It seems like there are a disproportionate number of Tudor buildings turned into fish and chip shops. There is another one in Alvechurch.

There are several other black and whites in the town center.

I liked the way the wall and window bulge out on this one…

… and the incredible imagination that went into naming it.

The people up the road have more imagination.

It looks like a wall to me, not a shrubbery, but if you redefine moss and lichen as shrubs, very tiny shrubs, then it is a shrubbery. If you were an ant, say, though ants don’t usually give much thought to landscape gardening. But if you were the Capability Brown of ants, you could indeed regard this as a shrubbery.

It being Sunday, the bustling metropolis that is downtown Alvechurch was closed apart from the Co-Op, so we did not get to visit the boutique called Gin & Pickles.

I was surprised to discover that that was not the owners’ names, or some form of obscure sexual innuendo, but it is in fact a list of the products they sell. I can imagine that living in Alvechurch might be enough to drive you to gin, but I have never heard of anyone resorting to pickles to assuage the pangs of suburban sprawl. Maybe I have just not been doing pickles right.

Alvechurch was originally Aelgiva’s Church in Saxon times, but the church itself is dedicated to St Lawrence. Though bits of it may date back to late Norman times it has been hacked around over the centuries, most notably by the Victorians. The tower is mostly 15th century.

These guys are probably pretty old, too.

This is what living in Alvechurch for all those years does for you.

The 20th century’s contribution to mucking up the church was an ark shaped brick and glass concert hall stuck on one side like a leech sucking blood from the stonework.

It doesn’t match the rest of the church, but then the church is a bit of patchwork anyhow, so what the hell.

They should just throw in a 3D printed car wash and baptismal service to complete the chaos.

Alvechurch probably isn’t really that bad. We are just bitter because there are no charity shops, and we are stuck here till tomorrow when a mechanic can get to us. A metal bar that holds our alternator in place broke (a problem we have had before). I was able to get the part welded back together at Alvechurch Marina (who were really nice about it and didn’t even charge me) but it is really awkward to get it back in place, and when it breaks again I want to have someone else to blame.

In the mean time we got to watch a boat being lifted out of the canal by crane, so if you want to know what narrowboats look like underwater, here you go.