Spirit of Place: the Automated Car Park in the Bull Ring

Source

Today a post about a car park, specifically the automated one in the 1960s Bull Ring. You can see it in the top picture: it is behind the long pierced wall. I heard an anecdotal account that this car park was 'never' used because nobody would trust their car to the automated machinery, however I suspected that it was probably used when it was novel and then stopped being used, maybe for the reason of distrust. In short succession I have found a published account of what happened and urbex-style photos of the abandoned car park:

MORE than 40 years ago the Bull Ring shopping centre announced a revolution in car parking.

Owners said they had developed a sophisticated automated system which would see the end of scratched wheel rims and craning your neck as you reversed your vehicle into tight spaces.

Heralded as ‘the future in car parking’ the 1964 scheme, considered the height of high tech at the time, featured a concrete rolling block, which could move Ford Anglias and Austin 1100s into a space – after a fleet of attendants manually pushed the vehicles into a bay.

But – despite the developers’ high hopes – the scheme only lasted for three days.

And the concrete rollers which could have blazed a trail for car parking, if they had worked, were finally demolished when the shopping centre was rebuilt in the early 2000s. Source

So it seems the mechanism didn't work properly and I have also read elsewhere that it was too slow and people wouldn't wait. The article this quote comes from is about the Cube, but there is another automated system, in whatever Beetham Tower is called this week. True to form, it has stopped working and people's cars were trapped inside. You can see a bit of the Bull Ring system working in the video below.

I was delighted to find these pictures of the interior, which I think were taken in the nineties. I am ashamed to say I didn't make a note of where they came from, so if they are yours, please leave a comment or contact me and I will happily attribute or remove them.

My Lent Book

As is my custom, ruthlessly stolen from the Christians, once again I have taken up a book to feed me during the Lent I am not keeping. As we know, we witches aim to recreate a mythical golden age of feasting and joy in which misery and abnegation didn't happen - Z Budapest writes about this at length. The book I have taken this year is Sex and Rockets - the Occult World of Jack Parsons. I have only just started it and am afraid its main effect on me so far is to make me jealous that he could be in on the early years of a new technology, communicate with big names in the field, and pick and choose what research jobs he took - all completely self taught and with no degree at all. Parsons' field of work also seems to have been incredibly tolerant of eccentricity, and he would recite Crowley's Hymn to Pan from memory when a new rocket was being set off:

Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!
Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,
On a milk-white ass, come over the sea
To me, to me!
Come with Apollo in bridal dress
(Shepherdess and pythoness)
Come with Artemis, silken shod,
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful god,
In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount,
The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!
Dip the purple of passionate prayer
In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,
The soul that startles in eyes of blue
To watch thy wantonness weeping through
The tangled grove, the gnarled bole
Of the living tree that is spirit and soul
And body and brain — come over the sea,
(Io Pan! Io Pan!)
Devil or god, to me, to me,
My man! my man!
Come with trumpets sounding shrill
Over the hill!
Come with drums low muttering
From the spring!
Come with flute and come with pipe!
Am I not ripe?
I, who wait and writhe and wrestle
With air that hath no boughs to nestle
My body, weary of empty clasp,
Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp —
Come, O come!
I am numb
With the lonely lust of devildom.
Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,
All-devourer, all-begetter;
Give me the sign of the Open Eye,
And the token erect of thorny thigh,
And the word of madness and mystery,
O Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan,
I am a man:
Do as thou wilt, as a great god can,
O Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! I am awake
In the grip of the snake.
The eagle slashes with beak and claw;
The gods withdraw:
The great beasts come. Io Pan! I am borne
To death on the horn
Of the Unicorn.
I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!
I am thy mate, I am thy man,
Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, Maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

What I Did on my Holiday

I have had a holiday. And it has been a genuine holiday, in the sense of returning to the centre and recreating.
My mother is still alive and finally in the home which has been beckoning for the past decade. She has been incredibly difficult and made a huge number of people's lives difficult, but then this is her standard effect. It does mean that I have taken possession of what is left of the family photos - she threw out most of my dad's side of the family - and have completed scanning them. The photo which illustrates this post is of my dad, and there can surely be no doubt who I take after. 😋
I have had various dreary health appointments but the overriding theme has been of clearing out. I have taken numerous bags of stuff to a charity shop and there is still some to go. As we know cleaning the house or getting rid of unwanted stuff is a very ancient magic and in my experience usually presages progress.
As always at these times the tarot has leapt into my hand again and revealed new meanings and depths. Particularly of the court cards, which in common with so many others, I have always found difficult.
I have an interview for another job on 11th, I am rather wary because it is with my current employer and they're hopeless but we'll see. A friend commented that everywhere I go I meet idiots who need a good hard slap and I can only think that this must be my geas. It's not something which gives me any pleasure, but it seems like nobody else will do it (they're usually quite happy to sit around moaning though). I, on the other hand, seize this task and am beginning to realise that I am faced with these tasks because I will do them. Perhaps I wasn't so wrong in my misspent youth when I wanted to be a monastic, because the word comes from monos in the sense of being alone but is also understood to mean a single focus on the one thing necessary. I don't go exactly looking for trouble but my attention is always drawn to my obligation to be me and with that comes having to deal with things.

Spirit of Place: Birmingham in 1965

These are stills from the 1965 film in the Look at Life series called Down Town. It sings the praises of rebuilt towns and cities and particularly can't get enough of Coventry (lol). Such short-sightedness, and a mere four decades later much of what you see here was demolished. Personally I preferred the Bull Ring shown here and had an experience in Manzoni Gardens with a bus driver. I see that I have previously written about the Bull sculptures (one of which you can see in the bottom picture) here.

And finally a classic depiction of Birmingham by Spitting Image, which I know will entertain Inexplicable.

The Family in the Tarot

It has literally just struck me that there are very few families depicted in the RWS tarot, surprisingly few since the family continues to be the setting in which most people live. The family continues to be the setting for most abuse and violence (you cynic, Hound), since some families are nuclear in the sense of fission.
I am only able to identify two cards which depict actual families  and they are in the top row of the picture. My own opinion is that both of these families are dysfunctional - the 10 of Pentacles one because nobody is listening to each other, and the 10 of Cups one because it is the sort of ideal which doesn't happen in real life. The latter one reminds me of some family friends of ours where the mother didn't bother to tell her four daughters that she had had breast cancer when they were small, until the eldest daughter found a breast lump and died very shortly afterwards.
The cards in the lower row depict family events to my eyes  and it is interesting how they are mostly negative events. I have put the Lovers there because I think of it as the interfering mother in law card, the way it is depicted in the Marseille deck. You will see that I have not included the six of Cups because, despite what anyone says, I still think that card refers to child abuse.
Luckily these days there is a tendency away from traditional family towards a more 'tribe' - based way of living. Perhaps Pam depicted this coming change in the minors of her deck - I wouldn't quite say foretold, but I would say that she perhaps unintentionally depicted the future. I say in the minors, because Waite dictated the majors, and they were in turn dictated in large part by the existing majors. The court cards also in my opinion don't have the intention of showing a family - in my opinion the point is to show the mediaeval court.
I do have a theory as to why there is so little depiction of family in the tarot - which is that in the game which was the origin of the deck the point was about scoring tricks so that the relationships shown are more about actions or even civil contracts, rather than about the religiously-motivated sacramental relationships. But of course I wouldn't go to the stake for this opinion.
I suspect that Pam would have been working within the Golden Dawn correspondences (including initiatory] for the tarot, which are about relationship with the universe rather than earthly commerce or love.
Have a soundtrack... Predictable I know.

Graveyards Again

Two posts in one day and both about graveyards!
I was delighted at Warstone Lane to see that the catacombs, which have been tending towards collapse for ages, are in the process of repair. The rest of the graveyard is also being tidied up. I am of course less happy to see that a number of the gravestones have obviously failed the 'shove test' and have been laid down flat to stop them killing people, since this reduces the likelihood that I will be killed by a falling gravestone.
I have also discovered a new titbit of information about the graveyard which was dug up to build the ICC. I knew of course that it was huge and completely undocumented. I did not know that bones from the graveyard had a tendency to surface in the playground of the school next to the Catholic church there! This presents a wonderful image of a boy going in from playtime saying, 'Miss, look what I've found'...

Have a Witchy New Year

Of course I am celebrating the new year with the womanly arts of witchcraft. I did some clothes repairs and sauntered over to the Jewellery Quarter to sacrifice some black sesame seeds in Warstone Lane cemetery. Sadly the needs of witches are rarely considered in town planning and the convenient Park Street cemetery is boarded up for HS2. On the other hand, how I laughed when I found the brand of black sesame seeds in the Chinese supermarket was Honor.
I have enjoyed baby sitting a cat but he is going back to his normal human early because the human is not helping me in a particular problem so I am not feeling the need to do him any favours and find myself out of pocket on cat litter!
As for what the problem is, well of course despite being one of the more obvious homosexual men you could wish to meet I am a c*nt magnet so am in the early stages of a grievance already in my new workplace and of course am finding allies!