Bull Ring open market, Birmingham

Today I met my youngest son in Birmingham for lunch. I arrived an hour or so early so spent some time looking for suitable blip material. There are some tremendous buildings in Brum but none of them were lending themselves to a good angle and having taken some weak pictures I began to doubt that they were tremendous buildings at all - either that or my eye simply wasn't playing ball.

I wandered over to the rag market - a place that has always enthralled me with its collections of bizarre objects that people clearly buy: insole warmers for a mere £1.00; every possible kind of plastic flower; diamante jewellery like you've never seen before; Marks and Sparks best at £2.00 a piece; glow in the dark hoodies; clubwear that makes you think the Brummies know something about clubbing that's passed the rest of the world by; items of computer hardware and software for every machine that's ever existed; fabrics, ribbons, curtain materials, cords, threads and haberdashery beyond the realms of imagination; all the electronics you'll ever need, for anything... the stalls go on and on, the prices are the lowest you'll ever find, and anything you'll ever need in life is there, alongside an awful lot of things you'll never need.

I resisted the temptation and moved on to the fruit and veg market where the temptation was even greater. Look at the price of these artichokes! I could have cut £20 from yesterday's shopping bill no problem had I done my shopping here. But my son would never have forgiven me had I turned up a the best restaurant in town struggling with bags bursting with fresh fruit and veg...