Luxury's Disappointments

All Images: Central Birmingham, March 2016

These three images were collected close together, the other day - just outside Birmingham's 'exclusive' Mailbox shopping centre, (let's call a spade a spade).  In one way or another, they seem to point towards the priorities of a society fixated on the notion of 'luxury'.  They also tap into my uber-anoraky interest in urban parking provision.

I guess the first would make the point more eloquently if that were a newer, properly top-of-the-range Merc, but it still seems to suggest how, with ever louder exhortations to 'aspire', - directed at a population increasingly divided between 'haves' and 'have-nots', some will always grab their taste of the high-life in whatever opportunist manner they can.

That car can only have been joy-ridden, can't it? The jaunty angle at which it has been 'parked' in one of the city centre's most heavily regulated parking zones surely speaks volumes.  I also love the wonky tilt of the status-symbol bonnet mascot.  Has someone tried to pry it off - do you think?  What really delights me is the way the slow, heavy-handed response of officialdom appears be to simply impose one parking fine after another.  If only as much diligence were applied to analysing the societal tensions and priorities that may have contributed to the situation in the first place, - or even to just towing it away after a couple of days.  Who's ultimately liable to pay those fines, I wonder?

In my fantasy, I'd like to think the (possibly, shop-lifted) champagne packaging was discarded by the departing joy-riders, (it was very near the car), - although the two events are probably unrelated in reality.

Either way, it seems to suggest something of the decadence, deluded appeal, and race for instant gratification of the 'Champagne Lifestyle'.  When sipped on a special occasion, a glass of bubbly is, of course, one of life's great pleasures, (a Champaign Socialist?, - me?).  When glugged by the bottle-full, and the box - discarded in the street to become part of the general mulch of detritus, it seems to suggest something rather different.

Right, I'm off to put on my hair shirt, eat a bowl of gruel, and find an improving pamphlet to read...