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Birmingham Blues
Friday, January 13th, 2012 05:19 pmI visited Birmingham having high hopes of buying some DM boots, preferably not in black. Didn't see any so will be venturing online and hoping I choose the correct size. Bought a Gap T-shirt, some Jellybeans (they've replaced the lever things with little shovelly things, and removed the Ice Cream flavours, boo) and some sushi.
On the train towards Birmingham I was sat across the aisle from two middle-aged men on their way to a business meeting. One of the men was very upper-middle-class looking and sounding, the other was more a standard guy in a suit. UMC guy was talking about how he had no plans to see The Iron Lady, he was definitely not a Thatcher admirer, even though not seeing the film meant missing out on seeing Meryl Streep. Other Guy looked rather crestfallen at this anti-Thatcher revelation, and talked about how she did this or that and you can't argue it wasn't successful. UMC guy then started talking about watching TV news reporting of the Leveson Inquiry, and what a horrible man Richard Desmond was, I think Other Guy was a secret Daily Express reader cos he was not impressed by the direction of the conversation.
I must have been in a train carriage near the end, because when I got off at New Street I was near the signage for the exit to Victoria Square, so I thought that would be a good opportunity to visit the da Vinci exhibition at BMAG, which opened today. I'd only heard about it a couple of days ago so I wasn't sure if I'd be visiting, especially given the queues there'd been for the Staffordshire Hoard, but the queue this time was officially half an hour and actually more like 20 minutes at 11am. The pictures - mostly studies da Vinci made for paintings, anatomy drawings - are wonderful, very detailed, and accompanied in many cases by his famous mirror-writing. There's also lots of stuff alongside about the materials he used, and the papers. There's only ten items in a single room, but well worth a visit, to see with one's own eyes the works of one of the greatest creative minds of Western civilisation is too awesome to miss.
I bought some da Vinci postcards from the giftshop, and a three-colour pen, which seems to have vanished :( I came back into the main shopping area via New Street, I went in Shared Earth, which is undergoing a liquidation sale - sad, but I was surprised it had lasted this long. There were two women in there accompanied by a guide dog, a beautiful creature apparently called Rupert-No who had to sniff everything on display within nose height.
I stopped at the food court for lunch, but for a veggie taco bowl rather than my usual jacket potato, as I had a jacket potato for dinner last night. Waterstones had lots of children's Christmas books on sale, and I was tempted by a pop-up book about How Santa Works, which tells how the elves read letters from children and check on a computer to see if the children have been good, and how after the party Santa throws for his elves on Christmas Day, everyone sleeps until the spring. However, I managed to resist this, and a copy of That's Not My Puppy - if I start buying books for Bean every time I visit Waterstones, she's going to need a separate library as well as a warehouse to store all her toys.
As well as looking online for DMs I might also look for soaps. I found out that Lush have moved from Corporation Street to somewhere else I didn't see, and The Body Shop only had the same stuff they always have in. I prefer soaps to shower gels, will see what Lush have on their online store but am also interested in looking up some natural ingredients soaps, can't remember if it was Oxfam or Greenpeace or someone else but a while back one of the major charities used to sell a big box of assorted cubes of soap made with olive oil, sage, rosemary etc. Something seasonal, preferably.
On the train towards Birmingham I was sat across the aisle from two middle-aged men on their way to a business meeting. One of the men was very upper-middle-class looking and sounding, the other was more a standard guy in a suit. UMC guy was talking about how he had no plans to see The Iron Lady, he was definitely not a Thatcher admirer, even though not seeing the film meant missing out on seeing Meryl Streep. Other Guy looked rather crestfallen at this anti-Thatcher revelation, and talked about how she did this or that and you can't argue it wasn't successful. UMC guy then started talking about watching TV news reporting of the Leveson Inquiry, and what a horrible man Richard Desmond was, I think Other Guy was a secret Daily Express reader cos he was not impressed by the direction of the conversation.
I must have been in a train carriage near the end, because when I got off at New Street I was near the signage for the exit to Victoria Square, so I thought that would be a good opportunity to visit the da Vinci exhibition at BMAG, which opened today. I'd only heard about it a couple of days ago so I wasn't sure if I'd be visiting, especially given the queues there'd been for the Staffordshire Hoard, but the queue this time was officially half an hour and actually more like 20 minutes at 11am. The pictures - mostly studies da Vinci made for paintings, anatomy drawings - are wonderful, very detailed, and accompanied in many cases by his famous mirror-writing. There's also lots of stuff alongside about the materials he used, and the papers. There's only ten items in a single room, but well worth a visit, to see with one's own eyes the works of one of the greatest creative minds of Western civilisation is too awesome to miss.
I bought some da Vinci postcards from the giftshop, and a three-colour pen, which seems to have vanished :( I came back into the main shopping area via New Street, I went in Shared Earth, which is undergoing a liquidation sale - sad, but I was surprised it had lasted this long. There were two women in there accompanied by a guide dog, a beautiful creature apparently called Rupert-No who had to sniff everything on display within nose height.
I stopped at the food court for lunch, but for a veggie taco bowl rather than my usual jacket potato, as I had a jacket potato for dinner last night. Waterstones had lots of children's Christmas books on sale, and I was tempted by a pop-up book about How Santa Works, which tells how the elves read letters from children and check on a computer to see if the children have been good, and how after the party Santa throws for his elves on Christmas Day, everyone sleeps until the spring. However, I managed to resist this, and a copy of That's Not My Puppy - if I start buying books for Bean every time I visit Waterstones, she's going to need a separate library as well as a warehouse to store all her toys.
As well as looking online for DMs I might also look for soaps. I found out that Lush have moved from Corporation Street to somewhere else I didn't see, and The Body Shop only had the same stuff they always have in. I prefer soaps to shower gels, will see what Lush have on their online store but am also interested in looking up some natural ingredients soaps, can't remember if it was Oxfam or Greenpeace or someone else but a while back one of the major charities used to sell a big box of assorted cubes of soap made with olive oil, sage, rosemary etc. Something seasonal, preferably.
