It was mid-week, the cupboard was bare and the troops on the domestic front needed a morale boost. I did the honourable dad thing: I said I would pick up fish and chips on the way home.
Not only that, I offered to pay for them. The children’s pocket money, I declared, was safe, although it was, of course, only theoretically safe because we don’t give them pocket money.
Our eldest daughter gets a modest allowance from her mother to buy clothes and girl stuff – and when I say modest, boy, do I mean modest.
Her younger sibling pretty much fends for herself. I think children should be brought up without any false sense of hope. Life’s tough, get used to it.
I made it through the rush-hour slog to the chippy in Francis Road, Ladywood, an area of the city not renowned for its quality dining options or accessibility.
But it’s been this way for several years now; when the urge for fish and chips has arisen, it is to Francis Road that I have headed because this was the home of the Great British Eatery.
I gave my order, tickled pink having just received a text to say one of our daughters was at a friend’s house and wouldn’t need feeding. I felt so flush I ordered a portion of deep-fried black pudding.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have ordered an extra haddock and chips. For the plug was about to be pulled on the Great British Eatery (GBE). This was to be our last fish supper.
As is reported elsewhere, the GBE closed last Friday, wiped off the take-away landscape by a combination of flawed business judgment and criminal conniving.
It always baffled me why Conrad Brunton and Andy Insley opted to open at Broadway Plaza. There was no on-street parking and limited passing trade. The rents were huge, cripplingly so for an independent food outlet.
The duo must have heard the same voices as Kevin Costner in the movie Field Of Dreams and believed the manta: “If you build it, they will come.”
To paraphrase the seer-like character played by James Earl Jones: “They’ll come to Ladywood (Iowa) for reasons they can’t even fathom.”
And they did. People like me made mad detours across the city, through interminable traffic jams, to buy the best fish and chips in town.
There are plenty of chippies within a five-minute drive of my home but I would make a 45-minute round trip to GBE because what they did, as far as I am aware, was peerless in Birmingham.
(Small confession: I have yet to visit the legendary Bedders in Sheldon but with this small proviso would happily crown GBE as the best fish and chip shop in the city.)
Brunton and Insley’s business was also undermined from within by old school friends. Two financial supporters – one a partner, the other a backer – carried on a private sideline in international share fraud and were subsequently banged up.
Brunton and Insley were blameless but the fraud inquiry further helped to derail what was always a fragile commercial enterprise.