BUT IT'S OK

 You know I’ve always felt ambivalent about Sergeant Pepper.  For every cracking song like 

‘A Day in the Life’ there’s some horror like ‘Lovely Rita.’

 

But without wanting to appear perverse, the song I really used to like and still do is ‘Good Morning,’ which apparently John Lennon hated, saying ‘It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought.’  I can see his point, the words are  all over the place, but throwaway isn’t always bad, the song does rock, and there’s some tasty lead guitar by Paul.

 

The song was on my mind when I was in Sheffield recently, especially the lyrics.

 

After a while you start to smile now you feel cool
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school
Nothing is changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's OK

Good morning, good morning
Good morning ah

 

They had some resonance because I did indeed take a walk by, and to a limited extent inside the grounds of, the old school: King Edward VII, Glossop Road, Sheffield.  And an awful lot had changed.

 

For one thing, they’ve built a stonking great extension, and there were some forbidding security gates, though not all THAT forbidding because you could easily walk through whenever they opened to let a car in and out, which happened all the time.  I assume I was being filmed.

 

Other changes: some art in the car park:

 

And they even have a school mini bus:

 

Many changes, though the main school building still looks like the same forbidding satanic mill that it always did.

 

It was early evening when I took most of these pictures so I had no reason to sing, or say,  ‘Good morning.’  But it was OK.

The Beatles version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3O23zqqaE

And, hold on to your hat, the Micky Dolenz version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyA_xBYUPw

ABIDE WITH ME, ETC

 Here’s a picture of an old feller walking in Sheffield.

 

I took it about fifteen years ago when I was walking around the old neighbourhood where I grew up.  It’s taken at the corner of Crowder Road and Crowder Crescent, and I’d have said it was on the Longley Estate, but it could be the Southey Green Estate: these things are finely nuanced and I’ve been gone a long time.

 

I don’t make any claims for myself as a photographer but I’m rather pleased with this one: the twisting of the trees contrasted with the bending of the old man.  (Are they trees? I suppose they may be bushes or shrubs, but never mind). And for one reason another I decided to take a look on Google Street View to see what had been happening on that corner. This view, dated 2021, shows that the twisty trees are gone.

 

What a sad thing.

 

However, if you let Street View take you into the side street, Crowder Crescent, they’re still there.  They’re not looking as healthy as in my pic but they’re hanging in there.  But that picture is dated 2012.

 

So we can say that somewhere between 2012 and 2021 those trees were either removed or possibly they just died.  It seems a sad thing but it may be nature taking its course. 

 

The old man, I assume, is long, long gone.

WING WALKING; NO, NOT THAT KIND

You looking for a walking gif?

This will do nicely

• 

Peter Falk in Wenders' 'Wings of Desire'

Of course I know it isn't, but that background looks an awful lot like Sheffield to me.

PHOTO WALKING

         Eureka.  I’ve been looking for the above photograph for years.  I knew it existed - I’d seen it often enough before - and I knew I had a copy, but it had gone missing somewhere in the choatic arrangement of files, papers and photographs that make up the Nicholson archive.  Then, yesterday suddenly while digging around in search of something else, there it was.

         It shows my Aunty Daisy and my Nan, in Sheffield walking along what is recognizably Fargate, across the road from the Peace Gardens.  Young cousin Margaret is in there too, between them, but apparently not wishing to be seen.

The picture comes from the golden days of a certain kind of street photography when you might be walking along and a ‘professional’ photographer would pop out and take your picture, hand you a ticket, and then later you’d go to his kiosk, see the picture on display and if you liked it you’d buy a copy.  Hence it would be possible to have quite a few pictures of yourself walking.   Incidentally, this family picture has a very pale ink stamp on the back that says, I think, ‘One Snap.’

I’m sure these street photographers operated mostly at the seaside, when people were in holiday mood, and in that Sheffield photograph my aunt Daisy and my Nan don’t seem to be in holiday mood; they’re obviously out shopping, and I do wonder what Daisy’s got in that paper parcel under her arm.  Nan's got one too, bit it's smaller.  But for whatever reason they decided they wanted a copy of the picture.

Above is another ‘walking photograph’ which I’ve always known the whereabouts of (or at least the whereabouts of a scan), this one showing my grandparents, though I don't know the story behind it.

I don’t know where they are, but they’re quite dressed up so it must be some kind of occasion. It could be at the seaside though somehow I don’t think so.  I’ve always thought they might be at the races in Doncaster – it was the kind of thing they did - but I’ve no hard evidence for that.

But it does remind you how few photographs we have these days of people walking.  When the camera or phone comes out, people stop and pose.  They might be in restaurants, on the beach, in the living room, even the bedroom, but chances are they aren’t walking, unless of course they think of themselves as ‘walkers.’  In which case …

SEVEN HILL ARMY

I was walking in Sheffield again. It’s a good place to walk.  It has seven hills (no, not much like Rome), but they do keep you fit, if they don’t kill you.

That isn’t me in the photograph above, in fact I don’t know who it is.  I took the picture years ago while leaning out of the window of one of these towers, where a friend lived at the time.

Sheffield has always had ‘interesting’ architecture, little of it truly great, and very little of it genuinely Brutalist. There’s Park Hill of course, now desired by hipsters, 

and there used to be the terrifying, now demolished, Kelvin flats, 

But those towers always had a certain brut charm about them. I know they weren’t very popular in their day, and my friend was only living there because she was working for the council and they gave her the flat because it was hard to let.  But times change.

Today there’s all kinds of zesty new architecture all over the city, a great many towers, and as far as I can tell as an outsider, these aren’t very well loved either.

So I was wandering around looking at all the new, computer-generated, Lego buildings, and suddenly there they were – those very towers – which have been given cladding to hide their brutish exteriors.  

Purists would have sneered at this under any circumstances but I don’t think we quite feel the same way about cladding as we used to.

I also went to look at my parents’ old house: they died a long time ago. It didn’t appear to have changed a bit, which was in some ways the most surprising thing of all.

WALKING BETWIXT

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.

A MAN IMPROVED

Strange as it may seem, I was in Bradfield in the Peak District at the weekend.  I was there for an event titled “Walking Through Time: A celebration of Sheffield’s Walking Heritage.”  It was organized by my cousin Margaret and her husband Chris.  I hadn’t seen either of them in a very long time, and I’ve never knew them all that well, but over the years they’ve become keen walkers it seems.

Bradfield, if the local literature is to be believed, “is probably the largest civil Parish in England covering 56 square miles, with over 100 miles of public footpaths,” and it has a boundary walk that’s pretty much 50 miles long. 

There were talks in the village hall about the local wildlife, and rights for walkers including one by a former local MP on the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act, and there was music from a group called Clarion Call, singing songs about rambling. I was there to do my party piece about walking and trespassing with my dad. 

This guy was there (Terry Howard) - a man you tend to remember:

and so were these two:

This is cousin Margaret, me, and the man on the right is top, Sheffield-based photographer Berris Conolly.

The event didn’t in itself require any actual walking, so between acts I meandered from Low Bradfield to High Bradfield and back, which took me to St Nicholas’s Church which among other attractions has this very, very fine gargoyle:

Back in the village hall there were people selling books, one fellow selling old photographs and postcards of the area, and Terry Howard was selling off the stock from the now defunct Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, including this lovely little volume (about two inches by three) which I bought, produced in the 1950s, still in amazingly good condition, with a fold out map at the back:

And best of all is that line on the front of the book, “The man who was never lost, never went very far,” attributed to GBH (Bert) Ward, who was a local steelworker and walking activist.  It's a sentiment currently very popular with people who call themselves psychogeographers (and even Rebecca Solnit), but the date here is 1952/3 which is interestingly close to the year that Guy DeBord published his “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” – 1955.

And – (and now set your face to stun) – 1955 was also the year that Chet Baker released the album Chet Baker Sings and Plays containing the song “Let’s Get Lost.”  And lord knows Baker was a man who, for a significant amount of time, lost himself quite spectacularly.

“Ee by gum” as somebody probably said at some time in Bradfield.  

The "Walking Through Time" event raised 310 quid for the restoration of local stiles.  I actually thought the local stiles were pretty wonderful as they were, but no doubt it would be better if there were more or them:

WALKING IN THE PAST

Back in the day I used to fancy myself as a bit of a “street photographer” (not a lot of a street photographer, just a bit).  I used to walk around in my lunch hour with a camera, and inevitably I’d take pictures of people walking. 

And it’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how the Internet is both so of the moment but also so nostalgic and backward looking.  Beause of social media I constantly see photographs from people’s childhoods and college years, that I’d never have seen pre-Internet.

 And so here are some of the pictures I took back then.

I’m not absolutely sure of the dates – very early 1980s I think.  All the ones above were taken in London.  The ones below were taken in Sheffield: 

and Scarborough:

MAPLESS

I grew up partly on the Longley Council Estate in Sheffield.  When I look at maps of the place these days it seems that the urban planners must have been familiar with very modern and/or very ancient designs for cities.  It wasn’t exactly Bauhaus because it was all essentially single family houses, nor was al-Mansur’s circular city, but those geometrical designs didn’t come out of nowhere.

         I can’t remember precisely when I first saw a map of my neighborhood, but I know it was after I’d been walking the streets for some years and thought I knew the layout of the place pretty well.  At ground level however, I had no sense of those geometrical designs, those semi-circles and spokes.  I was surprised but also somehow enlightened.   I can’t say this was when or why I first developed a liking for maps, but develop a liking for maps I certainly did.

Longley wasn’t the worst place to live, and you definitely didn’t worry about walking the streets there, but we had bad neighbors in the house next door and that had a lot to do with why my parents eventually moved out.

The father next door was a glowering and occasionally violent presence – a hod carrier by trade.  There were two children, a boy and a girl.  The boy was a year or two younger than me, and a poor, timid little thing, not very bright, and it occurs to me now that he was very possibly knocked about by his father. 

         After we’d left Longley my mother still got reports from other (perfectly decent) neighbors.  The boy next door left school young, without any qualifications, was unemployed and probably unemployable.  The way my mother put it, “All he does is mooch around the streets all day,” presumably drifting around thosee semi-circles and spokes.

         “Mooch” is an interesting word, and my mother used it a lot, and always to mean walking aimlessly, loitering, doing nothing much, though the sense of being a scrounger or a good for nothing was probably there too.  I’m not sure if she knew the Cab Calloway song “Minnie the Moocher.”  I’d guess she probably did, though I imagine she didn’t know that in the song to “mooch” is to be a drug addict.  Perhaps our wandering neighbor lad eventually went that way too.

“Minnie the Moocher” was recorded in 1931 and to modern ears it sounds as much of a drug song as, say, the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.”  Some of the lyrics run 

She messed around with a bloke named Smoky

She loved him though he was cokey

He took her down to Chinatown

And he showed her how to kick the gong around

To kick the gong is to take opium.  In 1932 Calloway sang a kind of a sequel, titled “Kickin' The Gong Around,” in which Smoky Joe searches for Minnie in an opium den: and finds her.  What’s of particular interest to scholars of walking, is that Calloway performs the song in the movie The Big Broadcast and does a kind of dance, maybe more of an exaggerated walk, which is a very early precursor of the Michael Jackson moonwalk, though I gather it was called “backsliding” at the time.

Calloway was also responsible for the  “Hepster’s Dictionary” –  teaching squares how to be groovy.  I’m not sure how seriously anybody took this at the time, not very I think.  Today it seems a mixture of language that’s either entirely obvious, as in “the joint is jumping,” or elaborate constructions that would be just too much trouble to use.  “Have you got the line in the mouse?" (Do you have the cash in your pocket?).  The word “mooch” doesn’t appear in the version I’ve got there were different various “editions.”

But the term “map” does appear in this form:

Sadder than a map (adj.) -- terrible. Ex., "That man is sadder than a map."

I just don’t get that.  What does it mean?  How sad is a map anyway?  Is a map, in fact sad in any way whatsoever?  Is there some hipster meaning of  “map” that we non-hipsters are missing?  Is it possibly the sense that only a real loser would walk the streets consulting a map?  (Compare and contrast with the Thomas Wolfe story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn”).  I really have no idea, and I’d be grateful for any enlightenment anybody cares to throw my way.

I have no idea how Calloway felt personally about maps or about walking, but thanks to this handy map you could (circa 1932) have walked to his club in Harlem: