Birmingham

 

There’s something familiar about Edgbaston. After Trent Bridge, there aren’t many grounds where I’ve spent more time hanging around the media centre. During the Commonwealth Games, I secured a volunteer post that put me near the centre of the action. Two weeks absorbed not just in cricket, but in the city of Birmingham and the other sports going on alongside.

Until this year, the biggest challenge was always finding the right exit from New Street Station to catch the bus. It took a mechanical bull named Ozzy to finally guide me out.

Today, I wanted to revisit a bit of Birmingham I hadn’t seen in a while. Now that the Commonwealth Games are long gone, the city feels strangely empty.

Victoria Square remains one of those grand Victorian spaces, its architecture borrowing from even grander empires. There’s a touch of Turin or Milan in the Council offices, and something of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the town hall next door.

By that time, Birmingham was a city of big industry, the “Workshop of the World.” The very heart of the British Empire, which, unlike the Roman Empire that inspired its buildings, travelled the globe and said, “That’s ours now.”

They missed the point of the Roman Empire, which, while it expanded under military force, absorbed the cultures along the way. The Victorians, by contrast, preached: be more like us.

When the Empire collapsed, many from around the world said, okay, we’ll help you rebuild after the Second World War— and then we’ll stay.

That made the Commonwealth Games feel like a fitting choice for Birmingham. Many of the communities were already represented here.

It’s what makes Birmingham feel different. You only have to walk down New Street and there is so much going on. Today a Ratha Yatra chariot was making a slow procession, part of the yearly celebration. It added colour and friendly, happy song to an otherwise dull high street.

Birmingham is special like that. There are always people highlighting their spiritual beliefs or pointing out the injustices going on in the world. I like that. It makes the place feel lived in, and it makes the place feel alive.

I read people who live closer to Birmingham, Alabama, spouting off nonsense about there being no-go areas in Birmingham. I’ve been to a few parts, and I have never felt that. I’ve felt like I was in a different place to my provincial background, but that has never been a problem.

Perhaps there are no-go areas for bigoted racists.

The Commonwealth Games were staged, in part, to try and change perceptions of the city — with its distinctive accent and industrial, shabby past. But it’s nothing like that. It’s a city constantly evolving, even if some of the outskirts have seen better days. They’ll no doubt be gentrified in years to come, tidied up if HS2 ever gets that far.

One of the schools I worked at took their GCSE Geography students to Birmingham to look at the urban regeneration before the Games. It was interesting to see the repurposed buildings and a place looking towards the future, but respecting its past.

It was the same school, and the same department, that sent me the email to say I had got the gig as a media volunteer at Edgbaston for the duration of the competition. It was less than a week after my grandma had died, and it was the type of news I needed.

She died suddenly one Sunday morning and never got to hear the news. She had given me the money to go to my first Test match at Trent Bridge. Her parents both loved cricket — my great-grandad a league umpire, and my great-grandma who always had the cricket on in her flat. That was my first real exposure to the sport I would become obsessed with.

I celebrated that evening — or intended to. I ordered some fish and chips from the chippy up the road and planned to pick it up on the way home. The only problem with the app is it assumes you want a sauce or side with it, not just salt and vinegar.

Another problem is when the person assumes you want the mushy peas smothered all over the chips before squashing the fish on top. I don’t like mushy peas. Revoke my Nottinghamshire citizenship, I know.

It was the breaking point. I had stayed strong for my mum, and the contrasting emotions exploded over mushy peas. It feels weird that that’s where it happened, but emotions aren’t clean. They creep up on you when you least expect it.

Grief doesn’t just suddenly wrap itself up. Some people take years to get over things like that. Others seem to find their composure — sometimes out of expediency, others because they know no other way. There isn’t a right answer, of course.

There’s another loss I haven’t written about yet. A woman from Birmingham — a teacher, my mum’s best friend. She had her demons, born from trauma, and they spilled out in messy ways. But not in a way that asked to be rescued. Especially not by my mum.

Like me, she made the sort of mistakes that make people form an opinion about you, one way or another. An arranged marriage that went badly was one of the main reasons. You could tell it hurt her sons — even though I only saw them at the funeral.

I had never been to a Sikh funeral before. It was disorientating. I wanted to sit with my mum, to be a comfort, but in the temple the men and women were separated. I spent the rest of the ceremony in contemplative silence, not sure exactly what was going on.

It was someone that believed in me when I was starting out as a teaching assistant. Someone who thought they could find a girlfriend for me even.

It was another death out of nowhere. Her brother phoned my mum just as we pulled into the Tesco car park. It was a jolt out of the blue. She had recovered from a heart attack in the couple of years before but seemed on the mend.

We went to see her mum a while after the funeral. A frail old Indian woman that, as soon as we walked through the door, said, “You’ll need something to eat.”

Throughout the day she kept asking, “When are you going to get married? I need to buy a new sari.”