Home Blogs & Comment Birmingham Columnists Chris Upton

Birmingham connection to Charles' birthday portrait

To mark his 50th birthday, as I recall, the Prince of Wales hired Aston Manor Transport Museum for his party, as unexpected a decision as it was doubtless a welcome one for those invited. Read

What not to wear to a Leonard Cohen concert

How does one dress for a concert? For a classical performance the choice is relatively straight-forward. One dresses exactly like the conductor - black for the man and even more black for the woman. Read

Graveyard jinks nothing new

What is there to do in a graveyard ? One possibility is to lie very quietly, and enjoy the daisies from above, or push them up from below. Read

Climbing peer league table

Tomorrow I’m giving a paper at an academic conference. The subject matter - the medical provision at the Asylum of the Infant Poor in Birmingham - need not concern us, not this week, anyway. Read

Tricky issue of childcare

Childcare is as tricky a part of parenting as potty training. What to do with the new arrival for the first five years before the primary school takes over ? I was lucky (in the 1950s) to have a nursery school attached to my local junior and infant, and by the time I’d reached the age of five I could hang up my coat on a peg, find my way home in the smog, and hide my school dinner behind the dining-hall curtain. Read

There’s nothing new about inter-religious dialogue

The other night I was crossing the Moseley Road and making my way to my local in Balsall Heath, when a car slowed down next to me and one of the passengers shouted out of the window: “You Jewish b*****d”. Read

Flying in the face of common sense

A while ago now, and possibly never at all, a chap called Icarus borrowed a pair of wings off his father and flew up into the sky. The Greek legend tells how Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax which held the feathers together melted, and Icarus crashed back to earth. It was a wise and perceptive story about the limits of human aspiration, and of knowing one’s limits. Read

Evaporating shares in a delusion

I’ve never seen myself as a share-holder. When the Iron Lady was privatising the public utilities back in the 1980s – what Harold Macmillan described as “selling the family silver” – I stood superciliously aloof, refusing to listen to anything Sid was telling me. I always thought that Mrs Thatcher’s vision of a share-owning democracy was a piece of self-delusion, since most of those who grabbed the newly released shares from British Gas and BT flogged them as soon as they had doubled in value. Read

Oaths flying at the first ever Birmingham elections

On Boxing Day 1838, the people of Birmingham (or those who could vote anyway) elected their first ever town council. Read

When hymn writers give the words holy the wrong meaning

The Nature Centre at Cannon Hill Park used to be a zoo. There’s a subtle difference – not entirely clear to me – between a nature centre, a zoo and a wildlife park. Read

The spin of turning a cut into an improvement

I’m standing in a queue at my bank in Bullring. Under the Data Protection Act I’m not at liberty to disclose which bank this is, or even whether it’s a bank that still looks like a building society. The important thing here is one of those notices they stick on the glass to prevent you getting a clear view of the cashier. Read

They’re only words but it depends how you use them

Postmodernist historians (I vowed I would never start a sentence, let alone a column, with the word ‘postmodernist’, but there we are) reckon that we cannot learn anything meaningful from old documents. All we can discover is the different way people use words. Read

We’ve found comfort with our housing bread and butter

The people in the middle always get missed out. Read

Singing from the same hymn and err sheet

The Nature Centre at Cannon Hill Park used to be a zoo. There’s a subtle difference – not entirely clear to me – between a nature centre, a zoo and a wildlife park. Something to do with where the animals come from, if they’re behind bars or not, and whether they’re allowed to detach your windscreen wipers. Read

The pure hell of mucking about with historic leather

Recycling is a complicated business, and some (most) of our neighbours have not got to grips with it. They don’t realise - silly them - that the blue box goes out when the Sun is in Aquarius, and there’s an “r” in the month, whereas the green bag goes out on the first Tuesday after the third Sunday after the new moon. It’s really perfectly straightforward if you have an astrolabe. Read

Not the best time to pop out for a couple of pintsI

It’s 12.30 am and I’m at the all-night garage, queuing for milk. This would never happen if I didn’t put off buying the stuff until the last moment and forgetting at various points in-between. Read

Keeping your head when all around are losing theirs

Come over here, Bill. The King of England's climbing out of the window !" I have to take you back three centuries and more to put this remark in context. Read

Stratford House and 400 years of miracles

Stratford House sits almost on the middle ring road, between blocks of social housing and furniture superstores, as if it nodded off sometime in the late 16th Century and woke up in 2008. Read

Erupting into a bout of deja vu - and common sense

The sobering side of being a historian is that rarely does one come across anything new under the sun. Indeed, one good reason for never setting up a thinktank of historians – an idea mooted a few months back – is that they would inevitably pour cold water on any new idea. Read

Italian? Sorry mate - it's all Greek to me

We have always found it more difficult at Newman to persuade English students to spend a term abroad than to attract the Europeans (or the Japanese, for that matter) in the opposite direction. It’s the language thing, of course. Any German, Polish or Dutch student will be incomparably more confident in the English tongue, than an English student nervously stepping off at the deep end in Milan or Frankfurt. Read

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