Midland Heart Sutra: Frankley Services to Wythall

Spending time in a motorway service station, early on the morning of a clocks-back timeshift, without a car to return to or an urgent need to go anywhere, is a slightly disorientating, almost hallucinatory experience.

In the cafe, a face large than any human face has any right to be; in racks, oversized soft toys with [...]

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‘Frankley, my dear…’ Merry Hill to M5

Pic: Merry Hill Zen garden
I wandered about the Merry Hill Centre for a bit, feeling incongruous in my hiking gear – despite the cold day, some customers were wearing shorts. It is an impressive place, one of the largest shopping malls in Europe. It was a late 80s example of privately-funded regeneration – ‘an attractive [...]

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Good Delph: Stourbridge to Merry Hill

The news this morning included an item about the sound made by stars – some unimaginable humming in the vastness of space. Rays from our own astral body, the sun, were reaching the places I passed through today making a kind of late pseudosummer, as I moved on public transport from Lancashire to Wolverhampton; from [...]

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Enchanted Wayside

I have a nagging sense of guilt that I don’t post enough in this blog. Perhaps there are people who keep revisiting, hoping for new stuff, doomed to frequent disappointment. (If this is you, I’d suggest getting hip to RSS feeds, for instance with Google Reader – then I’ll come to you, without you having [...]

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