Thoughts on Sheffield

 

If you look at a map of the country and squint slightly, you can see four big blobs of urbanity running up the middle of England like the buttons on a jacket. These are Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield. Having visited the first three, my most recent trip was to the town that is the home of the world's oldest existing football club (not 'United' or 'Wednesday' but Sheffield FC, founded in 1857). However, I didn't visit the ground as it was about six miles to the south of the city centre. Sheffield is arguably the fifth largest city in England after London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.

As with Nottingham and Manchester, there is a tram service in Sheffield. However, my aim was to walk to the southwestern suburb of Ecclesall, as my paternal grandfather was born there, in the days when it was a village just outside the conurbation. It was a long uphill walk of about three miles from the city centre and I popped into the parish church, where I was pointed in the direction of the vicar who managed to track down some info on Colton graves for me.  My grandfather struggled to settle back in Sheffield, working as a crane driver after World War I service, so he went off to search for 'gold' in California. He didn't find any, so he joined the Canadian army's Princess Patricia Regiment, eventually meeting my grandmother who was working as a house parlour maid in Winnipeg. Moving back to Sheffield, they soon relocated in the Kentish town of Ashford, which is how I came into the world as a 'Southern Softie' who loves black pudding and isn't averse to gravy on chips.

My next port of call was the childhood home of Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of the nineties band, Pulp. Personally, I think that their hit 'Common People' epitomised the decade that my generation now view with rose-tinted glasses, but the band had been around for many years before remotely troubling the music charts. I took a very scenic amble eastward to the suburb of Intake, but I was unable to view the front man's front door. Or indeed any of his former residence. However, the wander back into the city centre was pleasant, with a great view before descending past an amphitheatre. I popped into a quaint looking pub which played continuous classic rock music and had a range of real ales from mild to porter. Bliss. The barman was from Lincolnshire but he said that he had found it a struggle to fit in in South Yorkshire, intending to move back home.

On the second day I followed the River Don upstream (westward). Near the industrial heritage site of Kelham Island there was a big mural of Jarvis Cocker smoking a cigarette on the side of a building (great role modelling for kids!). I then climbed steeply beside Ruskin Park and the suburb of Walkley - a typically ‘northern’ slice of urbanity (terraced streets on steep hills) and I descended a steep lightly wooded bank to reach the Rivelin Valley – a very picturesque river walk with stepping stones across at one point. Sheffield is at the eastern edge of the Peak District and some of the city actually falls within the national park. Indeed, the city is said to stand on seven hills - an epithet it shares with Rome. However, a glance at Wikipedia will reveal a whole host of other places in the UK which also make this claim.

I ambled as far as the Rivelin pub where I enjoyed two pints of excellent mild ale. Mild has almost died out in Southern England but the appeal of all the taste with none of the headache seems obvious to me. So what other delights are there to be seen in Sheffield?

The cathedral, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, seemed an unusual shape to me and it has a crypt – I looked around this at night while a concert was taking place, using the torch on my mobile phone. The Crucible is of course home to the world snooker championships, but really unless the snooker is on there's nothing particularly striking about the building itself. However, nearby is the Winter Garden which I would describe as being like a huge conservatory containing trees of the world. There is a free museum attached but sadly I didn't have time for a thorough look round before needing to catch my train home.

There is also a 'walk of fame' near the town hall, with famous names such as the singer Joe Cocker (popular surname, huh?), the athlete Sebastian Coe, Monty Python's Michael Palin and the actor Sean Bean. Think of the Hollywood 'pavement stars' and scale it down a bit! During my visit I found scant mention of the Arctic Monkeys however – a Sheffield band that were a huge phenomenon in the noughties, arguably as the city’s Def Leppard were in the eighties. In an earlier post I've suggested a similar attraction for my home town of Ashford, which can muster Bob Holness (of 'Blockbusters' fame), John Furley (founder of the St John Ambulance), John Wallis (inventor of the infinity symbol) and the author Frederick Forsyth, as well as a claim to having had the first white lines on any road in the UK. It seems that the north / south divide is one of pride in many cases, with northerners keen to promote their towns and their heritage while southerners generally run their towns down. We give our towns nicknames such as 'Trashford' and 'Jokestone,' but is this affectionate, in the way that courting couples banter with one another? Maybe we love our towns, with all their flaws, after all. 

Who knows, but I intend to check out Leeds next, in order to tick another big conurbation off of my 'must visit' list.

Thoughts on A.I. and Being Fifty

 

The job of writing satirical songs and skits is becoming increasingly hard, not least because the world is so bonkers now that you can't really exaggerate it for entertainment. I decided to re-record a couple of my old songs recently with updated lyrics for the modern age and I've put them out on a digital E.P. called 'Trumped.' Check it out on Spotify, YouTube, iTunes or whatever online music conduit you use. Having recorded many albums with my mother in recording studios (as Adam Colton and Teresa Colton), this one is just a 'lo-fi' production, simply because the main emphasis is on lyrics rather than polish (and because it costs so bleeding much!). It was good enough for Woody Guthrie after all...

One of the songs, 'This Song Wasn't Written by A.I.,' although heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, is about a modern issue that worries a lot of people. Creativity is a release of tension and a form of communication for many, in the way that sports can be for others. The fact that creative fields are being handed over to computers seems a particularly mercenary decision to me. Producers and managers no longer have to pay a human to create when they can get a computer to just copy what humans have already done and reconstitute it for a new market. It is surely the most cynical thing the 'fat cats' of this world have ever done – literally turning machines into expressive humans and humans into consuming machines. And all in the name of money, of course.

That said, so far I would quote the trade descriptions act when it comes to 'A.I.' Unlike in Kubrick and Spielberg's excellent film of the same name, what we call 'A.I.' isn't a sentient entity capable of it's own thoughts but really a very advanced search engine that simply scours the Internet for information / misinformation and presents it in the way that a human would present it (coherent but flawed). Somebody demonstrated it to me by instructing it to 'write a book in the style of Adam Colton.' The 'A.I.' then scours the Internet for things I have actually written and approximates the style and content. Personally I wasn't convinced, although my mum said that it was indeed the kind of thing that I write. Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

I went to watch the film 'No Direction Home' at the local cinema a while back. The film presented the early life of Bob Dylan in a slightly fictionalised way. It is certainly not a glamorised perspective of him, whereas I found the musical 'Sunny Afternoon' to present a much more affable version of Ray Davies than I encountered in Johnny Rogan's biography 'A Complicated Life.' What the lyrics of both songwriters have in common though, along with Pink Floyd's Roger Waters in particular, is a desire for fairness, which is increasingly seen as a lefty tree-hugging minority view.

I realise that my own views and lyrics are somewhat to the left of the majority of local people down here in the Garden of England (Kent), but thankfully free speech still exists. I find the shift towards money as an end rather than a means to be a worrying one, with Trump as its ultimate representative. As children back in the eighties we were taught that we would have much more leisure time in the future because computers would be doing all the mundane tasks, but now humans get to do the mundane tasks while computers create. What the technological Utopian dream didn't account for was the fact that the owners of the technology are generally unwilling to share the benefits. If half the work can be done by computers, they are not going to keep all staff on the same pay doing half the work, even though their own profits would be exactly the same. Instead, half the workforce will be laid off. And meanwhile, it's very convenient for the elite to get everybody blaming each other for the problem. Down in this southeast corner of Britain politicians have cleverly channelled everybody's anger in the direction of er... the Channel. Meanwhile, the elite and bankers can laugh all the way to the...

OK, enough puns, but I sincerely hope Britain doesn't continue down the same rabbit hole that gave the world Donald Trump. Time will tell...

Next month I reach the grand age of fifty. I've had a go at marriage and two attempts at being a 'townie' but like a boomerang, here I am back in the village where I grew up, living the single life again (lots of cycling and walking with the odd pub visit thrown in). Although I was always writing stories as a child, my first published piece was written when I was seventeen - an account of a five-day cycling trip for the local parish magazine. It was when I was 28 that I finally got a book into print, realising a childhood dream as a collaboration with my father who sadly now has Alzheimer's. The content hasn't changed greatly as you can tell, although I've ventured into other genres, such as psychological fiction and music reviews. I wonder if I'll still be writing my travelling tales in another 33 years time. Or will A.I. will be writing imaginary trips for me with imaginary meetings with imaginary characters? I think that's called a novel. Please check mine out on Amazon before my digital clone takes over. Toodle-pip!