Kira told me she’d adapted it from a Chicago performance group called Goat Island. The event was an aimless and leaderless wander as a group (or about 15 people) setting off from what was then VIVID’s space on Heath Mill Lane in Digbeth.

Fag ends littered the floor, and on closer inspection the earth underneath our feet was seen to be rising up. Office workers standing around having a well-earned fag and a chat eyed us with bafflement and bemusement. ‘What are you doing’ they asked? ‘Seeing.’ ‘Right’.

If you take up drawing, it’s actually seeing that you learn first, and what a discrepancy there is between what is there and what we usually record, whether that means draw, see or remember.

I’m always on the lookout for seating in public squares in the city: seated people observe their environment and talk to each other. Public seating is a rarity in city centre Birmingham—keep shopping, is the general idea.

Last year, I was given Tom Bolton’s wonderful book ‘London’s Lost Rivers’ which describes the overland course above seven of London’s underground rivers. Each river has become lost by design: at some point during London’s growth, the need for new land has superseded the need for a river.

We met with local artist Fran Wilde, who would be leading the walk into Cradley Heath. She was standing in front of wedding parties and groups of men in shirts ready for a day out. Apologies were made for a local councillor who sadly couldn’t make the walk because of an ill dog, and we were holding our breath for the Sandwell Walking Officer and the owner of the Hollybush Arts Centre.

The village ambience, and local constabulary, came off worse in that evening’s screening of You’ve Been Trumped: the story of Scottish Highlanders being squeezed out of their homes and lives by the evil golf tyrant tycoon Donald Trump as he seeks to build the world’s best (= most expensive) golf course. Dunes were bulldozed, electricity was cut and tears were shed – on screen and in the audience.

‘Before Ozzy was one of the biggest rock stars in the world, he was a rather unsuccessful criminal. Rob shows us the shop he attempted to burgle (which was behind his own house), and the painful-looking measures people put in place to keep the likes of Ozzy off their property’.

The first thing you notice are the chains: they appear in design everywhere, like they once did in industry. A famous anchor, now at the bottom of the Atlantic, had its origins here.

Looking at Victorian Architecture can be like seeing evidence from an ancient civilisation, one far in advance of our own.

His style, once you start to recognise it, is uniquely his. Stylised, streamlined and slightly cartoon-like but with real depth, fluidity and rhythm. The ball of a thumb is carved as richly and as memorably as a face.