The soapbox has a new home

I've been with Typepad since about 2003 and blogging a couple of years prior to that. I'd no real gripe with Typepad except that my account was costing me a tenner a month and of late, I've found myself having to fond money for daft things like camera repairs having managed to put down a very expensive Sony compact in some sort of oily residue which has crept up inside the display and totally ruined it. Camera less than two months old to.

Repair bill's going to top a hundred pounds too.

So I'm pulling in my horns a bit and have decided to relocate the once oft read soapbox to the Wix domain.

I like the pale green decor don;t you ? TBH, I don't get a lot of time for blogging these days or maybe my heart's not in it like it used to be. Or, it could be the fact I do this sort of thing in my job, so maybe it gets a bit too much.

First day back at work after 6 days off. I took OBC and crew down to the boat in Portishead a week last Friday and they tootled off into open seas taking the Anhinga II firstly to Falmouth then later in the week to Padstow where it has traditionally spent the summer for several years now.

I rather jammily copped for the use of the car for the week, but as usual didn't make much hay whilst the sun shone.

Popped over to see MTB (Mick the Bear) who is off work at present with a leg ulcer. This lad is truly a bear with a sore head as at his age (past state retirement), he doesn't need to work, but he's a very fit active polar bear. He loves working, enjoys the company of his work mate and he loves his cycling too. His racer is worth more than most second hand family cars.

So off we went to the pub and had a goo old chat like a couple of old wimmin. I think it cheered him up mind you, we've been pen pals for a couple of years now.

I used to work with him at Valen and since then, we text each other, usually tormentingly. Good lad is MTB.

Hospital appointment took care of Wednesday and then on Thursday, I had one of those days, you know, the sort when really it would have been better staying in bed.

I'd been hivering and hovering over going up to the Black Country Living Museum and despite suffering the effects from the increased dosage the hospital prescribed for my injected diabetes medication, I grasped the nettle and camera in bag set off in the shiny red Volvo for Tipton, the land of dragons.

When I walked into the museum entrance my heart sank. There were about 200 people waiting to go in, most of them kids and two people on the desk to take their money.

It didn't take long to make the decision to abort this trip and go do something else. It still cost me three quid to exit the car park.

For many years, I've been somewhat consumed with Black country history and you don't get much deeper into the Black country than Dudley and the surrounding locality.

Before my cancer surgery in 2009, I'd been corresponding with a lady from the St John's Church preservation Society over the location of the grave of William Perry aka the Tipton Slasher, champion pugilist of all England 1850 - 1857.

There's a small park in Tipton almost opposite the Fountain pub which was his training HQ, where in addition to a fine statue in his honour, there was also a rock with the inscription his remains were somewhere in these grounds.

St John's church begged to differ claiming that the grave was to be found somewhere in their capacious and overgrown churchyard. At the time, I was provided with a photo of the grave and no pun intended therefore took this as gospel.

A subsequent visit to the small park by the Fountain Inn revealed the commemorative rock had been removed, though thankfully the statue is still there.

So, utterly miffed at my experience with the museum, I decided to pay a long overdue visit to St John's, Kate's Hill in Dudley in search of the great man's grave.

I didn't find it. The church was closed in 2002 and the graveyard really is like something out of a Vincent Price movie with all the subsidence, graves going back to the 1800s are broken from a mixture of neglect and vandalism.

I took plenty of pictures and returned to the car a little disappointed. This was added to when I spied a warning message on the camera screen which read no memory card. I opened the camera and indeed, I had forgotten to put the SD card in the camera which has no internal memory, so I'd wasted almost an hour farting around in a slightly eerie boneyard not taking pictures.

Went home in a foul mood.

Despite a rush of activity and media promotion in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the campaign to save St John's seems to have lost momentum and not much if anything is being done any more.

If Mr. Perry is indeed resting his bones on Kates Hill, I hope his rest is peaceful. At some point, I shall return and this time with the digital equivalent of film in my camera.