H&V 72 – December 1999.
1. You say “town” and expect everyone to know which one.
2. You tell children to “mind the horse road”.
3. You have never been to Aston Hall but you know intimately the backstreets of Weston-super-Mare.
4. You know we’ve got the finest collection of pre-Raphelite art in the world but you don’t know a) where they are and b) what a pre-Raphelite is.
5. You can get into a four hour argument about how to get from Erdington to Northfield at 3.30 on the Friday before a long weekend but can’t find Coventry on a map.
6. You always have the exact change when you board a bus.
7. You think Maypole, Druid’s Heath, Bangham Pit and Gannow sound perfectly normal names for places.
8. The new tramway should never be called anything prissy, like the Metro.
9. You believe that being able to swear at people makes you multi-lingual.
10. You’ve considered punching someone just for implying that you have a funny accent.
11. Your door has more than three locks.
12. You go to the football for the fighting in the stands. *
13. You can’t see anything strange about your three favourite bands being ELO, Black Sabbath and UB40.
14. The most frequently used part of your car is your horn.
15. You like sterilised milk.
16. You know that Birmingham, has more miles of canals than Venice.
17. You feel the need to share this information with everybody you meet.
18. You only have strong views on art when the City Council put up a three-dimensional piece of it in the City Centre.
19. You consider Sutton Park ‘the countryside’.
20. You think Cannon Hill Park is ‘nature’.
21. You could never see anything odd about Crossroads.
22. You pay £ 1,200 a month for a studio apartment the size of a walk-in wardrobe in Brindley Place and you think it’s a bargain.
23. Shopping in suburban supermarkets and shopping centres gives you a severe attack of agrophobia
24. You’ve been to Wolverhampton twice and needed Air/Sea rescue to get home both times.
25 You pay more each month to park your car in the city centre than you do in rent.
26. You listen to Ed Doolan but say you can’t stand him.
27 You own several tons of fishing tackle that have never so much as seen water.
28. You have dinner at lunchtime and go home to tea.
29. You haven’t been to the Rag Market since your mom took you there to get a school blazer in 1974 but have to date signed 37 petitions to stop it closing.
30. You haven’t heard the sound of true, absolute silence since 1977 and when you did, it terrified you.
31. You go to Broad Street and pay £3 without blinking for a beer that cost the bar 28p.
32. You believe that Drucker’s Wiener pattiserie was invented for you,
33. You don’t take fashion seriously.
35. Being truly alone makes you nervous.
36. You spend the waking hours complaining about Birmingham Cable and Travel West Midlands.
36. You moaned about the cost of the NEC, ICC, NIA and Symphony Hall.
37. You tell everybody you meet that Bill Clinton and the Eurovision Song Contest came here because of the vision of the city council.
38. You regard Malcolm Boyden as a sex symbol.
40, You think that being refused entry to eighteen bars in three hours constitutes a good night out .
41. You haven’t cooked a meal since helping mum last Christmas with the turkey.
42. Your idea of exercise is jogging to the bus stop.
43. Your idea of personal space is no-one actually standing on your toes.
44. You can’t see anything wrong with a bus route that’s twenty-two miles long, takes four hours and finishes where it starts.
45. You think Carl Chinn sounds common.
46. You just know that the Millennium Dome, National Stadium and 1992 Olympics went to the wrong place.
47. You allow three hours for a two mile motorway journey.
48. When anybody asks you to recommend a good Indian you can provide them with a list of a hundred .
49. You have a minimum of five “worst cab ride ever” stories.
50. You don’t hear sirens anymore.
51. The breweries idea of tasteful pub renovation is to knock three rooms into one, put six tables in a corner and call it a restaurant and ban anybody over the age of 25.
52. Smoking does less damage to your lungs than breathing normally.
53. You can’t see anything wrong with spending your summer holiday on a caravan site thirty miles away.
54. You’ve heard of something called the Black Country but you can’t be certain it exists.
55. You live on a housing estate with a larger population than some countries.
56. Your cleaner is Spanish, your grocer is Indian, your off-licence owner is Jamaican, your landlord is Pakistani, your laundry man is Chinese, your favourite barman is Irish, your favourite cafe owner is Austrian, the watch seller on your corner is Bangladeshi, your last cabbie was Pakistani, your newsagent is Bangladeshi and your favourite chip shop owner is Cypriot.
57. You think pork scratchings are health food.
58. You call to total strangers “Aer kid”.
59. You think “getting a buzz” refers to public transport rather than drugs.
60. You get into fights with everybody who says that Manchester is the Second City.
61. You think that the Rotunda is a smart piece of architecture.
62. You think all arguments can be ended with the words “Shakespeare was a Brummie.”
63. You are terrified of offending a Welshman in case he cuts off your water.
64. You think the Lickey Hills is the Lost Continent.
65. The last man you heard taking the piss out if the pace is due to wake up any month now.
*only some of you.
Heroes and Villains 