Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains – in Birmingham anyway, whose city centre has been devoured over the last four years by the all-encompassing Bullring, a super concentration of chain store outlets and franchises in which all sense of locality deserts you. From Debenhams and Tesco to Phone4U and Foot Locker, with a starburst of Starbucks, a cluster of Costas, and the inevitable Subways and sub-Subways: Baguette World, Baguette Du Monde, Baguette Delicieux, Baguette Cetera (actually, I made that one up, but it has a nice ring). You could be anywhere in the world. It’s possible that some visitors welcome the distraction from being in Birmingham; I’d never be so unkind.

At the Art Gallery, there is an excellent exhibition of the life and works of Martin Boulton, Enlightenment entrepreneur and industrial revolutionary, sometime associate of James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood, to remind the visitor that Birmingham on his death 200 years ago was a workshop to the world. Today the chief form of employment seems to be standing in the street holding signs pointing to the nearest Subway, the dark satanic sandwich mill of its day.

From Edgbaston, meanwhile, which has hosted 16 draws in its last 20 first-class matches, the news is much the same: another regulation ECB belter, shorn of grass, coloured to a nice tint of straw, interchangeable with every other Test pitch in the country. Steve Rouse has described it as ‘low and slow’, forecast ‘bloody hard work for the bowlers’, and described the resistance of the county’s cricket director Ashley Giles to preparations that might have encouraged the bowlers further. Neither this nor the forecast rain bode well.

Recent evidence is in. How much more interesting was the Lord’s Test on the second day when the pitch, lightly dappled with rain, suddenly started giving the bowlers some assistance? Yet administrators, it seems, would much rather a five-day draw than a three-day shoot-out in which the bowlers hold the upper hand; they would sooner risk resentful boredom than refund. Trouble is that this hardly makes Test matches what is claimed for them: that they are the most complete and thorough examination of the technique and temperament of a cricketer.

If you produce chain store pitches, of uniform quality and character, then don’t be surprised if they breed formulaic and mundane chain store Tests.