Parkway

He's eight feet tall and he stands in some woods next to the Sheffield Parkway. Just standing there, watching the traffic go by. I'd heard about him and finally today I made a special diversion just to find him. Down Richmond Park Avenue and then along leafy paths into Bowden Housteads Wood. Tall, muscular and slightly menacing, he looked like a Sheffield foundryman of yore, mingled with a race of space invaders from "Dr Who". The sun was behind him so he was hard to capture with a camera. He's made of steel - not the stainless sort that was invented here in Sheffield - but carbon steel - the sort used for girders and ship building. He was designed by a young sculptor called Jason Thomson back in 2001. 

To tell you the truth, I think it is typical of the city of Sheffield - to hide an image of our proud steel industry in some woods where hardly anybody will notice it. It's the same with football (soccer to our American friends), the game as we know it began in this city which boasts the two oldest football clubs in the world - Sheffield F.C. and Hallam F.C. . And yet where's the image to declare that special position in sporting history? Where's the spotlight? Where's the tub thumping? It's as if it never really happened and many visitors will have passed through the city not realising that properly organised football began amongst this city's hills. We even have the oldest football ground in the world - The Hallam F.C. Sandygate Road ground. But shh! - Don't ell anybody, we like to keep that secret too!

Here's Parkway Man...if I had a hammer:-

Rawmarsh

Once I was a teacher but now I am a walker. When next I have to fill in a form that asks for my occupation, I will say "walker". Mind you, perhaps I could say "writer" because last Saturday I met somebody I had never met before who asked, "Aren't you a writer?". I was mystified but also rather pleased. She had come across my e-book, "The Headland". But until my writing becomes more successful, I think I ought to stick to being a "walker".

It has become my habit to mix up  walks - not always chocolate box hilly walking country as in The Peak District but also urban walks or walks round about industrial neighbourhoods. Yesterday, I drove to Rawmarsh north of Rotherham. It holds a special place in my heart because it was here that my mother was raised in the late nineteen twenties and into the thirties. She shared many fond memories of the place and the adventures she had there, living with the Whites - my great grandmother and my great grandfather who, I am proud to relate, was a coal miner at nearby New Stubbin pit.

Unusually for a working class family in the nineteen twenties, my grandparents split up and Mum - with her younger brother Derek had to escape to Rawmarsh in what I think of as their apocryphal walk - past dirty coal mines and smoky railway yards - over canals and fetid pools all the way from Mexborough to Rawmarsh - about four miles. They were both under ten years old but they found happiness and security with their maternal grandparents. Nevertheless, the emotional scars of that apparent parental rejection remained with Mum until her dying day and it was never fully assuaged by the love and kindness that she found in 13 Quarry Street, Rawmarsh - close to Rosehill Park.

That was where I parked yesterday before walking to Wath-upon-Dearne, then on to Swinton and Kilnhurst. The coalmines have all gone thanks to Thatcher and her spiteful Tory henchmen - who were determined to bleed the very heart of Britain's coal mining industry back in the nineteen eighties. Yet the ghosts of our country's hundred year coalrush are less easily exorcised.

I was walking along streets and past buildings and fields that Mum knew well - before television, before air travel, before supermarkets and before World War II. That was a war that changed her life utterly and without it I wouldn't even be here. As a bright young office girl of nineteen, she joined the Women's Royal Airforce - the WAAF - and left grimy, parochial Rawmarsh behind. She was soon shipped to India where she worked in administration for the Royal Air Force in Delhi. It was there that she met Philip - a young officer in the meteorological department who was also a recently qualified primary school teacher from Malton, Yorkshire. That man was my father.

Images from the walk:-

13 Quarry Street, Rawmarsh

Rowan berries - Wath Golf Course - former coal-mining territority

The derelict Dearne and Dove canal at Swinton - for a hundred and forty years
it carried coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield

St Thomas's Church, Kilnhurst with a memorial to the local pit which "died" in 1989

Sad face - entrance to Kilnhurst church

Mum's old school - Rosehill, Rawmarsh

Poem

Bounded in a Nutshell

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone  –  “A Fairytale of New York"  by Shane MacGowan & Jem Finer (1988)

Bounded in a nutshell
Sheltered from a storm
Small beneath the stars
Waiting for the dawn.
Summoned by a church bell
Lineage curtails
Paths forever twisting
Longing still prevails.
Bad dreams bounce
Like pinballs
Inside an aching skull
Taps that run forever
In a cup that’s never full.

Standing on a headland
Looking out to sea
Walking through a graveyard
Tracing history.
Doomed to be a dead man
Blood inside us pounds
Far off in the jungle
Another drumbeat sounds.
Infinite space
Like a kingdom
In a dream
Dwells here in the shadows
Of who we might have been.

Foxes

We have lived in this humble 1920's semi-detached house in the suburbs of Sheffield since 1989. When we first moved here, I swear we never saw any urban foxes. I recall a snowy morning several years ago when I was munching toast and gulping tea before setting off to work. I looked out across our white garden wondering how difficult the forthcoming drive to Parson Cross would be when I saw a nose protruding from our privet hedge. Then he stepped forward.

It was a fox, an urban fox and he saw me looking out at him before he tiptoed over the snow. It was one of those moments when you just wish you had a camera in your hands and that image of the fox peeping from the hedge amidst the white stuff imprinted itself in my mind's photo library.

In the last ten years, sightings of foxes in our neighbourhood have increased. At night I'd occasionally see flashes of these cunning creatures disappearing behind parked cars but for the past year, when returning from the local pub, I have regularly seen a certain bold  fox  who comes within ten metres of me and doesn't seem particularly alarmed. On a few occasions, I have tried to coax her to me with the sort of pursed lipped noises I once used with our pet cats. She looks at me and seems tempted - often stepping forward a metre or so before thinking better of it and running away.

On Saturday, I had been to do some shopping at "Lidl" on Chesterfield Road. Turning into Gisborne Road on a bright November afternoon, I had to pull over to the kerb because something was going on at the next road junction. Two healthy male foxes were having some kind of stand-off, right there on the tarmac. There was a sort of territorial supremacy dance with furtive glances  up and down the road. I watched them for three or four minutes before another vehicle drove past and they disappeared down garden paths. It was the middle of the day.

Then yesterday, after I'd spent a couple of hours on garden duty, I thought I'd try yet again to light the soggy bonfire I built in September. It was five o'clock but already dark. The fire was beginning to crackle and I was keeping my fingers crossed that this time it might really catch. Then I saw something move on the other side of the bonfire - just two metres away. Instinctively, I yelled out threateningly - "Grrah!" before realising it was a big dog fox - perhaps one of the streetfighters I'd seen on Saturday. In the flickering firelight, he just looked at me as if to say - "Who the hell are you?" then he padded over to my little bamboo grove under the apple trees where he appeared to cock one of his back legs.

I just stood there quietly watching. I thought he would disappear through the hedge into next door's garden but gingerly he came back to check me out. For a moment I had an eerie premonition that soon I would be physically fighting off a bold and hungry fox - wrestling him on the ground and trying to get my hands round his foxy throat as he tried to chomp chunks of meat off me. But it didn't happen. I stepped forward and he backed off. The little coward! Mind you, I have been told before that I don't taste very nice - though possibly, I might have simply outfoxed him.

Sparrowpit

Sparrowpit? An unusual name for a village but I understand that it is a name derived from the now defunct  local fluorspar mining - spar row pit.  It sits in the High Peak overlooking Rushup Vale and seems to possess a different, harsher climate than the one we are used to in Sheffield. For example, yesterday I left my adopted city when it was bathed in bright November sunshine - the sky was blue and the grass was green - but by Sparrowpit the earth was clad in swirling mist, low-lying clouds and the fields were frosted white.

Fortunately, as I parked the car and squeezed into my walking boots, the thick mist in the high valley started to clear and pale images of faraway farms were revealed. But as I walked up to Rushup Edge and then down to Stonyford along an ancient packhorse track, tongues of  the grey-whiteness returned.

Along to Maglow Farm then down to Bagshaw and Blackbrook, huffing and puffing up the hill above Barmoor Clough to wide sheep pastures and then onwards towards Bolt Edge and Barmoor where at High Barmoor Farm I encountered a farmer who I would love to have photographed given his dress sense. Helpfully, he guided me through the farmyard from where the little used public footpath strikes out. His face was reddened and gnarled by sixty High Peak winters and if he had been modelling for an alternative men's fashion magazine you'd have seen a collarless grey striped shirt, a holey lime green V-necked sweater, a padded overshirt - two sizes two big - in Royal Stewart tartan, khaki trews with a baling string belt, wellington boots with turnover tops - coated in cow shit and on his unkempt mop of greying hair a black beanie hat at a jaunty angle. Eat your heart out Giorgio Armani!

And then over the fields past madly barking dogs - "They'll not hurt you love!". Oh yeah! And then passing the sad wreckage of a tumbledown farmhouse on the eastern side of Sparrowpit. A lovely three hour walk made more interesting by the flirtatious November mists.

"The Wanted Inn" at Sparrowpit

Sheep in the mist by Rushup Edge

Town

This morning I was tempted to head out to The Peak District again for a long country walk. Instead, I marched in to the city centre ("town") to see "The Master" at our "Showroom" cinema. The light was beautiful and so for once I took my camera with me. Rather than waffling on and boring you to death as I usually do  - here are six urban snaps from today's excursion:-

Old letteing on the windows of Russell Brothers' disused factory.

Charles Darwin mural by "Rocket01"

Urban graffiti by Kid Acne

Modern buildings in Sheffield's city centre

Keating Tower - social housing

Back at Banner Cross, the light is fading
now. In this pub, I have spent a king's ransom

Malapropisms

"Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel. " - Katherine de Chevalle

"He's a wolf in cheap clothing." - Robert Brague

"Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child."
Dan Quayle, former US Vice President

"Electrocution lessons help to improve diction." - Ian Rhodes (aka Shooting Parrots)

"It's nice to go widow shopping at Christmas." - Mick from "Mick's Page"

"After a long air flight, it is reassuring to get your feet back onto terracotta." - Libby (from The Midlands)

"A triangle with all its sides equal is called an equatorial triangle." - Daphne Franks

"A rolling stone gathers no moths" - Jan Blawat

"At New Year I like to attend a Scottish Mahogany" - Maurice the Hippo (Angola)

" 'Don't' is a contraption." - Jennyta (Wrexham, Wales)

"I don't understand. You need to be a bit more pacific."  - Helen (Brisbane)

"It'a a long play but there's an intercourse in the middle." - Earl John Gray

"If you swallow poison, you should take an anecdote." - Mountain Thyme (Colorado)

" The doctor told him he had very close veins" - Dave (Hamilton NZ)

"One of my favourite songs is Michael Rode the Girl Next Door" -Brian (Catalonia, near Spain)