Meeting Bob

It's funny how things turn out.  I like to take a photo or two when I go out on my walks around the town but short of a pink shoe on a wall there wasn't anything that inspired me today.  I missed a turn off on my route which would make the walk shorter so deviated towards the end and headed home from a different direction than I intended. I'm so glad I did. 

There was an old chap at the top of the lane near our road who said hello and remarked on the view. We got chatting and he said he was born in Dronfield 74 years ago. I said he must have seen some changes in that time. What followed was a delightful local history lesson. 

He told me that the place we were standing used to be called Scrater's Lane, scrater's being an old word for 'at the bottom of the tree' as in 'very poor' and the lane is where the poorest people of Dronfield used to live.  Here's a picture of the lane now.  Behind the hedge to the left of the photo are a few large detached houses. It's quite a little secluded enclave and so very different to how Bob remembers it.

 

There's a house at the bottom end of the lane called The Monkey House and I have vivid memories of pushing the girls in their prams up there and stopping to look at the cage of monkeys they had in the garden. The house is under different ownership now, has been spruced up and the monkeys are long gone. People usually think we are making it up when we tell them about it, it was very strange thing to have in the middle of our small town.

Bob walked me to the top of the lane which is adjacent to the top of our street and told me that our road used to be a field with horses. Bob grew up with one of my neighbours Frank, and he remembers when one of the horses bit Frank on the chest when he was around 7 years old. Amazingly Frank now lives almost on the exact same spot so I guess he wasn't too traumatised by it.

 

There are two really old cottages at the top of our road that I must have passed a thousand times over the past 30 years. I knew one used to be a local shop as someone pointed out the thick glass windows in the wall which were serving windows. What I hadn't paid attention to was the boarded up window and door and the dilapidated shop sign which were still there. The sign said 'SMELTS', and if you get really close up to it you can still see the faint outline of the writing.I'd walked passed it so many times and just not seen it. I can only guess my focus was on the post box when going down the hill, and on looking forward to getting to the top of the steep hill when climbing up it! It just goes to show that looking at things from a different vantage point from normal can be quite revealing. Here's what is left of the shop now turned into two cottages. The cottages are privately owned and it's a wonder that the owners haven't bricked the old frontage up by now.  I'm really glad they haven't though and hope that future owners leave it too as a sign from an almost forgotten past.

I was such a pleasure to meet Bob, as much for it being unexpected as for the stories that he told me.   I learned a little more about my locality and  got my interesting photos in the end. 

Tempus Fugit!!

It flies, it flies

Can hardly believe how fast the past few weeks have gone.

I've been so busy.

Done some pottering on the house which is good. We have the electricians in today until the end of the week. Quite excited to get this bit done because then we can go almost full steam ahead on painting and creating and seeing some of the fruits of our labours.  Plasterer is booked for next week and he is going to do the rendering at the front of the house too, which is a relief as the first chap never got back to us.   

My very final Heritage assignment was submitted last week amidst much jubilation on my behalf.  Tomorrow I start revising for the exam my last hurdle to get over this year.  Then I can assign all of these lovely books to the bookcase where they shall sit and look pretty gathering dust.

I received a very thoughtful gift from Lily a few weeks ago that I had meant to post about. I saw the book when it first came out and meant to get around to buying it but like a lot of things it slipped my mind. So it was a delightful present to receive.  There are some great tips in there for would-be runners like myself, not just about running, but about nutrition and having the right mental attitude. A very useful gift indeed. 

The end of April saw two wonderful gigs. The first being Richmond Fontaine at the Greystones in Sheffield, which, despite being about 7 miles away from me,  is fast becoming my local in that it's the pub I've spent most time in this year.  All band related I quickly add.  I don't often go to gigs on my own but sometimes there is someone who I really don't want to miss so I bite the bullet.  It's times like these that mobile phones and social media come into their own, something to do in the interval when everyone else there seems to be in a group and there's no-one to chat to.  Anyway, back to the gig.  The support was Fernando, a stocky grey haired troubadour  originating from Argentina.  He played acoustic guitar backed up by Daniel Eccles on electric guitar. A worthy support with some great tunes and lots of interesting banter between songs.  Best part of the set was Fernando and Dan really digging into the music with an intense face to face play down.

Willy Vlautin

Dan then joined the line up of Richmond Fontaine for their set which consisted of 3/4 of the new album 'You can't go back if there's nothing to go back to' and some back catalogue tunes.  It was great to see Willy Vlautin, Sean Oldham and Freddy Trujillo who I'd seen in the same venue last year in their Delines incarnation.  Whilst Willy writes songs for both the bands, and his subject matter is the down and out and less than angelic there's a very different feel to each of the bands.  Willy is lead vocals for Richmond Fontaine, I love his voice, which has a  kind of southern, slow, adolescent vibe to it.  As well as the stories in the songs there are plenty of anecdotes in between to keep us smiling.  Rumour has it this was their penultimate tour, with a few last dates coming our way in October. I'm sad I only really just got going with them, although finding some consolation in the hope of some more Delines shows in the future and happy that Sheffield is one of their go back to places.

The second gig of the month saw the return of the much missed Milburn.  A local Sheffield band who parted company around 8 years ago.  Any subsequent gig that any ex-member of Milburn undertook would hear the crowd shouting 'Milburn, Milburn, so it was thrilling that they decided to do a four night residency at the 02 in Sheffield.  Becky and Rob went to all four shows, Simon made three, and despite me having tickets for two I decided to restrict it to just the one night. It was a great night too, so good to hear all the old songs and Sheffield celebrated so well. It was great to see the smiles on the lads faces too as they performed on stage, so obviously humbled and happy that the Milburn legacy has lasted so long.   

Milburn

Work has been extremely busy and tiring recently. We are way behind with letters, which means those of us who are fairly up to date have to help out other departments.  I don't mind helping, sometimes its a nice change to type about  people with  ailments other than arthritis. It's slower work  getting used to new voices and new terminology and consequently a lot more intense.  We barely come up for breath and I swear our little fingers have smoke coming from them some days. Perhaps not surprising I've not felt up to blogging much recently, sometimes the last thing you want to do when you get home is sit in front of a computer screen again. Still, tomorrow sees the end of this shift pattern although it will be straight into revision mode for the next lot of days off.

Just three more weeks though!!