Search results

I never suffered from bullies among the kids in school much. I remember a drawn-out fight with the toughest kid in class in one primary school but that was just a one off and not as one-sided as it might have been. Next primary school one kid and a couple of his mates tried to gang up on me so I...

A lot of the reason that councils reduced their house-building programmes in the late 70s was down to the new regulations from the Thatcher government. In addition to the "right to buy", city councils had to fund all new developments by selling existing stock at discounted prices either to...

Microsoft have always had some kind of issue with the alternate versions of Windows desktop. People liked 98 and said Me was bad, XP good don't touch Vista, 7 good again 8 to be avoided. The oddity was that there was a lot said about 9 being the solution to all of the problems in 8 but somehow...

..err that's St Martin's alright but there's not much of anything else in the picture. As I remember it, the market hall should be to the right (out of shot?) and the open market behind the observer.

B12 is Balsall Heath & Highgate although B12 8** and B12 9** roughly correspond to the Balsall Heath Council District of the late 50s/early 60s. I know the council district is older than that but they sliced off the bit between Balsall Heath Rd and Belgrave Rd in the 50s and abolished the...

True, all 3 have Balsall Heath printed on the map somewhere but the later 2 have a border in style and colour that matches the number 12 printed large and within the area. That's why I say that the bordered area relates to Birmingham 12 rather than Balsall Heath.

Although the first map does show Balsall Heath, the other two show Birmingham 12 which is not really the same thing. I'm not sure when they started with the numbered rather than named areas (1920s/30s) but, somehow, I doubt they exactly matched the named districts. As far as I can tell Balsall...

Use Microsoft and whatever their browser is and you are using the industry standard. This has been the default browser/operating system for years and consequently it has been the most common target for hackers and malware creators. Things are changing. A few years back Android became the...

The differences are more likely to be seen in internet pages than actual programs. The big Desktop operating systems generally have a smartphone counterpart that is much smaller and uses much smaller programs and Android is different enough from Linux that there's not much crossover there...

You never can tell. A lot of teams only drop for one season and go straight up again. Blues have been pushing the top end at various times in the season (though, not at the end) for the last few years so there's always a chance.

It's a high rise hotel. There's another (big green thing) a few hundred yards away and it's right next to the albany and a small multi-story car park. I would have thought that a lot of the clients would come by rail as this would be the closest hotel to New Street Station. Apart from the bulge...

True, but then I wasn't born in Birmingham. Like my mum, I'm from Croydon - south of London and a target for raids because of the old airport. I've lived in Birmingham since the 60s.

I vaguely remember my mother's account of being outside during a raid. Some woman let mum into her house between the time the doodlebug's engine stopped (they used to sound like a motorbike) and the thing exploded sending shrapnel everywhere. That was about as close as it gets without being fatal.

Sometime in the 80s I used to go to the Acafess on Friday nights to listen to the Jazz band. I can't remember what most of the name stood for but it began Afro-Caribbean. The place was on the Moseley Road in Highgate. The gigs used to go on pretty late and with the same house band (Steve Ajao on...

In the 70s and 80s I bought a lot of vinyl records from various shops around the city and, for some reason, I still have some of the plastic bags they came in. It seems that most of the old record shops had their own designs that they either kept up or changed over the years. Anyway, I...

It's been going on a lot longer than that. There's an old song from the front end of the 19th century complaining about how much has been knocked down or just disappeared. https://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/song-midis/I_Cant_Find_Brummagem.htm Even the place names aren't based on what the...

I never heard of him with the "Norway" name before although I (re)read "On the beach" with a group a few months back. If you're working through everything, this might be of interest. https://www.nevilshute.org/biblio.php

Depending on how you define London, I would have said 4 or 5. On the other hand, Liverpool don't have a cricket team (they have to share with Manchester). To stay up Villa have to win 5 from 6 games but Swansea are now irrelevant - The next three are Norwich, Sunderland, and Newcastle although...

As I remember things all of the non-fiction was in reference and not available to borrow but I've heard different things at different times. Is this something that has changed over time or did it just depend on what library you used?

As I remember it, you had to belong to a particular library to take books out, so you'd have a set of cards for the closest libraries and the Central library. The local ones didn't have that many books but they seemed to hold on to them longer and there'd be a different selection in each local...