Home Blogs & Comment Birmingham Columnists Chris Upton

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

Fascinating fascinators of an old fashioned order

I can say with some confidence that last week was a very good week for fascinators. I had no idea what a fascinator was until I stumbled across the TV coverage of Ascot. A sporting event, it's supposed to be, but one in which the horses play decidedly second fiddle (a violin-playing horse, now that would be something) to the fashionistas. Read

Why memory lane is an essential throughfare

Last week I took a group of secondary teachers on a kind of history/geography walk around central Birmingham. Newman runs an inset course for teachers on citizenship, an element of which is how (and by and for whom) cities are run, and the role of the citizen in that process. Read

Many stories behind the Rotunda's many storeys

I want to give a plug to a movie. The only problem (two problems, actually) is (or are) that you may not get to see the film. There's a book of the film too, but you may not be able to buy that either. But if anything will get the powers that be to screen it, and get the book into the bookshops, this will. Read

A long and proud history of media underkill

Call me paranoid, but it's my distinct impression that the Midlands never gets a fair crack of the media whip. Read

All at once I came upon bluebells

The connection with the Romantic poets is slight. I was driving and not wandering; nor was I lonely since my mother was in the passenger seat. Read

Sunday newspaper ritual hits the bin

When friends from Wolverhampton used to come over to visit me at university (most of them having chosen the "earnings today" route to personal advancement, rather than a degree in Classics with its prospect of no earnings at any point), they used to tease me about what they called my "paper round". Read

A very early visitor to Birmingham

Let me introduce you to John Grace. Grace was a freelance preacher in the Middle Ages, and by all accounts he was pretty good at it. Crowds flocked to hear his words, despite (or because of) the fact that they were unorthodox in sentiment and dangerous in doctrine. Read

Downsizing in the quest for perfection

Atale from Norse mythology, translated from the Elder Edda (or possibly made up) by Dr Chris Upton... Read

Using Virgil to predict an apocalypse

Bella, horrida bella, Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. Read

The history of the bed is keeping me awake at night

No one, at least to my knowledge, has yet written a history of the bed. I can see an obvious bestseller here, a spot on Richard & Judy, serialisation in The News of the World, and a late-night reading on the BBC. A bed book at bedtime. Read

Comforting sound of the Ripon wakeman

I have always felt the appeal of places which seem to have fallen asleep centuries ago and then woken up, confused and alarmed, in the 21st Century. Read

A dangerous accident waiting to happen

On a regular basis on my way up New Street I get asked whether I have had an accident recently. This makes me wonder if I look (or walk) as if I've had an accident. Read

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