Weekend In Birmingham

Part One: The Cricket

I wasn’t originally supposed to be attending the T20 Finals at Edgbaston, mostly because I have very little knowledge of or interest in The Cricket. But a whole bunch of folks were going, and a couple of them couldn’t make it, and seeing as how I’m just up the line from Birmingham, they figured that the tickets should go to someone rather than just go unused.

Met up with A+K in New Street Station, then everybody else at the hotel they were staying in, and we walked to the stadium. There were shuttle bus options, but it’s not that far.

There is the usual (to my limited experience) fleet of food vendors in little stalls, though this place had some interesting combinations.

I hadn’t realised that this was the costumed rowdy stand, and it got more rowdy as the day went on. Possibly because of the beer consumption. Costumes seen included;

• A bunch of people in seagull onesies ( and one guy dressed as Eric Cantona, which is a football reference I didn’t get )
• Some stereotypical and very colourful ‘Mexicans’
• Batman, Robin, Two Face, and The Riddler (who should either have got a costume a size bigger, or worn a dance belt, or both, because nobody needed to be seeing his Little Enigma in that much detail)
• People wearing face masks of the Captain of the England Football World Cup team
• Four guys in different matching shorts/shirt/hat outfits in bright patterns (the pink outfit with flamingo silhouettes was a good one, I thought)
• A group of cavemen
• People dressed in chilli pepper costumes

You get the idea. I was dressed fairly normally for me, which I’m told is no bad thing because it makes it much harder for a few thousand people to start chanting for you to drink your pint in one go. And that happened a lot; There was a little song about it.

Something I hadn’t realized is that this wasn’t one game; This was two semi-finals followed by the final, so it ran from around midday to about 10 pm

I ended up hitting my limit of noise and crowd around the end of game two, so I said my goodbyes and left at that point, at maybe five-ish?

It took an annoyingly long time to get out of the stadium. Very slow moving crowd, only one exit, and that wasn’t labeled in any useful way; The thing that was labelled as the exit wasn’t, but the people there did point me in the right direction.

The trains back to Stafford were rammed. Stood in the vestibule at the end of the carriage for half of the trip, which would have been more pleasant had the other people there not had just enough alcohol in their systems to think that if a joke is worth making once you should make it another five times, and that singing is a good idea. In their defence, one of them did make it his mission to constantly hit  the door opening button into the carriage so that at least we got some air conditioning.

So in summary, a fun day with a slightly annoying ending.

Day Two: Birthday Canals

Trust me, it makes sense in context.

Day Two, Sunday, was Alex’s birthday & was the original planned day for me to come down to Birmingham; Saturday cricket was a very last minute add-on.

The train, sadly, was packed again. I’ve clearly become accustomed to midweek services and off-peak trips to less popular destinations (Like Euston), but the morning train to Birmingham was bad.

20+ people & their luggage crammed into the vestibule bad.

Someone got worried that their ticket was with the other half of their group, but relaxed when it was pointed out that there was no chance of a ticket inspector getting through the train. As it turned out, they had the barriers open at Birmingham so I could have saved myself the cost of the ticket.

Apparently there were cancellations of trains going to the airport and so everyone crowded onto the earlier trains which weren’t canceled. But which also weren’t very long.

But I got to Birmingham in the end and joined people for some coffee in the station Wetherspoons, which I’m sure isn’t really called the “Cancelled Service” but as far as I’m concerned it is.

It was Alex’s birthday and he wanted to go and look at the canals, so that’s what we did. Then we saw a little tour boat on the canal, spotted that it started and stopped nearby, and that within the next half hour there would be a surprisingly reasonably priced one hour tour of the Birmingham canal network.

So that’s what we did, and it was good fun. It wasn’t one of those tours where they talk about the entirety of the city, or even the entirety of what you can see from the boat; this was purely canals, canal history, canal structures, and buildings having some relevance to the aforementioned canals. One of which had a pub in it so we went there and watched even more cricket.

Well, some of us did; The rest didn’t really pay attention and just chatted.

Things sort of turned into a meandering pub crawl after that. There was a very historical pub which was pointed out during the boat tour, so we went there and had a drink.

Then there was a much more Australian pub immediately across the canal, though we did also stop off on a bench which I think was the cover of a Black Sabbath album, in order to have a photo taken. There’s a thing where you scan a QR code and a camera across the street takes the picture and emails it to you, but I don’t have a copy of the picture.

We had a couple of drinks on the balcony and it was very pleasant, but then we moved on slightly after a South African woman sort of associated herself with our group and talked a lot about killing people. Possibly drunk, possibly unmedicated, possibly both; it’s hard to tell.

The last location of the evening, for me at least, was a Wetherspoons, where maybe half of the World Cup final was watched? I saw the halftime show, and I think left slightly after that, because I had a train to catch. And I actually got a seat on the damn thing this time.