My Lent Book

Lent began for the Christians on the 22nd and in the practice I have stolen from them I have once again selected a Lent book. This is the practice as it appears in the Rule of St Benedict:

During the days of Lent, they should be free in the morning to read until the third hour, after which they will work at their assigned tasks until the end of the tenth hour. During this time of Lent each one is to receive a book from the library, and is to read the whole of it straight through. These books are to be distributed at the beginning of Lent. Above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so apathetic as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others. Source

Every year I choose a book purely because I want to read it and it's unsuitable as a Lent book. This year it's a children's book of solve it yourself mysteries with fascinating pictures to get lost in. Because I can.

Spirit of Place: Another altered sign & 'Rentboys' Corner

I'm not in the habit of reblogging my posts, but this is a post I first published in August 2015. I'm reblogging it to make it more prominent because some twat flagged it to Blogger for having adult content. 

I was ashamed, after my last post on altered street names, to find on Flickr that another street name, which is both near two of the previous ones & near my broom parking, is fairly routinely altered. I'm also ashamed to say I've never seen it altered to Bent St, & in fact made a point of wandering up & down it today, only to find all the signs say Kent St. I particularly like the older-style one, with another little sign added underneath for the addition of a new-fangled postcode.

Kent St is probably best known for being the site of the original municipal baths - I mean of the sort where you would actually go for a bath & would take your washing there too. In more recent days it forms part of the gay 'village', although I would venture to comment that the alteration doesn't compare to (C)anal St in Manchester.

It has also been host to the famous (at least in gay circles) Rentboys' Corner, which the internet has sadly left abandoned. That said, imagine my joy, when looking online for reminiscences of the corner, to find the escort whose picture adorns this post. It was taken in the courtyard of the building I live in!

Time Travel: Swallow Street

I'm not in the habit of reblogging my posts, but this is a post I first published in October 2016. I'm reblogging it to make it more prominent because some twat flagged it to Blogger for having adult content. 

 There was me thinking that this would be a relatively simple time travel post, and you wouldn't believe the difficulty I have had getting to the bottom of this historical mystery. I have even had to resort to a hand job in the library to get to the bottom of Swallow Street - but enough with the innuendo, on with the mystery. My interest was first aroused by Brunel Street, which runs at an angle between Navigation Street and Suffolk Street Queensway; you won't discover a time travel post about that one because I've discovered that it is actually a relatively new street which appeared while Manzoni's boys were joyously going round the city centre with a bulldozer. And what started my interest in Brunel Street was that I remember it from trips to the city centre with my parents. I remember going to Allegro Music and also I remember Gino's, which I thought terribly sophisticated at the time. Anyway, I hadn't noticed then that Brunel Street intersects with a street called Swallow Street which runs between Suffolk Street Queensway and Hill Street. It is not an unsubstantial street by any means; in fact I think I had always assumed that it was one of those empty patches of land left over in the post-war rebuilding of the city, but it is only recently that I noticed it has a proper street name.

Swallow Street on the surface seemed to have gone back a long time without leaving any trace of itself, for some reason. It appears on the 1913 Ordnance Survey map of the city centre, where the characteristic pictures of buildings show that there were some at each end, but it didn't look like one of those tiny passages of higgledy-piggledy slums which formerly marked the city centre, so it must have left some trace of itself. First I looked on the internet. There was no history whatsoever. Nothing. Not even someone whose family emigrated to Nova Scotia (or wherever) in 1904 and whose great great grandmother was born above above a nailmaker's in Swallow Street. Literally the only historical reference was the picture from the 1960s which illustrates this post, and which made me think that really there should have been some history for the street, since it looked as if businesses were operated from the houses.

I turned to my 1967-68 Kelly's Directory and found only two entries for Swallow Street:

Here is entrance to Queen's College ch[a]mbers

Stanford & Mann Ltd. st[a]t[io]n[e]rs

I didn't see this almost complete lack of information as discouraging. I joined up the pieces by assuming that everything in the road except the stationers and Queen's College Chambers had been demolished in between the photo being taken and my Kelly's being published. Of course Queen's College Chambers is still there although its address is given as Paradise Street and it is prestigious apartments; it started off as a medical school in 1828 and was one of the colleges which made up the University of Birmingham. The present theological college called the Queen's Foundation was near there too.

I naively thought that it would be simple to find out the historical residents of Swallow Street. I naively thought that some trace of them would have been left in previous Kelly's Directories. I was naturally surprised on arbitrarily choosing the 1930 one in the library to find there was no record of Swallow Street at all. Nothing. It was bizarre that the street was there on the map of 1913, had houses standing in the early 1960s, apparently inhabited by at least one business in 1968 and yet had left no trace in Kelly's at all. I really began to think that I had imagined the street's existence as I went through successive Kelly's and still found absolutely nothing.

The earliest reference in a Kelly's Directory I could find was in 1962, where there were at least a couple of businesses:

12 O'Higgins and Secondini, tailors.

12 Docker F. dance studio

28 Cutler Bob Ltd. turf comm[i]ss[io]n[ing] ag[en]ts

All three of these businesses had vanished in the succeeding six years. There was no indication what was happening at numbers 13 - 27. Swallow Street looked as if it was determined to retain its mystery.

Then I started going through books of the city centre's history by hand (the Hound is not easily deflected when he wants to get to the bottom of a mystery), and finally found the reason for Swallow Street's elusiveness. The simple fact was that nobody noticed it or was bothered about it:

'Some of Birmingham's byways were built as access roads and had nothing more important in them than the back doors of buildings whose frontages were on more prestigious avenues. SWALLOW STREET first appears on Hanson's map of Birmingham in 1778, having been cut around 1750. It linked Hill Street with Suffolk Street and runs parallel to and to the north of Navigation Street, which it slightly pre-dates. The building of the cuttings into New Street Station divided Swallow Street in half, and steam and smoke can be seen rising [referencing the black and white picture of the street] above the bridge parapet on this bitterly cold Friday, 1 February 1963, as a train passes through the last, short, 20-yard cutting before the railway line disappears into the tunnel built by the London & North Western Railway (LNWR) and out beyond Monument Lane locomotive shed into the Black Country. Opposite the bridge, beyond the covered timber yard on the left and the elderly gentleman struggling along the snow-covered footpath, is Summer Street, which was on the same line as the present-day Brunel Street. On the right, behind the Morris LD 1-ton van, are buildings that had originally been the offices of the Inland Revenue, while Scruton's the tailor's, founded in 1931, occupies part of the rear of Queen's College Chambers. A 10hp Ford Prefect E493A of about 1952, one of Ford's last 'sit-up-and-beg' motors, which was phased out during the following year, is parked on the left. The winter of 1962-63 was particularly bad, and the snow lay from the end of December until early March. Behind the car is the West End Ballroom on the corner of Suffolk Street and Holliday Street, while coming out of Holliday Street is a Corporation Daimler CVD6 double-decker fitted with a locally-manufactured Metro-Cammell body, leaving its city terminus on the 95 service to Ladywood.' (David Harvey: Birmingham Past and Present, the City Centre Volume 1, 2002, p.16, which is also the source for the black and white picture of Swallow Street, taken facing the other way from the colour picture.)

So, mystery solved. The simple reason Swallow Street didn't appear in the directories was that nothing happened there which would have made an appearance. If it had it would have been a collection of rear entrances. Of course the situation may well have been different before the advent of the railway, but Swallow Street by the twentieth century was already a relic of a vanished past.

There remained one mystery. The colour picture shows the back of the Golden Eagle public house (in fact the 1913 map shows a P.H. on that site). The address of the Golden Eagle was actually in Hill Street, and it turns out that in the twentieth century it was an art deco 1930s rebuilding of whatever was there before. It was one of the buildings over which the conservationists tussled with the demolitionists and the demolitionists won (I believe in the 1980s) because there were apparently unrepairable structural faults with it. It turns out that the Golden Eagle was a pub known for its music and many famous bands of the time played there, but that isn't really a part of Swallow Street. Certainly, looking at the remaining pictures it looks as if it would have been a sexy art deco building, which it is a great pity is lost.

Idiots' Day

I can't believe it's taken me this long to think of a way to make dealing with idiots manageable and keep them in check so they don't dominate my life. I've started saving up idiots to deal with and when I'm forced to deal with one (for example if they ring me) I make a point of dealing with the ones I've been saving up at the same time.

So for example John Lewis (because what idiot sends a massive lorry to what is obviously a city centre flat during rush hour then is surprised when they can't park in the street?) just rang up and ended up very apologetic. When I put the phone down I went straight on and rang Sciensus and sent an email to the council* and got them all out of the way within about half an hour.

This contains the idiots and makes them more manageable. In fact my blood pressure is almost back to normal.

*Despite putting them on the idiots' list for cocking up my council tax I cannot remain permanently cross at Birmingham City Council because of the sheer annoyance they caused the gammons by using the pictured street names. I should say these names were chosen by the public to represent Birmingham values.

Her Name was Brianna Ghey

From an ancient hymn to the Goddess Inanna: 'To run, to escape, to quiet and to pacify are yours, Inana. To rove around, to rush, to rise up, to fall down and to ... a companion are yours, Inana. To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak, are yours, Inana. To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inana. To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inana. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana.'

Tarot: 'But I Don't Know What Any of the Cards Mean'

I have discovered that there is a book called The Upside-Down Bible by a chap called Symon Hill. I haven't read it but he has my instant attention by beginning an article about the book,

THREE YEARS AGO I was in a fetish club in the Midlands, leading a workshop on the Bible.

We were surrounded by a variety of interesting equipment, along with notices emphasising the importance of consent. In a small circle, I shared biblical passages with people attending a fetish-related conference in the venue.

We looked at Luke 7, in which a woman kisses Jesus’ feet. “It’s pretty kinky, isn’t it?” responded one participant. Source

What he has done is find a way of enabling people to see how people see the bible completely afresh, without any of the conditioning and assumptions created by repeated reading, commentaries, church interpretations, etc. He says he found this an absolute revelation.

I am of course familiar with how this happens and how this external clutter hides what is actually happening in the bible. The classic example of course is the sin of Sodom, which let me tell you is NOTHING to do with taking it up the bum.

I feel a similar thing happens with tarot. There are of course some major differences, the main one being that nobody will say that a particular interpretation of the tarot is divinely inspired, and the other being that a tarot reading is the classic magical act of divination so is intended to open up something in the reader or querent to enable them to see what is happening, rather than simply telling them. 

Let me be very clear that there is nothing wrong with looking up meanings in the little white book that comes with the deck, because that in itself gives you a number of possibilities that you will consciously or subconsciously choose from. But I think the frameworks we learn tarot in function exactly like the learned interpretations of the bible: they stop us seeing helpful stuff.

The closest I've got to reading tarot with people who have no knowledge of it in recent years is when Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (set of cunts) punished me by moving me to Urgent Care. Suddenly I found i was reading tarot for all my new colleagues in the Section 136 suite and it was a real eye-opener.

One guy I'd already known for years told me he'd wondered if I was a witch but was still surprised to find I read tarot (which is just as bizarre written down as it was when he said it). To my surprise I literally threw down some cards and despite having next to no knowledge, he was off doing his own reading. He could see himself and other people and brought this straight to a conclusion which was so obviously accurate for him. Yet it was also completely divorced from anything you'll read in the books that it was obvious he was a natural.

The way he did it was literally just that he recognized himself and others in the cards by the way they behaved and related. It took minutes, if that. If you want a formal name for a similar technique the Tarot School of New York teaches a technique called the Voice in the Card, where you literally just let your eye wander over a card and let some detail grab your attention. The thing was this guy had done it with the whole thing and taken it up a notch because he recognized himself and someone else.

Another difference between tarot and bible reading is that in tarot reading it is acceptable to project your own shit into the cards, because that's the point. Of course people do that with the bible as well, but that's a whole other thing. One of the theories about how tarot works is literally just that you project in a classic psychodynamic sense, onto the reading and engage with it that way. You either ignore or weigh up aspects you don't recognize.

So what I mean is if you abandon the textbook 'meanings', you're in more of a position to project your own stuff without finding your mother in there. That's a joke. If you're looking at the Empress it's a bit difficult not to see a mother of some sort.

A very good way to get to this is to describe the card without setting out to interpret it. You may think you're describing it objectively but this is actually what brings out what's happening for you.

A perfect example was another of my then colleagues who got Judgement in a quite important place in her reading. Textbook meanings can be, a judgement, an accounting, rebirth, and it can have some fairly heavy meanings around what might happen after death. None of them made any sense and she wasn't running with it so in desperation I asked her to describe the card to me. 

It was the nudity. All she could say was 'All those nude people', and this did in fact have a great meaning for her in the reading which she was then able to tell me. It was about people being exposed for who they were!

So to summarize, I wouldn't necessarily advocate never having any formal meanings because the world the tarot describes is pretty freaky, but sometimes an 'untutored' view is helpful and reveals the querent's own disposition. Ways to unlock this are to get them to describe the card or even tell a story with them. 

Because it's possible the Moon only references the anus if you know it does. 🤔