I'm taking a piece of my neighbourhood with me, and that is not a metaphor.

A few weeks ago I was walking south on Caroline Street in search of breakfast, nursing what I’ll delicately refer to as a morning head. I noticed one of the street cleaners of the area staring down at the floor some yards ahead. As I approached he took a picture of something on his phone, and it wasn’t until I passed him that I realised he was looking at a hole in the ground between the cobblestones, where once laid one of their number. It flashed upon me in horror that the absentee cobblestone was in fact inside my flat.

The shame and memory of the night before came rushing back to me. Reader, I promise you that I was not drunk. Tipsy? Certainly. Squiffy? Just a bit. Intoxicated? Perhaps. But certainly not drunk. And walking home, afloat, depressed and spiralling I noticed a loose cobblestone. The stone had been loose for some time and as I looked at it I thought about the many cobbles of the road. Who had walked on these very stones, trodden this very ground? Matthew Bolton? James Watt? Ozzy Osbourne? Almost certainly none of these, in fact; but the city did nurture a certain young man through some of the hardest times of his life. The cobbled streets, the grass on St Paul’s Square, even the eyesore of the BT Tower have shown me some comfort as a place to return to when all around is unsteady.

So then, after all, why not? Why shouldn’t I keep it? I have given to this city as it has given to me, in love and praise. I’ve brushed off the laughing replies of others when I’ve pronounced that this is the greatest city in the world. And whether I still believe that or not, like some key to the city, I believe it earned me some take-home bauble of appreciation.

A day or so after I purloined the article, and witnessing the street cleaner photographing the scene, and CSI had come around to do a thorough sweep, and they’d put one of those chalk outlines around the whole, the defendant - excuse me, I - looked out of my window to see that the road was closed, with various road maintenance vehicles outside. My harmless skullduggery had lead to the disruption of traffic, with worse to come: for as I walked the street later that day, once more at large, I found my paving stone had been replaced. Not by another paving stone adequately fixed into place, but by a pool of garish black tarmac. The worst of my guilt would come not from taking the stone, not from the road closure, but from the cognisance I have made my home all the worse to look at. In attempting to seize for myself a small detail of the beauty of the place, I have inadvertently corrupted it.

Now, it’s possible you, the passer-by, wouldn’t notice it to walk past. There are likely tens of people every day walking over it, and nobody has been disgusted enough to vomit on the side of the road - unless of course the street cleaners are dealing with it before it hits the ground. But, if you yourself are walking up the gentle hill towards the Jewellery Quarter and see an ugly crater of black asphalt amidst some gorgeous square stones, you have my apologies. But know that Birmingham’s loss will be my gain for as long as I shall live. Or at least until it becomes inconvenient to keep a 6-kilogram rock around the flat.