retiredmartin

August 2025. Birmingham

Much more of this and I’ll be changing my name to Brummie Martin.

Mrs RM had her blog material for Digbeth, bar the Sabbath mural behind the Anchor,

the weird Selfridges shot,

a car park on Allison Street with great art,

and that aforementioned pint of Hooch in Kilder.

Expect cask Hooch in the Crown in Stockport soon.

She then retired to the hotel to “work” on her blog, which in fairness has made more money than mine, and dispatched me into Chinatown to take a photo of the National Trust property.

Sadly the Brum Back to Backs (a working class version of Mr Straw’s house) were fully booked that weekend.

We’d visited once before, leaving the lads in a skatepark in Moseley while we did culture.

That culture included the Dragon, which I’d have rated similarly to the Spoons of the same name in Weston-super-Mare.

But today, it was magic, an exemplar of the “All Human Life is Here” JDW.

Quite a bit of Chinatown colour, but also a Spanish couple conspicuously sipping from smuggled in coke bottles and Maltesers, the sort of thing you expect from BRAPA.

A loud woman in a Liverpool shirt is expertly evicted for an unspecified racial slur, everyone cheers.

I come for the bargain Jaipur (NBSS 3.5) and stay for a can of the local Birmingham craft stout,

and head back under the Holloway Circus underpass  (nice mural) to find that Mrs RM hasn’t noticed I’d gone.

“Hope you got photos of Back to Back in portrait AND landscape” she says.