And speaking of gennels (pronounced jennels), or ginnels or snickets, a jitty in Leicestershire, a jigger in Liverpool, or whatever (I may not have all those spellings quite right), here‘s a picture I took a while back on a return trip to Sheffield:
This is the place where I was walking when I was about eleven years old, on my way to the library – yes, I was a swat (I said swat) - I met a man with a stethoscope in his pocket who engaged me in conversation. He looked like a doctor and I believed he was one, but I can’t swear that he was or wasn’t, and although he neither said or did anything inappropriate, in fact he talked to me like I was a grown up, which I found flattering. When I got home and reported the meeting to my dad I could see he was troubled, even as he didn’t want to make too big of a deal out of it. But neither did he speak to me like a grownup. Oh the hideous responsibilities of fatherhood.
This is also from Sheffield, it might be a gennel but really I think it’s just an alley:
This is in Halesworth and I've walked down it many times. I’d say it’s not really a gennel, not least that it has a name, official name is Rectory Lane (known locally as Duck Lane) and I have a feeling that gennels, by definition, nameless, but I do like it because of the crinkle crankle wall, good for directing heat into specific areas of the garden on the other side:
On Sunday I was walking in Hampstead Garden Suburb and I learned that the word they use there is twitten. Twittens look like this:
The word is Sussex dialect apparently, and presumably it’s got something to do with ‘betwixt and between,’ though I can’t imagine how it got to NW3.
