I went out with some friends this week to Birmingham to celebrate a birthday. Living in a backwater like Telford, the only places to really go out are Telford, Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton or Birmingham. Telford is, frankly, shit, so mostly we go to either Shrewsbury (also shit, but posh as well) or Wolverhampton (less shit, but not especially brilliant). Birmingham is generally too far away to make it worth the effort, and it also tended to be a bit shit as well. This time, we all took a Friday off work and got the train down at Midday.
To say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement - the place has definitely had some work done since I was there last. I know it's always had its fair share of fantastic things; old record shops; the Waterstones that fills a huge five-storey building with books; the pub that has a theatre on the first floor. However, those things aside, it always seemed a bit, well, drab. Grey. Maybe it was the weather, because sunshine really can do wondrous things, but this time the architecture looked more impressive, colours seemed brighter, and the whole place seemed cleaner and better maintained. It didn't feel like Birmingham used to feel. It felt more like London.
People thronged every street, which normally pisses me off something awful, but here it just made everything brighter and more cheerful. Me, who hates football, found it not altogether dreadful to be in a bar showing the World Cup. The bars were all playing great music, from Happy Mondays and Suede, through Blur, Pulp and Kasabian and onto Ellie Goulding and Florence + the Machine. Only a few momentary blips with Nickleback and Maroon 5 soured the soundtrack. After sampling a number of places, we settled on a relatively newly developed area on a canal full of different bars and restaurants. Fairy lights draping the bridge over the canal came on as the Sun went down. A band turned up on a small bandstand and started playing. The weather was great, the bars were full, the atmosphere was...bohemian. Don't get me wrong: I know a lot of Birmingham is shitty, I'm not that naive, even though many of my older and more cynical friends tell me often that I am. Funnily enough, my younger and slightly naive friends think I'm a bit cynical.
What I loved most of all though, is that people were fully mixing and integrating regardless of age, sex, race, anything. In certain circles, and in certain classes, at least where I live and work, there is a casual, supposedly inoffensive attitude of racism, homophobia and sexism. The kind of people that don't see anything wrong with the Daily Mail. The kind of people that hold Richard Littlejohn up as a beacon of common sense. It's not that these hateful attitudes have disappeared in our so-called enlightened society, it's just that the milder, more subversive form has become the accepted norm in too many places. I find it distasteful in the extreme, and I sometimes despair and wonder if it's everywhere. Well, it wasn't in Birmingham last Friday. Indian and Caucasian girls walked arm in arm, clearly either lovers or the very best of friends. Long-haired metalheads walked around with their blonde leggy girlfriends. Young black guys and old white men talked and laughed over the football, discussing the dissolution of Brazil's World Cup dreams. One girl was the spitting image of Scarlett Johansson - and that, I don't mind telling you, made my night. She was left to enjoy her evening with her friend without being approached by a pissed up bloke showing off to his mates. All the drunken walking arguments-against-evolution were probably back in Telford, diligently bothering anything female on two legs in sight. This is what a modern city should be.
After wading through the sinister, Daily Mail-fed attitude of non-acceptance and segregation under the surface of too many corners of my world for so long, to witness all these people simply enjoying time together made my heart feel good. And if that makes me a naive, wishy-washy, fuzzy liberal do-gooder as the Mail might label me, well then I'm proud to be exactly that.
It was however, really fucking expensive.
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