Reasons to be cheerful?

Not for the first time in my life I’ve been reminded that I’m lucky I no longer live in Coventry, this time by my old schoolmate Al, who does still live there. This happened just down the road from where he lives, outside a pub we regularly drink in on my visits back there. It’s not a particularly rough pub (if it was I wouldn’t dare go in there), though being a Wetherspoon’s outfit it does attract cheapskate punters like me, and it’s in quite a pleasant suburb of town, positively posh by Coventry standards. And yes, you read it right, these men were apparently “probably in their fifties”. I acknowledge that I myself still have yet to win any prizes for my zen calm and generally well-adjusted approach towards life, notwithstanding the number of such competitions I’ve entered, and some might sound a cautionary note that you can take the man out of Coventry but you can’t take Coventry out of the man. Nevertheless, I hope, and I’m reasonably confident, that I won’t be indulging in this kind of thing when (or if) I reach my fifties.

Meanwhile one poor soul from nearby Birmingham met his maker through his involvement in a quite different type of activity. What on earth is happening to the men of the Midlands?