The following is a brief extract from the recently unearthed sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses, entitled ‘Twolysses’. This rigidly structured chapter was to be written as a sequence of questions and answers, and an early version originally appeared in a 1921 edition of Aston Villa’s match day souvenir programme.

WHAT DIVERGENT COURSES DID STEPHEN DEDALUS AND LEOPLOLD BLOOM’S RESPECTIVE TRAMS FOLLOW?

Stephen’s 11A tram followed Birmingham’s outer ring road in an anti-clockwise direction; Bloom’s 11C tram followed Birmingham’s outer ring road in a clockwise direction.

AT WHAT POINT ON THE ROUTE DID THEIR TWO TRAMS CONVERGE?

In Cotteridge.

WHAT WERE THE NAMES OF STEPHEN’S FELLOW PASSENGERS?

Rev Al Green, Mr Edward G. Baston, Mr Mose Lee, Mr Bart Lee Green, Mr Bill Slee, Mr Derek End, Mr Dud Heston, Mr Frank Lee, Mr Thor Ochs, Fr Garret Greene, Miss Cassandra L. Vale, Dr R. Bourne, Mrs Hayley Mills, Mr Lee Bank, Mr Laurence ‘Loz’ Ells, Miss Minnie ‘Min’ Worth, Mr Kit & Mrs Mia Greene, Mr Oz Kot, Mr Rube Berry, Miss Sally Oak, Mrs Sally Park, Mrs Shell Dunne, Lt Col Shaw Teeth (Retired), Mr Tighe Burne, Dr Winston Greene, Mr Wes Teeth, Mr Ty Slee and Mr Alan Rock.

IN WHAT STATE OF HEATH DID STEPHEN FIND HIMSELF?

Gravely Ill.

WHERE WAS STEPHEN’S TRAM LOCATED IN SPACE-TIME?

At 2.30pm on 14th June 1914, Stephen’s 11A tram (maximum seating capacity approximately 45) was negotiating Erdington’s Six Ways traffic roundabout as it followed the 27 mile imperfectly circular outer ring road of the city of Birmingham (population approximately 840,000): which was part of the county known as Warwickshire (population approximately 1.3 million): which was part of the country called England (population approximately 34 million); which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (population approximately 46 million): which was part of the continent of Europe (population approximately 450 million): which was part of a planet known locally as Earth (population approximately 1.8 billion) which was currently following a 150,000,000 mile imperfectly circular orbit of its neighbouring Sun (maximum seating capacity approximately nil).

WHERE WAS BLOOM’S TRAM LOCATED IN SPACE-TIME?

In Stechford.

The high-brow world of literary scholarship was thrown into disarray earlier this week when lost manuscripts by the great Irish author James Joyce were discovered in one of Paris’ infamous northern suburbs by a team of French construction workers.

These priceless documents – which include fragments of a previously unknown sequel to Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses – were unearthed by the workmen during the building of a controversial new scenic landscape over a much-loved stretch of dual carriageway. This news comes as a further embarrassment to an already beleaguered intellectual community still reeling from several high-profile discoveries of lost Modernist texts by French construction workers.

Joyce’s Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom (a middle-aged advertising salesman), Stephen Dedalus (a melancholic young writer) and Bloom’s wife Molly (a successful concert singer who suffers from a rare form of PDD, or Punctuation Deficiency Disorder). During the course of the vast novel, Bloom takes a stroll through the streets of Dublin, forms an unlikely bond with Stephen, visits a whorehouse and finds out that Molly has been cheating on him. These events all take place within the course of a single day – 16^th June 1904 – and, on account of this, the novel is often cited as a major influence on the hit television series ‘24’.

For Joyce’s legion of fans, 16^th June 1904 is now affectionately referred to as ‘Bloomsday’ and every year they celebrate its anniversary by dressing up in Edwardian clothes, walking through the streets of Dublin and visiting local whorehouses for charity.

Experts have already determined that the Ulysses sequel – which Joyce provisionally entitled ‘Twolysses‘ – was to take place on 16^th June 1914, exactly 10 years’ after Ulysses and just prior to the outbreak of the First World War (which, as historians have been quick to point out, eventually had a sequel of its own). As well as a new date, there was also a new location: while its illustrious predecessor was famously set in the Irish capital city of Dublin, for the sequel Joyce relocated the inaction to the English second city of Birmingham (or ‘Brum’, as it was then known).

According to local historian Professor Charlie Chin, this change in setting was prompted by an “innovative local government cultural regeneration initiative” that offered “bostin’ (tr. ‘splendid’) tax breaks” to “arty-farty types” who agreed to move to “Birmingham”. Joyce, of course, was unwilling to leave Paris on account of his fondness for mille-feuille, pain au chocolat and other French pastries, so negotiated a deal with Birmingham’s civic leaders to relocate his characters instead. Ironically, the Irish government launched a similar scheme in 1969 to lure artistic migrants to the Emerald Isle, but the tax cuts were funded by an inheritance tax hike and Joyce would have ended up financially worse off on account of him already being dead.

The sequel was to feature the three main protagonists of Ulysses – Bloom, Stephen and Molly – interacting with fellow fictional characters and real-life historical figures from the area like Joseph Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain and Richard Chamberlain. As the novel opens, we find Stephen Dedalus – now in his early 30s – living in Perrott’s Folly, an abandoned Martello Tower in the Edgbaston district of the city which dates back to a time when Birmingham had a thriving coastline. Stephen shares the tower with a group of boisterous history students from the nearby University whose excessive drinking and late-night partying remind him bitterly of how he used to behave in a previous novel. At the end of the first chapter he storms into the communal kitchen area and confronts his tormentors by shouting: “Historians are the nightmare that keep me awake at nights!” This becomes a recurring theme of the novel, despite the fact that nobody in the book takes any notice of it.

Disillusioned by life, Stephen has all but abandoned his literary ambitions and now works at Digbeth’s famous Old Crown public house as its resident balladeer-balladist (an early form of singer-songwriter). His attempts at turning his complex theories on theology, philosophy and dermatology into toe-tapping crowd-pleasers have so far met with mixed success. This is partly due to the fact his radical and esoteric ideas are out of step with jingoistic pre-war mood of the period, and partly due to the venue’s poor acoustics.

Meanwhile, Bloom and Molly arrive in Birmingham at the nearby Digbeth Coach and Horse Station. When questioned by an obnoxious taxi driver en route to their lodgings at the Bartons Arms pub, Bloom claims he has come to the city to accompany his wife who has been booked to perform a selection of her hits at the prestigious Aston Hippodrome music hall. Privately, though, the advertising salesman is motivated by a strong desire to avoid Dublin on 16^th June as the Bloomsday festivities are starting to get embarrassing.

When Bloom discovers that Stephen Dedalus is living in the city, the two arrange to meet on the Number 11 Outer Circle tram so the “Bull Ring Befriending Bard” can take him on a guided tour of the city’s key residential areas, even though most of them are still fields. Unfortunately, Bloom boards a number 11 that is travelling along the route in a clockwise direction and Stephen boards another heading the opposite way. As a result the two characters never actually meet, although their respective buses briefly pass each other in Cotteridge. This seems to be an oblique reference to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics which states that any two particles moving in the opposite direction will eventually pass each other in Cotteridge.

Bloom and Stephen’s journeys are told in a variety of literary styles paralleling both their journey through the external environment of the Outer Circle route and their own respective inner-journeys of self-realization. This includes a chapter that’s written in the style of a bus timetable.

When Molly finds out about her husband’s planned rendezvous she’s incensed, having never forgiven Stephen for leaving the previous novel so abruptly. By way of revenge, she decides to resume her affair with sleazy showbiz impresario Blazes Boylan. Unfortunately, a bizarre backstage accident at the Hippodrome involving a case of HP Sauce falling from an overhead gantry renders Boylan incapacitated for several vital chapters and, in desperation, Molly is forced to arrange a hasty tryst with the woodwind section of the CBSO.

The novel ends with Molly meeting Bloom at a bus stop in Perry Barr and pledging to make him a breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and haddock the next morning. Bloom realizes that Molly only ever promises to makes him a breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and haddock after she’s been unfaithful, but decides it’s not worth having a row about. Stephen, of course, has already wandered out of the novel, just like he did the last time.

It now seems likely that Twolysses was part of the short-lived Modernist follow-up fad of the mid-1920s, in which many of the writers of the period tried to cash-in on their artistic credentials by turning their masterpieces into money-spinning franchises. The craze was started by the American poet T.S. Eliot, who ruthlessly exploited the popularity of his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by churning out several dozen artistically inferior and increasingly tawdry spin-offs. These included The Protest Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Power Ballad of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hardcore Dance Anthem of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Eliot’s fellow experimental writers were quick to jump on board this lucrative bandwagon. Besides Ulysses, other classic Modernist texts to receive the sequel treatment include Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (‘Second Wave’), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (‘2 Loud 2 Furious’) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (‘The Wrath of Cantos’).

The follow-up fad came to an abrupt end in 1927 during a party held at Ernest Hemmingway’s Parisian home to commemorate the removal of one of the great writer’s more troublesome wisdom teeth. Joyce, Picasso and other leading lights of the Modernist movement were in attendance when a drunken Gertrude Stein gatecrashed the gathering, making lewd and disparaging comments about the guests’ artistic integrity and the host’s choice of hors d’oeuvres.

Devastated by these comments, Joyce swiftly threw away his canapé and discarded his drafts of Twolysses. Like so many other abandoned Modernist sequels of this period, it was subsequently used as roadfill by the local authorities.

In addition to the sequel to Ulysses, the recently discovered Joycean hoard also contained journals and personal correspondence together with an unfinished screenplay for a Laurel & Hardy feature film entitled ‘Agenbite of Nitwits’. From next week, members of the public will be able to view a selection of the documents at museums in Dublin and Birmingham for a limited period. After this, the manuscripts will return to France where they will be housed in the permanent collection of Modernist literature located at the Paris headquarters of the National Union of French Construction Workers.

CONFESSIONS OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1974)

Cert X, Dir. Alan Smithee

Stockland Green Plaza from 16th June, 1974. Showtimes vary.

Based on the acclaimed novel by cult science-fiction satirist Jimmy Joyce, this new British sex comedy stars the ever-popular Robin Askwith as Steve Dedalus, a chirpy young aspiring novelist who yearns to break free from the suffocating straitjacket of conformity by embarking on an illustrious literary career. Steve soon finds, however, that it takes more than an abundance of talent, ruthless tenacity and sheer luck to make it big in the book business: it also requires a willingness to subject oneself to a series of back-breaking romps with various ladies of letters. This hardback harem of softback sirens include a licentious librarian (Sally Geeson), a lascivious literary agent (Rula Lenska) and a saucy censor (Irene Handl), and Steve’s so-called ‘epiphanies’ take place in a variety of ludicrously lewd literary-themed locations including a marquee at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the back of a mobile library and the top deck of the number 11 bus.

This, it must be said, is something of a departure from the source material.

Next week’s auction of rare manuscripts by the great Irish author James Joyce looks set to ignite a bitter dispute between private collectors, leading academics and fans of a West Midlands football team. The documents – made up of original, handwritten drafts of what many believe to be his earliest published work – consist of over 1500 pages of articles, match reports and in-depth player profiles that Joyce wrote between 1919 and 1924 for Aston Villa’s weekly match day souvenir programme.

‘This has got us all worried,’ says Harry H. Earwicker, Aston Villa supporter and spokesperson for the Anglo-Irish ‘soccerlit’ pressure group, Villa Yootha Joyce. ‘There’s a very real danger that some well-heeled foreign buyer could take the manuscripts out of North Birmingham. These documents form part of this great club’s history. They are the only surviving link between the modern-day Claret and Blue Army and the lost world of Modernist literature. They should remain at Villa Park or, at the very least, somewhere in Witton.’

As well as being one of the most important writers of the last century, James Joyce will also be remembered as one of Aston Villa’s original ‘famous fans’. In this respect, he was very much the Nigel Kennedy of his day. Joyce would often boast about this in public, despite the fact that – in the 1920s at least – no serious artist wanted to be compared to Nigel Kennedy. What first attracted the Dublin-born writer to this legendary North Birmingham club remains a mystery, however. Some Joycean scholars have tentatively suggested that he supported Aston Villa as an defiant act of artistic rebellion against the dated literary conventions of Victorian novelists like Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope and the Brontë sisters who were, for the most part, Birmingham City supporters.

Whatever the case, his obsession for the club found its way into the early drafts of many of his most famous books. His autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was originally entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan, while his masterpiece Ulysses – in which the entire narrative famously took place on a single day, 16^th June, 1904 – was originally scheduled to take place on 2^nd April, 1897, the date of Villa’s first FA Cup victory.

Joyce began writing for the club’s souvenir programme in 1919. He was living in impoverished exile in Zurich with his lover, Nora Barnacle, and was desperately struggling to make ends meet. By the time his ends eventually did meet it was too late, as the pair had already moved to Paris. To help alleviate Joyce’s poverty his well-connected patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, put in a good word with Aston Villa’s owners. In those days, the football souvenir programme industry was a melting pot of Modernist talent and many of the great artists of the day got their first break working for these publications. The likes of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust cut their creative teeth writing articles, match reports and in-depth player profiles until people started taking them seriously. Writers weren’t the only people to benefit from this industry, of course. Pablo Picasso famously produced a series of lurid strip cartoons for Birmingham City’s souvenir programme during what later became known as his ‘Blues period’.

Over the next five years Joyce was a prolific contributor to the publication. He produced 276 articles, 573 match reports, 834 play-by-play tactical analysis charts and over 15,000 in-depth player profiles. This prodigious output was all the more remarkable as he spent most of this period living abroad and, as a result, was rarely able to attend home games. Instead, he had to rely heavily on detailed telegrams, eyewitness accounts and conjecture.

According to Earwicker, Joyce’s early articles for the souvenir programme featured ‘a winning combination of hard-hitting match analysis, erudite Irish wit and obscure literary allusions that proved to be a big hit with Villa fans.’ His classic work during this period included the groundbreaking match report Villa v QPR (1919) and its disappointing sequel, Villa v QPR (1920), and during Villa’s 1919-20 FA Cup campaign Joyce received widespread acclaim for his detailed account of the long road to Wembley, which was entitled ‘The M1.’

Unfortunately, Joyce’s love affair with Aston Villa was not to last. Egged on by fellow Villa fan Ezra Pound, he began to introduce increasingly experimental literary techniques into his Villa programme contributions. His play-by-play tactical analysis reports featured an increased use of multiple-viewpoint narration and Lobachevskian geometry. This confused scores of Villa fans who were more familiar traditional third-person narrative approaches and Euclidian geometry. He also abandon many of the traditional rules of punctuation: a 1921 interview with Frank Barson upset the legendary ‘hard man’ striker after Joyce removed all the quotation marks and replaced them with inverted commas.

The situation finally came to a head in 1924 with his controversial profile of one of Villa’a most notorious fans. A precursor to the modern-day streaker, Macintosh Brown would interrupt Villa matches by charging across the field wearing nothing but a brown macintosh. Joyce’s profile of this shady exhibitionist – complete with pop-up illustrations – resulted in a highly-publicised obscenity trial and Joyce was forced to accept a three-match ban.

The club’s owners were furious with Joyce. When Villa were defeated by Newcastle United in that year’s FA Cup final, Joyce submitted a 10,000 word match report which featured passing references to Irish patriot Charles Stewart Parnell, Catholic theologian St Thomas Aquinas and Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. The club owners urged Joyce to remove these references which, they felt, were ‘somewhat irrelevant’ and ‘confusing to younger fans’. Angered by this perceived attack on his artistic integrity, Joyce submitted a 10,000 word profile of Parnell, Aquinas and Vico which made only passing reference to the FA Cup Final. In retaliation, the club owners published a clumsily edited version the original article and attributed it to one of Joyce’s uncles, who he didn’t like.

For Joyce this was the final straw. He sent the club a blunt, two-word resignation letter in Latin which read: ‘Non-serviam.’ The club responded with a blunt, two-word response in Anglo Saxon, which – unfortunately – was lost in the post. After turning his back on his religion and then his country, Joyce finally turned his back on his favorite team. In a fit of rage he attempted to set fire to his vast collection of Aston Villa scarves, track suits and other paraphernalia. Unfortunately, due to his failing eyesight, he instead set fire to a pair of curtains and an early draft of a planned sequel to Ulysses that was provisionally entitled Twolysses.

Nearly a century later, Joyce’s influence still remains strong at Villa Park. According to Earwicker, his ghost has often been witnessed sitting on the top deck of a bus that passes close to the ground and shouting abuse from the terraces. Most touchingly, perhaps, many of his early, lyrical poems have formed the basis of some of the club’s most enduring supporter chants. These include the touching ‘We Love You Villa, We Do’, the rousing ‘We are the Boys from the Holte Army’ and, of course, the ever-popular ‘Shit on the City.’

Stateless, scrawny James Joyce and his mistressmusewife, Nora Barnacle, were waiting for a number eleven omnibus in the Perry Barr district of Birmingham. It was twenty-six days, five months and one hundred and four years after 16th June 1904, although they didn’t necessarily spend all that time waiting for a bus.

At what precise location in Perry Barr was their bus stop located?

By a clay bark’s bank, where a stone lane meets a field of birch.

Do you mean by the Barclays Bank on the Corner of Aston Lane and Birchfield Road?

Um, yes.

What obsolete vernacular term for acute dental dysfunction can be used to describe the approximate time of the bus’s arrival?

Tooth hurty.

What action did the author make upon the arrival of his omnibus?

He inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket of his trousers to obtain his senior citizen’s bus pass.

Was it there?

No. It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on the day but one preceding.

Why was this quadruply irritating?

Because he had forgotten; because he had previously reminded Nora to remind him not to forget; because Nora was now reminding him that she had previously remembered to remind him not to forget; because the previous trousers were now at the dry cleaners.

Was the controversial author of such groundbreaking classics as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake entitled to free travel on bus, train and Metro services throughout the West Midlands and environs?

Yes, insofar as the author was 126 years of age and could therefore be classified as a pensioner.

Due to the aforementioned bus pass oversight, was Joyce required to tender the full adult off-peak fare?

No. The stately, plump bus driver was in a charitable mood and let him off on a technicality.

What was the technicality?

The fact that Joyce had been dead since 1941.

Briefly outline Joyce’s initial observations with regards to the distribution of passengers in the lower deck of the number 11 bus.

The lower deck contained twelve adult females (two with infants), nine adult males, and eight juveniles (five female and three male) of varying ages, races and creeds; five adults (three female and two male) were reading (or appearing to read) daily newspapers, monthly magazines or this week’s Take a Break; two adults (male and female) and one juvenile (male) were listening to music (or appearing to listen to music) on portable MP3 players; one adult (male) and one juvenile (female) were conducting (or appearing to conduct) mobile telephone conversations with unidentified parties on matters pertaining to, in the first instance, a somewhat contentious business transaction involving an otter,and, in the second, a highly detailed account of a series of regrettable and somewhat lurid romantic entanglements involving a third party known only as Our Sonia.

There were no available seats on the lower deck, then?

Indeed.

What parallel course did Joyce and Nora subsequently follow?

Starting united both at normal walking pace from the driver’s cabin, they turned right and approached the steps leading to the upper deck. Joyce, a well-mannered man, insisted that Nora go first; Nora, a feminist icon, insisted that Joyce go first. He eventually acquiesced, for fear of getting a punch on the nose.

What change in circumstance almost thwarted their ascent?

The vehicle’s sudden and unexpected transition in relative state from at rest (statum) to moving (agitato) caused Joyce to lose his footing on the narrow stairwell, ricochet off the handrail and launch into a form of graceless backflip commonly referred to as arse over tit (ineptio).

What prevented Joyce from sustaining a serious head injury?

The fact he collided, face first, into the ample cleavage of his mistress, Nora Barnacle.

What was Nora’s initial reaction to this?

NORA: Get off me Jim, ye wee skitter! I’m not falling for that one again!

What was crestfallen (and chestfallen) Joyce’s initial reaction to that?

Shock: embarrassment: shame: mild titillation: guilt: a profound sense of irony.

Why irony?

Because he had now done by accident something that he had previously done on purpose; because when he previously did it on purpose he pretended it was an accident.

What was the origin of this hitherto intentional stair-stumbling, cleavage-colliding phenomenon?

A high risk seduction stratagem Joyce called The Epiphany Accelerator.

Where and when did this previously happen?

With Nora, along a set of stone steps in Ringsend, Dublin, on 16th June 1904.

Shall we move on?

I think we should.

Were there available seats on the upper deck?

There were.

Where did Joyce and Nora decide to sit?

On the left hand side of the deck, at an equidistant point between a cackle of truants sitting on the back seat and a skinnylooking galoot and his girlfriend sitting at the front.

Why did Joyce take an irrational dislike to the skinnylooking galoot?

He was making witless remarks, scribbling furiously in a note pad and looked like a blogger.

What course did the number 11 omnibus subsequently follow?

Travelling in a south-easterly direction at an average speed of 26 mph, it left the field of birch and its broken librubble and followed Aston Lane’s Path, past Roddy Tufnol’s factoray and the new 24 our tescosuperstore.

What was the skinnylooking galoot’s reaction to the broken librubble?

- Where the fuck did that go?

What was the skinnylooking galoot’s reaction to the new tescosuperstore?

- Where the fuck did that come from?

What was Joyce’s reaction to the skinnylooking galoot’s reactions?

He let out a pair of audible tuts.

Was Joyce the first great 20th century novelist to have used the number 11 bus despite being dead?

No.

Can you elaborate on your answer?

Can you be more specific with your question?

Alright, then. Was Joyce the first dead 20th Century Modernist author to use Birmingham’s number 11 bus?

No. Ernest Hemmingway spent some time on the Outer Circle route during an otherwise regrettable trip to Birmingham.

Why was the trip regrettable?

He didn’t realize the Bull Ring was a shopping centre.

Am 11. November 2008 Clare und ich verbrachten einige Stunden circumnavigating die Stadt von Birmingham auf dem Bus der Nr. 11. Dieses wasn‘ t unsere Idee, verstehen Sie. Eher war es das Geistesprodukt der Jon Bounds der erstaunlichen Brum-gegründeten Web site Birmingham: It’ s Nicht Schit.

Birchfield Library

At about 2.30pm we leave Wellington Road and cross the Perry Barr roundabout on Birchfield Road. Although I’m no stranger to this area, this is an odd approach for me. I regularly drive along the Birchfield Road, but I usually take the underpass that runs beneath the traffic island. Here’s a picture of the underpass from when it was under construction in 1961, courtesy of Digital Handsworth:

That’s The Old Crown and Cushion pub in the background, which has changed a lot since then. Luckily the underpass has too, otherwise it’d be a bugger to drive through.

One of the advantages of seeing the world from the front seat of the top deck of a number 11 bus is that you get to witness all the juicy street level stuff you’d normally miss while driving through underpasses and along flyovers. That’s why I’m surprised to see that the library that used to sit on the corner of Birchfield Road and Aston Lane has now been demolished, and that’s why I say out loud (and a bit too loudly): “Where the fuck did that go?”

Someone sitting behind me lets out an audible tut. As we’re sitting on the front seat, “someone sitting behind me” hardly narrows it down, so I let it pass.

Maybe I’m too sensitive about these things, but there’s something about the sight of a demolished library building that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Didn’t this country once take a moral stand against a cruel and evil regime that was more than a tad partial to burning books? If so, then how can we turn a blind eye and let such wanton acts of anti-intellectualism escalate on our own doorstep? I imagine it’s because we’re all too busy driving through the underpasses and along the flyovers of life.

Let’s just hope that all the books got out in one piece.

Tufnol Factory, Aston Lane

At Aston Lane the bus stops for what seems like seventeen years. As the Wellhead Lane depot is nearby, I assume that the bus has to change drivers, the driver has to take a leak or the leak has to change buses.

I notice an elderly couple get on board. The man is wearing an Edwardian-looking suit, sporting a pair of jam jar glasses and bears an uncanny resemblance to the great Irish writer James Joyce. I can’t say whether his companion resembles Joyce’s wife and muse Nora Barnacle, but that’s only because I can’t remember what Nora Barnacle looked like.

Along Aston Lane, on the corner of Wellhead Lane, we pass the Tufnol factory. Tufnol, in case you don’t know, is a firm based in Birmingham and Glasgow who have been producing rods, sheets and other laminated plastic products for over 70 years. The reason why I know this is because my Uncle Eddie used to work there. Uncle Eddie was one of my favourite people in the world. He had a sense of humour was as dry as a sand sandwich and he always made sure that my family were never short of rods, sheets and other laminated plastic products. I miss him.

As we pass the Tufnol factory I realise that it’s been years’ since I last travelled along Aston Lane. That’s why I’m quite surprised to see a massive, new 24 hour Tesco Superstore, and that’s why I say out loud (and a bit too loudly): “Where the fuck did that come from?”

Someone sitting behind me lets out an audible tut.

I think it might be James Joyce.

Le 11 novembre 2008 Clare et moi avons passé plusieurs heures circumnavigating la ville de Birmingham sur l’autobus du numéro 11. C’était idée de limites de Jon Bounds de ‘Birmingham: n’est pas Merde.’

We’re still on the number 11 bus, we’re still in Perry Barr and we’re now passing the Crown and Cushion pub. There’s been a Crown and Cushion standing at the corner of Wellington Road and Birchfield Road for as long as I remember, although it hasn’t always been this Crown and Cushion.

The current incumbent is a fairly modern-looking, functional affair that, by my somewhat unreliable estimation, was constructed in the late 1980s or possibly even the early-1990s. I wasn’t on the number 11 at the time so I didn’t take any notes.

It was built on the site of a more traditional looking red brick boozer called, unsurprisingly, The Old Crown and Cushion. As I recall, across the road from what used to be The Old Crown and Cushion was a smaller pub squeezed between a row of shops on Birchfield Road. It was called The New Crown and Cushion.

Now, I’m no expert on pub name etymology, but I think its safe to assume that the New Crown and Cushion was a late arrival on the scene. Being a younger pub, I imagine it was a bit of an upstart fuelled by youthful exuberance and swaggering cockiness, although it probably skipped on the the piss and vinegar for health and safety reasons.

It must have felt a bit annoyed when the Old Crown and Cushion was bulldozed and replaced with a Crown and Cushion that was newer than ‘The New Crown and Cushion’. For one thing, it had to change its name.

For some reason this makes me think of Spinal Tap.

On 11^th November 2008 Clare and I spent several hours circumnavigating the city of Birmingham on the number 11 bus. This wasn’t our idea, you understand. Rather, it was the brainchild of Jon Bounds of the marvelous Brum-based website Birmingham: It’s Not Shit. You can read about it here.

While some tech-savvy contributors to this social experiment provided a real-time, multi-channel omnifeed of sights, sounds and experiences, I preferred a more 20^th Century approach and instead scribbled down my thoughts in a notepad with the intention of writing it all up on my blog the following day.

This process is taking somewhat longer than I’d anticipated.

At about 2.25pm on the 11th November 2008 the number 11 bus - our number 11 bus – makes its way along Church Lane, past Hamstead Road, up Wellington Road and down Memory Lane.

We’re in Perry Barr, now, and – seeing as how I spent many of my formative years living in nearby Kingstanding – this stretch of the route turns out to be pretty damn evocative for me. Many of the buildings we pass seem to resonate with all kinds of personal significance and I soon find myself embarking on an unscheduled detour via the outer circle of my brain. There’s no mention of that in the official timetable.

Over there, to the left, is the Holy Roman Catholic parish church of St Theresa’s. That gets me thinking about two of my closest friends – both former parishioners – and of gatherings, both happy and sad. Next, to the right, is a garden centre. A dim, nebulous childhood memory flickers and sizzles and struggles to take form. It seems to involve me shopping for shrubbery with my parents on a wet Sunday afternoon in 1981. I decide to let it go.

Then, just a little further along and to the left, I catch a glimpse of a modest-looking building you probably wouldn’t notice if you didn’t already know it was there. Tucked away just off Wellington Road, behind what used to be a bed warehouse, is St Theresa’s Social Club.

St Theresa’s Club in Perry Barr used to be one of my family’s most regular haunts. It’s been more than a decade since I last paid it a visit and, as we pass it now, I find myself sliding into a synaesthetic spiral of sentimentality. Family snapshots cascade through my cortex as I taste the velvety richness of a perfectly-pulled pint of Guinness, smell the aroma of stale cigarette smoke and hear the sound of Irish Music being played with varying degrees of authenticity. The experience is quite overpowering and leaves me feeling a bit like a bad Caffreys ad.

The St Theresa’s regulars I got to know were all friends of my parents’ who, like my Mum & Dad, were part of that big wave of Irish migrants who arrived in Birmingham during the 1950s and 60s. When I was in my late-teens and early-twenties I shared many a raucous night in their company and - despite the not inconsiderable age gap – they were often more amusing, unpredictable and interesting than many of my peers. Back then, they’d often comment on how much better the place was in the old days, but from my experience of this demographic they’d usually say that about most places. Of course, if I got off the number 11 bus and popped into St Theresa’s now I’d probably also comment on how much better it was in the old days. From my experience of my demographic, we say this about most places, too.

But still, I couldn’t help but wonder. On many of those raucous nights I’d often find myself imagining what places like St Theresa’s club were like in their heyday. As I watched the old black and white photos come to life, it certainly seemed a lot busier. Young men in sharp suits were dancing with young women in fine dresses to the tunes of a visiting showband. Over there I can see my parents and their friends sitting at a table, and they’re all looking a damn sight younger than me…

Of course, this was just me romanticising the past. I used to do a lot of that, back when I was sentimental.

“Occupations such as working on buses and trams were rejected by English workers for the higher wages and appealing shorter working hours enjoyed by their counterparts in factories. One contemporary estimated that in just fourteen months in 1946-7 two-thirds of the 6,000 drivers and conductors in Birmingham had resigned and taken other employment. As was the case in London, the local transport authority recruited directly from independent Ireland, continuing in effect a practice initiated during the war that eventually ceased in 1953. By the early 1950s roughly one-third of the transport authority staff were Irish, many of them women. “

Edna Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain p 97

Of course, indigenous populations don’t always take kindly to people from other countries “taking their jobs”, and the Irish influx was often greeted with distrust and even hostility. The fact that the jobs the migrant workers were ‘taking’ were the ones that nobody else wanted to do was neither here nor there.

I’m so glad that sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

When the Birmingham Irish of my parents’ generation first arrived here they worked hard, lived in often squalid conditions, were separated from their loved ones and were often distrusted and disliked. In this context, then, the Irish church clubs in Birmingham played a fairly significant role. With their regular dances and visiting showbands, places like St Theresa’s – as well as those other Patron Saints of the Birmingham Irish like St Chad, St Francis and St Catherine – offered the Birmingham Irish a means to reconnect with their culture, reengage with their community and have a bloody good time. More significantly, though, if it wasn’t for places like this then people like me probably wouldn’t be here today.

My parents met at a dance at St Chads…

“The road you can talk about is not the road you can walk on.”

Lao-Tse – Tao Te Ching

At about 2.10pm the bus is driving through Winson Green.

For the uninitiated, Clare and I are indulging in a spot of guerrilla ethnomethodology aboard Birmingham’s legendary number 11 bus. Some youths board the bus and sit behind us. This doesn’t concern us, however, as everyone else on the top deck is sitting behind us, too. That’s what happens when you sit on the front seat.

Before long, we notice a suspicious, burning odour coming from behind. This isn’t the typical, pungent, herb-based burning odour that’s commonly associated with philosophy students, jazz aficionados and the top deck of a double decker bus, though. This doesn’t smell like anything exotic, illegal or monged. No, it smells like someone is baking a jacket potato.

“Kids nowadays,” says Clare.

We’re driving through Winson Green, and Winson Green – of course – is best known for its prison. In fact, to most Brummies, ‘Winson Green’ means prison. In this respect it joins a long list of locations that seem forever lumbered with deep-seated incarceration associations. Notorious places like Strangeways in Manchester, Alcatraz in San Francisco and Portmeirion in Wales.

Which is a bit of shame, really. If you manage to separate the word from its links with the local lock-up, then Winson Green itself is quite a pretty name for a place. It wouldn’t seem out of place in Trumptonshire, alongside Camberwick Green and Chigley.

Of course, things like that are always easier said than done. This place and its prison seem to be neuro-linguistically fused in the popular imagination. It’ll take more than Zen detachment and baked potatoes to sever those tethers.

The fact the 11 bus drives straight past the prison probably doesn’t help.

By 2pm we’ve left Harborne. It happens to us all eventually.

After crossing Hagley Road (home to my old sixth form, St Philip’s College), the number 11 saunters wistfully along the Bearwood High Street as another song comes to mind. This time, it’s the sublime This is What She’s Like from Dexys Midnight Runners’ wilfully uncommercial and criminally underrated 1985 album, Don’t Stand Me Down:

On the album version of the song, The Little Nibble café on the Bearwood Road gets name checked during some pre-song banter (legend has it that Kevin Rowland and his bandmates used to meet there for tea-dinking sessions). Sadly, The Little Nibble ceased trading in January, Dexys haven’t recorded a studio album since Don’t Stand Me Down and I’ve been sitting on the top deck of the number 11 for long enough now to start making connections.

We take a right onto Sandon Road and into Edgbaston, passing the former home of my good friend, the macaroon-chomping friend of Garfield Jez Higgins. I remember going to a barbeque there years’ ago. Jez and his goodwyf Nat are vegetarians, so this – understandably enough – was a vegetarian barbecue. Our mutual friend – the talented comic artist and occasional thug, Tony McGee - arrived at this vegetarian event clutching a greasy megaburger in his mitts. I vividly remember him wantonly flaunting his tasty bovine-based snack with scant regard for the feelings of others. At least, I’m pretty certain it was Tony.

I hope it wasn’t me.