Gas Street Basin blues

God I feel old today.  I flew from Bari to Birmingham via Zurich this morning, so I could attend the first day of my Celebrant course.  Having checked into my hotel I took a stroll around the city centre.  I have been coming here since the early seventies.  First as a schoolboy in a canal boat and later as a stressed executive in a company car.  As I walked around layer after layer of memories began to be peeled away.

On the way back to the hotel I dropped into an Indian restaurant and found myself in a building over the canal that you can see in both these photos, looking out over Gas Street Basin.  When I first came here forty years ago the Basin was derelict and forgotten and the only way to get into it was through a gap in the fence of the ATV Television Centre car park.  Now it's a fashionable post-industrial residential and shopping zone.  In the intervening period there has even been time for a new pub to be built and fall derelict, now boarded up and awaiting further redevelopment.

I remember spending a night in the Basin on a canal holiday with my friend Ken and our English teacher Mr Topless.  Were we woken up by the slap-slapping of a towrope passing over the roof of the boat as a horse-drawn barge passed by?  Or was that another time, or never, just a borrowing from someone else's memories?  It's all such a long time ago.