The police have kindly told him his credit card, driving license and ID are in the found property office of a city centre station. C’mon and get it. Whoa. Someone is using my address for their identity. Will I come home one night to find a full family devouring my dinner, watching my TV, redecorating the back room, using my…you get it.

It is alarming to think for some reason a person has set up this fictional address which unfortunately is where I live. And where I have lived for the past three decades. I visit the police this week to sort it out so they can see it for what it is. (And saying that, I’m not even sure what ‘that’ it is).

I assuage my paranoia and go to eat. There is a Persian cafe down the road. The local postmaster – from Tehran- decided there was more money in fetajeen, lamb and rice than second class stamps. It is delicious. But I could have gone to one of the ubiquitous curry houses, or the Syrian cafe which has equally high standards with its walnuts, its pomegranates, its mint tea and sweet sticky baklava.

My neighbourhood, for so long rundown and littered with empty shops, is booming. There are no boarded-up fronts. Chains such as Pizza Express and Costa Coffee are grabbing properties as they empty.

Of course, this begins a dichotomy between those who back the small independent operations and those that feel “As long as it’s being used, it’s good”. It is the roller coaster of living in a city. Up and down. Up and down. I’ll think about it as I head out for the Cuban restaurant across the road from me.

This all reflects well on where I live. My city, Birmingham, has a lousy reputation among the British, mostly from folks who have never been here. Now it’s improving. Yes, it is scarred by the remnants of the old smokestack  industries: steel, glass, textiles, metal-bashing. But you can still take a relaxing walk and get into the centre by the canals and avoid the main arteries and the unending traffic which rams through the streets because, shamefully, there has never been a proper underground built in this, the country’s second largest city.

Birmingham canals

The canals are an odd anachronism. They were built as ribbons of water to transport commerce in the early decades of the 19thc. They are remarkable. And as soon as many of them were complete…wham…along come the railways. They were old fashioned. Inert.

Today, the towpaths are in great shape for walking and cycling. Once in a while a canalboat bustles through the placid waters. I roll through my local park and to my local canal. It is a straight line into the centre and you see the urban world from another angle.“What road is that?” a friend asks as we go through a tunnel under a major thoroughfare. It is  all so different, as if you are holding a map upside down and the tail of South America points north.