the sweetest things

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152/365: Victoria Road Cemetery, Cradley Heath
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I nipped up to Merry Hill this morning, and although it was a slow start weather-wise, things improved quite a bit later on. Today's photo is of Victoria Road Cemetery in Cradley Heath, not directly attached to a church but an overflow space for Christ Church in nearby Quarry Bank. Despite initial appearances, the location pictured here is in a very urban area -- you can just see the houses in Victoria Road itself beyond the trees to the right. The cemetery had newly mown grass, but it otherwise seems a little on the neglected side, with a lot of plants growing over graves as seen here. On the plus side, its relatively untouched nature makes it a little oasis for wildlife, although I didn't see anything interesting during my brief visit.

As for the Merry Hill part of the day earlier on, the main downside was that I managed to drip brown sauce (from a bacon butty) onto my white polo shirt. Go me. Fortunately Merry Hill is a biggish shopping centre, so an emergency Primark run sorted out the immediate issue. (Basic cotton T-shirt, quite a pleasant teal colour, £2.50.) Whether the brown sauce will come out of the polo shirt is a good question, but I have reasonable hopes. It fortunately wasn't an expensive shirt in the first place -- though not quite as cheap as the T-shirt I bought today! -- so I'm not going to expend vast amounts of effort on it. I can always keep it for doing gardening in or something if the stain doesn't disappear.

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151/365: The Shambles, Bewdley Museum
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To say the government has not covered itself with glory over the welfare bill is a bit like saying that I am not a world-class golfer. The headlines may say that the government won tonight's vote, but the week leading up to that has been chaotic for a party with a majority of 170. A few days ago the whips were briefing that any rebels could say goodbye to future payroll posts. Tonight, the government only won by making not one but two very significant concessions. Even then, 49 Labour MPs still voted against it. This one is going to run and run, and Labour only has itself to blame for that. It has been, as Labour MP Ian Lavery said, a shambles, and the modified bill is still a bad one.

Talking of shambles, the origin of the word is as applied to a slaughterhouse -- and originally from the Latin scamillus, meaning something like "small stool". What you see above is The Shambles at Bewdley Museum -- and yes, this area was indeed a slaughterhouse hundreds of years ago. It's now the main pathway through the museum, and it has to be said that the small display picturing its earlier use has been somewhat sanitised! When the museum was first opened, the path had big round cobblestones, but people kept hurting their feet on them and so it was resurfaced with setts. The doors on either side lead to galleries and craft workshops.

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149/365: Sunset towards the Wyre Forest
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A very warm (27 °C) day today, but disappointingly cloudy, which made it feel very humid and uncomfortable. I had enough time for a pint of perry at lunchtime, which was nice -- Wetherspoons is doing a Craft Cider Festival, and perry qualifies as it's pear cider. Specifically, I drank Midnight Special from Mr Whitehead's, a Hampshire company. A new one on me: medium-sweet and easy drinking, and although you wouldn't call it especially complex it did slip down well on a very warm day in the beer garden. My photo from today is of sunset during a short walk I was taking on the western fringes of Bewdley. This photo was taken at 9:56 pm, and I'm looking towards the Wyre Forest on the horizon.

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147/365: Ozzy the Bull, Birmingham
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I had to be in Birmingham today for boring reasons, and the city was even busier than it usually is. The New Street Eats street food festival started today, and there was a major open day for prospective students at the University of Birmingham. Still, it wasn't as bad as it is in the run-up to Christmas! Today's photo may well look familiar as I've posted Ozzy before, just not as part of the 365 project. The concourse at Birmingham New Street station (the UK's busiest outside London) is now the permanent home for the mechanical bull that was built for the Commonwealth Games in 2022. His name, Ozzy, is a nod to Ozzy Osbourne, who grew up in Aston -- although he was actually born in Marston Green, over the border in Warwickshire.

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145/365: Working boat Swilgate, Kidderminster
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Well okay, their banks do. Another picture from the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal today, though this one was taken on the outskirts of Kidderminster rather than in Stourport. Most narrowboats these days are pleasure cruisers, but there are also a relatively small number of working boats. This one, Swilgate -- named after a minor Gloucestershire tributary of the River Severn -- was being used to support grass-cutting and hedge-trimming operations beside the canal. You can see the section used to store the cuttings at the rear (though that's actually the front, as the boat is travelling away from the camera). It probably doesn't look it from this picture, but it's only a few minutes' walk to Kidderminster town centre from here.

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144/365: Outdoor tables, Severnside South, Bewdley
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Fantastic Test victory over India today! I must admit, I was among the many yelling at Ben Stokes over choosing to field after winning the toss, but I can't argue with the outcome. It wasn't a classic test of bat and ball as apart from Bumrah in the first innings there wasn't much to write home about with either side's bowling attack. Still, you can only beat what's put in front of you -- and we did. Test cricket may be struggling in global terms, but England v India is generally worth watching. For once, "England bat deep" actually mattered, and India's tail folding in the second innings was what kept England's target reachable. A proper five-Test series this year, so what a way to start off!

The Iranian theocracy is a bloody terrible regime that executes huge numbers; disappears, tortures and otherwise oppresses its citizens; and is no kind of heroic state, regardless of what one may think of Israel or the US. I have no more time for the kind of protestor who actively supports Khamenei and his ilk than I do for the kind who decades ago used to portray Stalin as a goodie purely because he was an enemy of the Americans. I suspect more than a few of these idiots think supporting Iran is showing some kind of pan-Arab solidarity with Palestine. Newsflash to those guys: Iranians are not even Arabs.

In everyday news, I arranged my diabetes review today, which as usual with my local practice was a quick and painless operation. For those who aren't aware of how these things work, every six months I have a blood and urine test, and a face-to-face meeting with a specialist nurse, to see how I'm managing. Every other meeting, ie annually, I have a more detailed appointment which includes things like a comprehensive foot health check. It's that which I've now booked for next month. As for today's photo, it's not that interesting but I didn't get anything better. Some pub and café tables on Severnside South in Bewdley.

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...is that I am just starting to pick up (and I mean myself, not just reading about it in the press) a significant backlash against the sheer volume of student accommodation being built in towns and cities. I think most people accept that a large student population brings various benefits. But drawbacks too. Most students (outside London, at least) have cars now, and so both congestion and parking issues get noticeably worse. People resent being unable to buy a house or even a flat at a vaguely affordable price when hundreds or even thousands of extra students are being provided for. Some shopping centres are being cleared out for yet more space for student flats. In some cases student accommodation is at least partially exempt from rules that apply to normal residential, such as the (admittedly inadequate) ones on affordable housing. The number of foreign students is now vastly higher than 20 years ago. There's a sense in many places that the towns and cities they live in won't see much benefit as those with high-value degrees will go off to London or abroad. "It generates money for the economy" feels hollow if it's spent somewhere else.

This isn't to say that people don't understand the benefits of having a significant student population in a town. I think most people do, and sometimes (as with the Hive, the large library in Worcester that I wrote about yesterday) there's a clear and obvious benefit to the local community. But I do think we're at the point now where people are beginning to feel that (and this isn't a new complaint by any means) some areas are starting to verge on being a giant student housing quarter with a town attached. I think we could reach a point where some local communities actively don't want more uni growth in their towns. Higher education institutions need to do a lot more, and now not in 10 years' time. Big, serious provision available to the local public -- theatres, say, or leisure centres -- and on a walk-in basis too, not a "we have occasional public events" or "well, if you sign up and pay a membership fee and book a week in advance" basis. Some do -- the Hive succeeds for exactly this reason -- but not enough.

ETA: It's been pointed out in the comments that the increase in student accommodation is not necessarily simply at unis' behest, and that's perfectly fair comment. This is still how quite a few people feel, though. They feel as though another big student block is being prioritised over their run-down shopping centres and swimming pools. It's also true that it's the case that the hollowing out of local government by various Westminster parties in recent decades has had a strongly negative effect, otherwise they would be providing better pools and centres. But what I've recently been picking up, fairly or not, is resentment against the unis themselves, even if that's not altogether fair.

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141/365: Old Woodcolliers Arms, Bewdley
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Another very warm day, but hopefully the last for a little while. Today's 365 photo is not one of the easiest to make out, but I particularly wanted to include it at some point. It's the engraved glass on the front door of what is now a private house but until 2016 was the Woodcolliers Arms pub. What, you may ask, is or was a woodcollier? It's simply another name for a charcoal burner, and until about a hundred years ago charcoal burning was carried on in the nearby Wyre Forest. This pub went through several incarnations in its final years, including a short spell as a Russian-menu gastropub. I never went in it as far as I can remember, though. Just not my kind of place.

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140/365: GWR 1450 on autotrain duties, Bewdley
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For the second day running temperatures here approached 30 °C, but this time it was much cloudier for a lot of the day and so it felt uncomfortably humid. I still went out, though, as I had a ticket booked for the SVR's Supporters Day -- when the railway is open free of charge, but only to people like members (that's me!) and shareholders. The heat sapped me a bit and I didn't do as much as I might have done on a cooler day, but I still had a good time and I still (rather to my surprise) just topped 20,000 steps. The photo is from the SVR today: GWR no. 1450 on autotrain duties. This arrangement allows the locomotive to be controlled from an area at the rear of the train. That leads to the highly distinctive sight seen above: it's not an optical illusion or camera trickery; the engine really is sandwiched between the front and rear coaches.