I'm walking down the street having just come out of chapel. I pass the ironmongers with tin baths hanging outside and then remind myself I need a mattock like the one in the tool shop.The greengrocer waves to me as I descend the blue brick steps to a canal wharf where a pretty girl comes out from a corrugated iron hut to greet me, our conversation gently drifting from canal boat painting to other things. It's very warm, so I feel obliged to drop into the cool shadows of the public bar of the Bottle & Glass public house, where another delightful girl pulls me a pint of mild and furnishes me with a cheese and onion cob.
Have I gone to some kind of Unmitigated Heaven? In a way yes. I'm in the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, and I urge you to engage with the rigours of the West Midland motorway system and innumerable traffic lights and roundabouts in order to pay it a visit. You won't be disappointed.
7 comments:
Sounds good. You'd probably enjoy Blists Hill - http://bitaboutbritain.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/blists-hill-victorian-town.html
I visited Blists Hill yesterday on the same mission, and you're right Mike, I found it very enjoyable. I may do a post about it later.
Ah a tin bath. Takes me back to the Grandfather's back kitchen, scorching water from the copper, and hard red industrial soap that took no prisoners. Then up to bed with the Suba Seal to keep me warm in the I heated bedroom, casements rattling from the winds blowing across the Lincolnshire marshes. Those were the days.
That should have been 'unheated bedroom', but the iPad knows nothing of rooms that are unheated, and made a silent 'correction'.
Now I HAVE to go there..a pint of mild? not your £6.50/pint 'craft' beer is it? No I'm sure it's not. If you're quick you can nip into the Birmingham Museum and Art gallery on the way and see the incomparable Rowland Emett exhibition before it closes on 21st September.
I think the pint of mild was £3.50 Jon, the cheese and onion cob £2. Don't know if I'll be able be Tottering over to the Emett. Dammit.
I saw the Far Tottering and Oyster Bay Railway for you...and you drank the mild for me!
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