Birmingham Post

I have completed the convoluted system designed to crack down on the postal vote fraud that so enlivened the last elections in Birmingham.
It requires completing a postal voting statement, including filling in "date of birth" boxes – "Please ensure you do not use today's date or year" (it does say that, really) – and putting a signature in a second box.
So far so good.

Blairite loyalist Liam Byrne, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Immigration Minister, might do well to search for a safer seat before the next General Election if this week's city council election results are anything to go by.

Top marks to PricewaterhouseCoopers batsman Syed Iqbal this week for a memorable course cricket feat.
Batting at Britannic Park, Moseley, in the opening match in this summer's John Bright Trophy, Iqbal produced a pioneering way of avoiding a certain run out when his sprawling dive ended a foot short of the safety of the batting crease.

The grubby confessions of an urban pyromaniac Richard McComb I have done a very bad thing. After doing it I felt dirty and grubby and had to take a shower.

Not all the soapy bubbles of Molton Brown’s body wash could cleanse me. The odour of shame lingered.

Sport - an activity involving physical exertion or skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment - Concise Oxford English Dictionary, eleventh edition, 2006.
So snooker's not sport, then? Sitting down for long periods, occasionally getting up to walk around a 6'x12' table, bending over to play a few shots, then sitting down again. No serious physical exertion there.

Here's a Bright exposure of what actually happened on a Skinbags Airways jaunt to Murcia in Spain.
The not very pretty sights on tour took in PR guru Andy Skinner, the host, film mogul and man about town John James, society photographer Tony Flanagan and Bright's vicar on earth John Duckers, Birmingham Post business editor. Much improved by Skinner's partner, the lovely Angela.
The couple have got a very nice holiday pad in Murcia ... except it's now been trashed. Far too much drink, far too much gluttony.

Brum's battle of the beaches has claimed its first casualty.
Civic Society planning committee chairman Stephen Hartland has been shot down by the withering fire of council snipers, metaphorically speaking of course.

It's the simplest ideas that are the best, so hats off to the organisers of this year's Glastonbudget Festival.

You read that right. Not the £100-plus a ticket weekend at Worthy Farm in Zummerset but its threadbare, slightly shabby cousin which takes place on the Nottinghamshire / Leicestershire / Derbyshire border near the villages of Rempstone and Wymeswold next Bank Holiday weekend, May 25 to 27.

Those crazy European guys, they really know how to have one helluva a crazy time.
We know they're "crazy guys" and we know they know how to have "one helluva crazy time" because they can't stop telling us. And then telling us again.
Anyone bullied into watching the Eurovision Song Contest, as I was, will know what I mean.

Please somebody, give TV presenter Llewella Bailey a spare set of keys that she can hide under some plant pot in the garden
It wasn't so long ago that, after some long-into-the-night bash, she had Birmingham Chamber chum Tony Bell clambering through a window in a bid to gain entry to her own home.
Now my spies tell me she got herself locked out yet again.

Philistines in the Birmingham council planning department have dropped an almighty clanger.
A map accompanying the infamous application for a beach at Chamberlain Square refers to a statue of J B Priestly (sic), handily placed close to the proposed juice bar and the deckchair shed.

Another year, another dismal FA Cup Final. Was anyone surprised?
Ever since the Champions League became the money-spinning Holy Grail of European football, the Cup Final has meant less and less to those who can't remember when the television coverage used to start at 10am with Cup Final It's A Knockout.

We'll kick off this week with an appeal by occasional Birmingham Post gig reviewer and all-round good egg Marcus Face.

As well as being adroit with a snappy James Taylor put-down, Mr Face is also a rather talented songwriter and producer in the old style. His stock in trade is pithy pop nuggets which connect directly with the English pop psyche underground of the mid-1960s.

It is a select club and counts US rocker Lenny Kravitz, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and one-time British Olympic hopeful Zola Budd among its esteemed members.
Other luminaries include Peter Cushing, Sir Matt Busby, John Wayne and Alexander Puskin.

Is Moseley Rugby Club going after the pink pound? More likely it is into racy birds.
Or perhaps both after the first team were featured on a recent Channel 4 programme, Embarrassing Illnesses.
Sandwiched in between features on piles and flatulence, it showed the lads showing off their tackle and examining themselves for testicular cancer.

The most serious rebellion to hit the leadership of Birmingham's Tory-Lib Dem coalition in three years fizzled out in the end, but it was a close run thing.
A change to the city council constitution which, on the face of it, gives council leader Mike Whitby more power at the expense of the Lord Mayor, was finally passed by a smaller than usual majority with several Liberal Democrats voting against.

Bored? Fed up with your friends? Looking for an existential experience? I’ve got the ideal suggestion: get in a British Gas phone queue.

The automated service is packed with inter-active telephone keypad action, fab music and fascinating advice. All I wanted to do was solve the mystery of my billing payment and thrown in – for free! – was a host of energy saving tips, all provided against the aural tapestries of Coldplay on panpipes.

A long, long time ago, when I finally realised that my interest in sport massively outweighed my ability to play it in any form, I briefly considered becoming a cricket umpire.
I quite fancied the idea of standing in a green field on a sunkissed summer's afternoon, magisterially raising my right index finger on occasions and explaining the intricacies of the lbw law to friends and family.