Birmingham Post

I hear a successful night at the Birmingham Press Club Media Awards went quickly down the pan for photographer extraordinaire Tony Flanagan when he got to his room in the Radisson Hotel.
It being one of his rare nights off, Flan, one of the award judges, had drunk his fill as had many others.

It remains to be seen how much longer Liberal Democrat backbenchers are going to allow themselves to be humiliated by their own group leaders and Birmingham's Conservative city councillors.

Here is an example of the different way the emotional circuit-boards of men and women are hard-wired.
I turned on my computer, fluked a connection to the internet, and looked at the news headlines. There it was.
"Evel Knievel's dead," I told my wife. "My God, Evel Knievel's dead."

A tale of two visits to Rome. My sympathies to Birmingham Chamber pair John Lamb and Tony Bell, and Lamb's partner Lisa Kennedy, plus two kids, for what must have been something of a nightmare.
It apparently went a bit like this . . .

I posed the question last week of how much longer Liberal Democrat backbenchers were going to allow themselves to be humiliated by the Conservative half of the coalition running Birmingham City Council.
The answer would appear to be indefinitely if the great wheelie bin fiasco is anything to go by.

The ceremonial carving of the turkey, one of the last Christmas traditions, is under threat.

Remarkably, this has nothing to do with EU directives on poultry conformity, or health and safety regulations designed to cut down on domestic knife injuries. Depressingly, however, it has everything to do with apathy and idleness.

Reports of the annual St Basil's Sleep-Out are slowly reaching the Bright secret intelligence desk and my spooks tell me that the great and the good bedded down in record numbers this year; some 450 people I'm told.

The second eleven were out in force at this week's Birmingham cabinet.
No show from city council leader Mike Whitby, who was perhaps enjoying another one of those cosy setting-the-record-straight chats with senior Tories in London.
No show either from opposition Labour leader Sir Albert Bore, who had better things to attend to in Europe.

I got in the mood for Christmas by unbuttoning the top of my trousers, bending forward and having a needle inserted into the top of my buttock cleft.
It was an invigorating experience and one that brought a grimace, if not a smile, to my face.
I have tried other methods of preparing for Christmas before, including, in the days before it became trendy, binge drinking.

Not content with gentle post-Christmas liquid recovery, the aptly named MAD Club at The Meynell Arms are once again inviting those of a deranged or suicidal disposition to attempt the Hoar Cross Soap Box Downhill on December 29.

Someone must have stiffened Alistair Dow's backbone. The head of Birmingham city council's scrutiny section has hand-picked members of the awkward squad for his review group examining the business case for the £193 million new library.