Among Brummies great place to make our home

LAST week I used too many of my allotted 625 words telling you I had a wedding anniversary pending.

Well, it happened! We celebrated with a top dinner with our daughter and her partner.

They live in Toowoomba and clearly don’t starve themselves if this dinner was anything to go by. It was a most enjoyable day and far better than the wedding days themselves.

My wife and I had a total of about 70 pounds between us with which to fund the reception and have a brief few days holiday to recover from the drain on our resources.

We were married in the town of Stockton-on-Tees, famous for the Stockton-to-Darlington railway, the first passenger train ever.

Stockton is also famous for the Stockton YWCA which provided a place to sleep for men and women.

I believe it’s still there and serving the same boring meals more than 60 years later.

I liked living there because it had a table tennis table and at least two excellent players.

Our honeymoon lasted for about four days, which I spent mainly in bed with a stomach wog and no expectation of surviving our first week of married life.

My wife spent her time warding off question regarding her sick husband and his apparent inability to behave like a newly-married human being.

At the beginning of our honeymoon, we bravely survived a train ride to Birmingham and a range of toilets.

By the Thursday, I had recovered sufficiently for us both to return to work where I was greeted by University of Birmingham colleagues anxious to know how we enjoyed our first week together.

I had to give a couple of lectures on my first two days back on the job and nothing much seemed to have been changed by our personal coming together.

We lived near the Edgbaston test match ground, sharing a house with a 700-year-old woman who was more concerned about the health of her young lodgers than about the performance of the English test team.

My new wife’s main task was to find a school willing to employ someone with good experience but no ability to speak with a Birmingham accent.

She quickly found a school but, like her husband, never mastered the amazing local accent which, to this day, I find difficult to understand.

The highlights of our years there included the birth of our daughter and the rivalry between Birmingham City and Aston Villa soccer clubs.

Those closely-fought matches filled in the time thinking of what to say to students whose average age was scarcely less than mine.

Most of them had clearly mastered the Birmingham accent and this did nothing for my confidence when trying to explain the more mathematical parts of structural engineering, or why Aston Villa deserved their report.

These days, Birmingham is bigger than ever and designed for visitors to lose their way.

Accents are still incomprehensible, and Birmingham is not a city that I would go to for a holiday.

But, my goodness, it’s a great place to make one’s home and get involved in the politics of the UK.

It is the home for excellent universities, theatres and sports events.

As a bonus, the countryside between the city and its neighbouring towns is very pleasant and I played many cricket matches against local teams, usually on wickets that are a model of good preparation and excellent hospitality.

Birmingham residents, Brummies, are a mixture of people from all over the world as well as the local lifetime inhabitants.

They may speak in their own particular way but they also provide leadership to the country on how to live fruitfully and in a fruitful manner.