an Aladdin’s cave of historical treasures in Nechells. Who knows what you might notice there in the dark and quiet of night?
On the evening of 11th November I joined Jon Bounds with a sizable gang to take part in the after -dark round of his ‘psychogeographical epic’ 11 Bus Project. The idea is that everyone has ‘a window of eleven hours to complete a circuit of Birmingham’s number eleven bus’, recording their observations and findings as they trundle along in whatever way they see fit. It was the first time I’d ever traveled on the 11 Bus, and I stupidly misread the timetable and thought a full circuit took about an hour, so thought my Flip’s memory of 60 minutes would pretty much cover it. Therefore my initial means of recording the experience was my Flip, some gaffa tape and a handy pole at the back of the top deck to film the bus’ interior as we sat on it:
This resulted in the rather surreal and badly edited film above – most of it is speeded up to the iMovie max with the first and last few seconds at normal speed (I wanted to keep the explanation we gave to a stranger who asked us what we were doing, and everyone waving goodbye at the end).
Of course I was completely wrong about the timings. As Jon said, “Birmingham’s a big place, you know,” and it took us almost two and a half hours to get around. So once my Flip ran out of juice I got out my camera and started taking pictures of people on the bus. Those within our happy 11 Bus crew were aware of me doing this but strangers on the bus, whose backs I snapped, weren’t.
What I found most interesting about the doing the circuit was how our large group changed the normal seating patterns on the bus. Younger, cooler kids kept walking onto the top deck and looking longingly at the back seats we occupied before settling for the seats at the front end. We seemed to upset the usual social order of 11 Bus riding and turfed the kids out of their comfort zone. Me and Ben Whitehouse chatted about this and more on this audioboo he took during our journey.
All in all it was a really fun thing to do – I got to meet and share sweets with new people, see a bit more of Birmingham (including Perry Barr, where you can be a star) and enjoy some post bus-ride drinks at the Hare and Hounds with friends. I think next year I’ll definitely go in the daytime, so I can see and record more of what’s outside the top deck of the bus.
Proof that even when getting down to sirius conferuns bizniz, people still have that natural inclination to play and turn the whole thing into one big game. At the Hello Digital 2009 conference everyone settled down in the main hall for the opening speeches…and a game of battleships ensued on Twitter.
It started with people stating their locations (‘one row behind and 6 seats to the right of @paulbradshaw’) and others present trying to trace them. It then progressed to launches of torpedos and the like – the audience were trying to take each other down. So next time you’re at a conference and find yourself a little distracted, don’t drift off – connect to those around you via Twitter and have a little fun.
Well, it’s been a good long, while, hasn’t it? I’m not going to do the cliched apologising for the prolonged silence, most people know I’ve been a busy bee. In early August I left my job with ACE dance and music to join Will Perrin’s talk about local team and spread the hyperlocal love. And things have been a wonderful whirlwind since then.
But all work and no play makes me really rather dull. So that’s probably what this blog will start to become – more of a personal place of play.
And I’m going to start off with a game played with Nikki Pugh on her birthday recently. Nikki decided she wanted to play the game rather than make it for her special day, and who were we to argue? So after Libby Heighway and Michael Grimes had finished with Nikki in the Nature Centre, they packed her off to me at the graveyard in St Mary’s Church, Moseley.
She found me there waiting with a piece of cake. It was only after she’d eaten it I told her it wasn’t her cake, but that of the cake-loving ghosts. So poor Nikki had to find said ghosts going by the clues below and play them a message from their mean Cake Angel.
Can you spot the gravestones of the ghosts in the slideshow?
I rode into heaven on my trusty steed.
Too young to lay anchor, I swam aweigh to sleep with the fishes.
I survived my sister to die on Turkish soil, caught up in the Drama of Dardanelles
John and Jane have flown into heaven, their family’s legacy is yellow and sweet.
So many of us, we caught Bounder’s bus to heaven.
Luckily, Nikki managed to find them all in time to get to The Fighting Cocks and enjoy a cake that did belong to her, a grand Michael Grimes creation of chocolate, jelly babies and liquorish all-sorts.
I got all the gravestone-name gathering with Ben Whitehouse, when we were thinking about a possible Moseley Barcamp thing that didn’t happen. But it was a great day, mulling over the encryptions and thinking about the stories behind them, and it gave me some inspiration eventually!
It wasn’t my health or the environment that made me swap my daily commute from Moseley on the No. 50 bus for a bike ride. The abuse, crack smoke, constant smell of Macdonalds fries and occasional smell of urine never helped matters, but the thing that really turned me off was the tinny sounds of crap garage blasting out of gobby teenagers’ mobile phones. I could never fathom why they found their favourite music was best enjoyed when it sounded like it was played on a secondhand cassette machine in the bath, gave up trying to and bought a cheap boneshaker off Ebay instead.
One day a particularly loud broadcast interrupted a toryboy’s enjoyment of his Telegraph and he saw fit to tell him, “I don’t want to listen to your shit,” as if that would come as some sort of surprise. Upon being answered with incoherent mumbling, he searched around the top deck for moral support, met my eyes and asked me if I wanted to listen to this rubbish. I told him what I wanted was to marry him. Beeper could have been Our Song.
Battling the wind, rain and racedrivers on my crap bike was always worth not having to hear grime grating on my brain after a hard days’ work.
But last Thursday I found myself in a hurry so I hopped back on. They’ve got plasma tellies now, so you can see what the kids are smoking before you go upstairs.
Downstairs a couple chatted over their twin buggy. One seat held their baby and in the other sat two small dogs. Perhaps it was the Special Brew that deafened them to the horrified silence on board.
Now every day I put my £1.50 bus fare into a glass jar. I’m saving up for a new bike.
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