Shirts

One's birthday is tomorrow. One was asked what one wanted as a present. One suggested a denim shirt. One went with one's wife yesterday to the Meadowhall shopping palace where one tried on several shirts. One couldn't find a suitable shirt - one that fitted pefectly. One was disappointed. One will need to visit a couple of city centre shops today - including John Lewis. One hopes to have better luck.

Now when it comes to wearing shirts, I am a little old-fashioned. I prefer to tuck my shirts in to my trousers. It's what my father and previous generations of men always did. Tucking your shirt in keeps out draughts and avoids accidental belly exposure which could easily drive female onlookers wild with desire.

However, in recent years more and more men have been wearing their shirts outside their trousers and many shirts are now designed with that use in mind. Consequently, a lot of shirts are now significantly shorter than they would have been in past times so "tuckers in" like me find that many modern shirts are just too short. When you sit down the shirt rides up and frequently comes out over the waist band. I get sick and tired of constantly having to tuck shirts in - even having to unbutton my trews to perform said manoeuvre.

When the fashion of "untucking" first began a few years back I would occasionally advise men I met that their shirts were out - not realising that it was  a deliberate choice. To me, when a man wears his shirt out it is as if he is wearing an itsy bitsy mini dress or an agricultural smock. If any "untuckers" are reading this, I say let's turn back the tide lads. Tuck yer bloody shirts in you silly...untuckers!

Fantasy

Tick tock...tick tock. For three nights, I had been sitting in the darkness. Waiting. Occasionally, I heard the wailing of ambulance sirens heading up to King's College Hospital. Just before three a.m. on the Sunday, I heard men's voices outside the bathroom window. But it was a false alarm.

By Monday night, I was beginning to think that my prey would never arrive. I was tired. And it was no fun sitting silently in my daughter's darkened flat in Camberwell. I couldn't watch television or surf the net, checking out faraway blogs. The screen light would be a give away. The night hours had passed so slowly. Tick tock...tick tock. This was going to be the last night. In the morning I would travel back to Sheffield.

I must have nodded off around midnight - descending into the dark well of sleep. Down down. To a place of memories and imaginings. But less than an hour later, I was sitting bolt upright. There was a noise at the entrance door. A faint noise. A rat scratching perhaps. The sound of a key in the lock.

This is what I had been waiting for and yet my heart began to pump so violently that it threatened to burst out of my rib cage. Conscious of  every breath I was taking, I stood up as quietly as a Native American scout and moved behind the door of the lounge. Waiting.

And not a moment too soon. The intruder was in the flat now. It was too late to change my mind or press "replay" on the DVD of my life. I could hear him moving quietly, cautiously, There was a pale beam from an electric torch or phone. He was in the kitchen. He was opening drawers. I heard him mutter, "Shit" and "Fuck" under his breath. What if he had a knife...or worse? A gun? It was too late now. No replay.

And then, almost before I knew it, he was stepping into the lounge. He was on the other side of the door, his torch beam on the far wall. He took another step forward and I saw his silhouette against the uncurtained window. This was my moment. Do or die.

The bedspread was over his head in an instant and he was down on the floor with a great harrumph. As I brought him down, like a sack of spuds, his head hit the edge of the mahogany coffee table. Though the wind was knocked out of him, muffled protests emerged from beneath the quilt. He was struggling like a sheep at shearing time but I was in charge. For good measure I gave his head a couple of solid punches and using unsavoury expletives demanded his silence as I reached up to the light switch.

Peeling back the bedspread, my quarry now came into view. No more than twenty with a suggestion of acne - either in recession or bubbling under. I couldn't tell. There was some sort of tattoo on the nape of his neck and I noticed a foul odour of tobacco smoke on his breath. His left eye socket was starting to swell.

He tried to buck me off but by now my knees were pressing hard into his shoulders. He was well and truly trapped. It's not easy to dislodge a seventeen and a half stone Yorkshireman who is intent on revenge. 

"Wot you want? Wot you what?" he asked in his whining Thames estuary accent and when he tried to spit at me I am afraid I lost my temper momentarily and loosened his front teeth with my right fist. He calmed down then so I was able to explain that I had been waiting for him and that he had had no right whatsoever to steal my daughter's handbag and her boyfriend's Macbook. 

I reached under the sofa for the washing line and the belts. I had placed them there at the start of the long weekend in anticipation of this moment. It was a struggle but my will prevailed and soon the rat was trussed up, tied to a chair. I noticed he was trembling and that he had most certainly peed his trousers. Disgusting little rat.

"Wot you gonna do?" he whined.

But I hadn't thought ahead that far.

I got his mobile phone out of his jacket pocket and began to thumb through his contacts..."Mum", "Nan" and a bunch of random names that meant nothing to me.

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As some of you will recall my daughter was robbed last Tuesday evening. Her handbag contained the keys to her own flat in south London and sure enough this past weekend the robber travelled down to  Camberwell to rob her a second time. She was away at a wedding in North Yorkshire and then she had to work in Manchester on Monday. When she got back, she found the door to her flat had been left open and a few items had been stolen but nothing of great value because she had anticipated such a visit and had even had one of the locks changed. But still the rat came in. In reality, I am sorry to say that  I wasn't waiting for him. As the title of this blogpost suggests, all of that was just a delicious fantasy.

Arrivals

The East Yorkshire village of my childhood was entirely white. We were of Anglo-Saxon or Viking stock apart from an Irish family who lived up High Stile in one of the pebbledash council houses on Trinity Close. The very  idea of a "multicultural society" would have made us frown with sheer puzzlement.

It's a different world nowadays. Our capital city, London, has become an exciting melting pot of cultures and races. Every nation on Earth is represented there but back in the sixties, the vast majority of Londoners were still white Anglo Saxons. In the past fifty years, such multiculturalism has rippled throughout the land so that every one of our cities now has a significant volume of residents whose racial origins lie overseas.

There has been so much movement of people - not just in Europe but across the world. No matter what you might think of this acceleration, we simply cannot turn the clock back. It is how it is and we must all learn to embrace this new reality.

On Sunday I visited a super photographic exhibition in Weston Park Museum. It was called "Arrivals: Making Sheffield Home" by Jeremy Abrahams. There were some fifty enlarged and rather beautiful pictures of people who came to Sheffield from other lands. They were each asked to choose their own picture locations - from anywhere in the city. They chose workplaces, parks, studios, streets or  living rooms and each one of the subjects had had positive things to say about this city and how they had made it their home. It made me feel quite humbled.

In fact I recognised four of the "arrivals". There was Leni, a New York teacher who came here in 1968  and Renata, a Polish activist who arrived as a political refugee in the late eighties. She often pops in the Oxfam shop where I work to check out stock changes or make donations. And there was Annie from Singapore and a West Indian fellow I knew when we lived up at Crookes. His manner of speaking English meant total attention was required to gain any kind of comprehension.

Each one of those photos contained the image of a unique human being. Someone just like you or me. Someone who has had ups and downs in life. Someone who has sought happiness through the years, striving to be the best person they can be and to make the most of the hands that life and circumstance have  dealt them.

If  Jeremy Abrahams had continued with his project - producing a photograph and recording a little story for every one of  Sheffield's half a million citizens, the result would have been an even more amazing and vibrant mosaic that spoke ever more positively for humanity and yet more powerfully against idle racial prejudice.

Elephants

Fifty eight fibreglass elephants that have been around our city all summer are starting to leave. Below you can see "Hendophant" being covered in bubble wrap. He was situated close to the old Henderson's Relish factory and that's why his colours are orange and black.

He was soon to be loaded on to this vehicle , ready for his journey to the elephant graveyard:-

Half an hour beforehand, I had been in  Weston Park where I spotted three more of the elephants. Like Hendophant, they all belong to The Herd of Sheffield. I blogged about them earlier this summer. See this post.

They are not really going to the elephant graveyard - I was lying about that. In fact, they are going to The Crucible Theatre where - on October 20th - they will be sold to the highest bidders in a charity auction. I wonder how much they will go for. We would like one in our garden to keep Beau and Peep company but I have a feeling their prices will be slightly beyond us. However, monetary donations and pledges from visiting bloggers and readers would probably help us to secure an elephant. How much will you give? All money raised will go to Sheffield Children's Hospital.

Sandal

Sandal Castle ruins rise on the horizon, looking over the lake at Pugneys Country Park

In bygone times, disused English castles were commonly treated as stone quarries by local builders. There was no sentimentality or hesitation. They arrived with carts and hauled the stone away leaving tumbledown ruins behind them. Here in the city of Sheffield, we once had a large and significant castle. It stood on a bend of The River Don and played an important role in the history of northern England for four hundred years. But when it fell into disuse, almost all the castle's thousands of stone blocks were pilfered. Today, only the foundations remain to hint at once was.

Twenty miles north of Sheffield is the much smaller city of Wakefield. It was once the county town of The West Riding of Yorkshire and is rich in history. It had two strategically important castles. In the shadow of one of them, Sandal Castle, The Battle of Wakefield occurred on December 30th 1460, during the Wars of the Roses.

Twenty three years after that bloody battle, King Richard III decided that Sandal Castle would become his northern stronghold. He ordered many improvements to the castle that had by 1483 been in existence for over three hundred and fifty years. However, in 1485 Richard died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in Warwickshire so consequently his occupancy of Sandal Castle was short-lived.

A hundred and eighty years after Richard III's death, Sandal Castle was a Royalist base during the English Civil War and was besieged at least three times by Parliamentary forces. From that time onwards, the castle fell into disrepair and right up to the middle of the nineteenth century it was still being used as a convenient stone quarry by local people whose main objects in life did not include the preservation of historical buildings.

I am telling you all of this because I visited Sandal Castle yesterday. The text is just background to my photographs. You can see how little of the original construction remains - but enough to give an evocative sense of the location and what once was. You can almost hear the battle cries.

Sandal Castle looking to Emley Moor telecommunications mast

Updates

The beloved daughter got an emergency locksmith in to fit a new Yale lock (£115). The designer bag with the designer purse (circa £250) contained a ring from a friend in Leeds (£200). It was going to have a new ruby fitted. She cancelled all her cards straight away and her boss was able to loan her his last i-phone for free. So apart from the bitter memory of this robbery and the sick feeling of violation, she's moving on.

Financially, her boyfriend's loss was bigger - a brand new i-pad costing about £600.

Did you know that if you lose an i-phone, it is possible to track it down on a map? The beloved daughter did this and located her phone in a  block of flats two streets away but apparently the police were not interested. I guess the location was too imprecise. They could hardly go ransacking twenty apartments to find her phone.

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Meanwhile in Bolton, Lancashire a greedy beast called Sam Allardyce crept out of his luxury home complaining of entrapment and that he was only "helping out a friend". He was ensnared by "The Daily Telegraph", his greed exposed for all to see. He was the manager of England's national football team for just two months, on a reported £3 million a year salary and yet old habits die hard. He wanted more and he still couldn't find it in himself to deliver a true, heartfelt apology to this football loving country. This will live with him till he is shovelled into his grave. It is obvious that "The Daily Telegraph" didn't target him randomly. They knew what this big-headed man was about. Not so big now are you Big Sam? More like Pig Sam...

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Here in Blogworld, some of us bees are making honey. Regular bloggers like Earl Gray, Steve J. Reed MP, Meike, Tamborine Lee and Red Deer Red leave offerings for their fans quite frequently. But some bloggers have completely dried up or gone away. They may be under the illusion that this is a free world and they can do what they want. They can't. I still miss Daphne Franks, and Friday's Web, Brad the Gorilla and now Tom at "A Hippo on the Lawn". Even garrulous Helen from Brisbane is unproductive these days and old timer Adrian still hasn't sorted out his connectivity. Over in the leafy suburbs of Manchester-on-Irwell, Ian has returned from extinction to resurrect his "Shooting Parrots" blog. I love his witty and thoughtfully constructed "Sunday Round-Up" every week. Please check the last one out here. How come I am the only idiot who has so far left a comment? All that great work deserves many more visitors. STP! Save The Parrot!

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In eastern Aleppo, a four year old child is trapped in the bombsite  rubble. Russian MIGs swoop overhead dropping their costly payloads. "It wasn't us! It wasn't us!" turnip-faced Russian spokesmen declare on behalf of Donald J. Putin. The four year old child's dusty right  arm reaches up through a little hole in the mess of concrete. For a moment, it stretches for the sun or perhaps for help but no one comes. Not even Bashar Hafez al-Assad to save his people so of course he doesn't see that thin arm fall in slow motion as the small child's subterranean heart stops beating. He never learnt the words to "All You Need Is Love".

Robbery

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Our lovely daughter Frances was twenty eight on Monday after a happy birthday weekend down in London. But last night (Tuesday) she phoned up in distress to say that she and her boyfriend had been robbed.

Some sneaky, lowlife scumbag got into her boyfriend's Bethnal Green apartment and grabbed his laptop from the bed plus Frances's handbag before scuttling away like a rat in a dank cellar.

The handbag contained her purse - including bank cards, driving licence and the £50 that her boss had kindly given her as a birthday bonus. Amongst other things, the cherished designer bag also contained a doctor's prescription note with her address upon it  and the keys to her own flat in Camberwell,

Of course she was worried about the possibility of a second robbery with the rat making his way to South London to do the dirty deed. 

In ten days time she is scheduled to move out of the Camberwell flat and her flatmate has already departed. To borrow that friend's keys, Frances needed her i-phone but guess where that was? Yes. In the bag and worse than that - uninsured.

When she phoned at nine thirty last night, they were waiting for the police to arrive and the situation with her Camberwell flat hadn't been resolved. We contacted our son Ian who lives in north London and he was planning to come to his sister's assistance.  

Sheffield is four hours north of the capital and besides, if I had jumped in the car, what could I have done? All I could say to her was, "I know it's not much comfort but in a week's time this horrible business won't seem so bad. Just a nasty historical event."

I don't know if sneak thieves come into Blogworld but if you are reading this Ratty, I challenge you to a bare-knuckle fight. I'm going to make mincemeat of you young man and teach you a lesson you will never forget. When you look in your bathroom mirror you will see something resembling a squashed helping of  lasagne. Shame on you you selfish nobody!