Sicily 4 - A Mosaic

The Colours of a Mediterranean Spring

Christ Pantocrator, Cefalù,1148

In February 1989 I made a trip to Sicily, sailing from Naples at night.  In my diary I noted: the Jolly Hotel tower and the Martini sign, bright crimson, yellow and white over the Magazzini Generali silos and frigoriferi building.  Extraordinary fascist art; decals of stone and work-ethic mosaics in and on the Tirrenia reception hall.....the motor-nave Torres, built by SEBM in 1988, leaves the port, the dome of San Carlo singing goodbye.....

Up at sixish, still dark, but the lights of the Conca d'Oro readily visible.  No dawn, a dark smudge of cloud instead.....  In the market the stalls are being laid out, full of octopus and strange fish, and freshly slaughtered kids hang outside the butchers.  A man SINGS about cabbages.....  I rest in the church of the Gesu, if rest is the right word in this astonishing monument of Sicilian baroque, coloured marble and crazy motifs of babies, dolphins, angels, ducks and flowers from the floor to the garish frescoes of the ceiling.....

Orchis italica - Naked Man Orchid

Yellow oxalis; almond blossom; hazy clouds; rising cliffs of limestone in the mist.  Bougainvilleas in flower, lemons in abundance, oranges.....  Arabic the language around me on the train; concrete shells up the barren hillside, then, the sea.  Citrus groves, olives, eucalyptus, tamarisks, pines - a few carobs.  Marigolds and borage in flower, palms, oleanders, agave, brambles.

The Greek Temple at Segesta - built by the Elymian people in the 5th Century BC but never finished

Segesta warmly honey/rosy in the weak sun; daisies and yellow vetch, golden wild marigolds, white dead nettles, pink-tinged asphodels, the bright green of wild carrot and sunny yellow of giant fennel.  On the hill opposite the bleats and clonks of sheep at graze.  In front of the peristyle a steep drop to a stream in a limestone ravine; pines up the slope above the vineyard opposite and a clump of little firs by the temple. 

The Greco-Roman Theatre, Segesta - built before 409BC

I walk up the hill through marigold-thick air.  Theatre in magnificent position, looking north over the sea at Castellamare del Golfo: plenty of signs of modern life - autostrada, railway, farms, fields, pylons etc - but it is not impossible to think it all away, to reforest it.....  I scramble periculously down the mountain through wild countryside and floral vineyards to the station at Calatafimi - no one at all about, though a dog yelps, and magpies cackle, and the wind cools my neck and the sum warms my back and I sit on the desolate platform waiting for the 15.23 for Trapani.....

Calendula Officinalis - Pot Marigold - and Viper's Bugloss (Echium Vulgare)

Segesta in 2014 the landscape is still a mosaic of flowers, but it is not the same.  The car park is full and the visitor centre is busy.  A shuttle bus ferries culture-hungry tourists up the tarmac road to the theatre and the sense of isolation, and of peace, has gone.

St Bernard's Lily

But the colours of Sicily still catch the sun, and everywhere we go there are examples of the shimmering mosaics of nature and art that amaze, from the exotic floors of the Roman Villa at Piazza Armerina to the Christs Pantocrator in the apses of Cefalù and Monreale.

Fishing nets drying - Cefalù

In some ways the art of the mosaic is like impressionism, in others it is like the pixellation of digital photography.  The artist takes a selection of small uniform pieces of tile, in a range of colours, and arranges them to build an image, subtly setting the tesserae at different angles to catch and reflect light at differing angles.  The Romans did not pursue this effect so much in pavements, but the breathtaking gleams and glints of the curved surfaces in churches, where candles and oil lamps play on the walls, show just how alive these designs can become. 

Fresh from the groves of Palermo (what's left of them)

In 1989 I went out from Trapani on the motornave Canaletto, out on the shining sea: Trapani, Erice and the coast down to Marsala fading into the blue, the windmills of the salt pans curiously more prominent as we became more distant.  Now on the starboard bow is Levanzo, a limestone rock, a small port, field systems, squares of walls set out up the dry flanks of the hills.  Favignano on the port bow.....  The boat has half a dozen passengers, and carries various merchandise - fruit and vegetables, a second-hand deep freeze and ice-cream cabinet, a lorry carrying old furniture. The people are short, dark, with black, or grey, hair, weathered faces, dark jackets or jackets, jeans or dark trousers, and smart shoes.....  It's clouded over, and the sea is dark; we're coming into harbour, a low African-looking spread of square white buildings, a yellow church with ceramic dome....

Ferula communis - Giant Fennel (though not fennel at all!)

A recurrent theme in the diary is flowers everywhere, beautiful carpets of them, and the blue sky, the blue sea....  Visiting again this year (and last) the floral display is still breath-taking, with a mixture of yellow and orange, blue and green that would make Matisse dance from his wheelchair. It is no wonder that the artists of the great cathedrals were inspired to such greatness.  The gold and blue edged with red, inlaid with turquoise and outlined with dark streaks could be sunsets on the mountains, or the beach at dawn.

It is not all bright sunlight, however, and in 1989 I visited Erice - soughing pines and the fog rolls in, obscuring all, making it quite likely that the Normans might return.....  haloed in the clouds the church and tower, silent save for the occasional 'ctang' of a bell, loom out of, or back into, the mists, the white stone and orange lamps vaguely luminous, the winds the breath of ages.....

Darkness gathers; damp, rotten, grey, thick, cloying darkness.....  Earlier I had a chat with the Custodian of the Norman castle, an old, friendly man, a strange encounter among the castle ruins and the TV signal boosters and telephone antennae, the wind humming in the guys, and the custodian's block entirely laced in by rusting lightning conductors.  We talk of the weather, and of the difficult times, how everything is upside down.....  He tells me of the tourists in the summer, when it can be 45º in the shade, with the brilliant harsh colours of the tourists' summer clothes, and the noise..... 

The Madonie Mountains, from Polizzi Generosa

This year we stay for a while in the wild mountains of the Madonie, and lie on the beach at Cefalù, 

Cefalù - dominated by the fortress of its Cathedral

then we edge our way past the squalor of Palermo's outskirts, through the impossible traffic, then over the hill at Monreale, pausing to see again the glories of the cathedral 

Christ Pantocrator, Monreale, 1185

and its cloisters, 

The Cloisters, Monreale

looking down on the Conca d'Oro from three hundred metres above the sea, bemused by the concrete sprawl that just was not there when I first saw the view in 1977.  Then we cruise past Partinico and Mary Taylor Simeti's Álcamo, and past Castellammare del Golfo to stay on a hill near Scopello, where in the 1950s Gavin Maxwell spent some time living by the old Tonnara (Tuna factory). 

The rocky coast of the Zingaro Nature Reserve

The Riserva Naturale Orientata Zingaro is one reason to be here, and it is worth the trip.  If Castellammare del Golfo is best seen from a distance, the Zingaro Nature Reserve is best seen close up, with an abundance of wildlife, from the Italian Gladiolus (common sword lily)

 

Gladiolus Italicus

to the Sardinian Warbler, 

Sardinian Warbler

all around you blooming and chattering.  But it is more than even this, with small museums of local nature and history housed in traditional buildings, and tiny coves, with caves in the dolomitic limestone, reached only by steep footpaths.  

Cistus - I think this is Creticus

Here there is still a tradition of weaving palm fronds from the Chamaerops Humilis (European Fan Palm) into artefacts and one museum is dedicated to the once lucrative business of extracting manna (used as a mild laxative) from ash trees (Fraxinus Ornus).   All this and, if you are sharp you could see a Bonelli's Eagle.

Ceiling, Catania

On our return we stop, again, at Enna.  In 1989 I noted that the best thing about Enna is the station and its bar and restaurant; run by Mrs Jolly Fat Lady and Son.  And I noted that there was a fantastic exhibition of a national competition for ideas for a public car park......  Not quite sure what happened to that?

The Nave - Enna Cathedral

In 1989 I wandered up the main street, finding the Cathedral in disorder, dusty, seats piled in one corner, planks in another and behind that some gilt palanquin.  The black columns of the nave stand on elaborate carved plinths, and then, above, there is wedding cake sugar icing decoration.  The ceiling is heavily carved wood, the apse ornate stucco - Christ being crowned against a yellow background: the light filters in through dirty glass and garish stains..... An interesting marble pulpit is supported by angels, their protruding breasts well worn....  Pleasingly the angels are still there, and the interior has been spruced up, with the floors, some marble and some ceramic, gleaming clean and fine where the light falls through clean windows.

The Sacristy - Enna Cathedral

Further up the hill, in 1989, I came to Enna castle, a real state of disrepair - rabbit cages and opera house - cages for baritones and mezzo-soprani, cages for maestri del coro and so on.  The stage in ruins, half up and half down, the rows of metal chairs waiting for never, the backdrop a flaking bright blue wall.  As I leave, the only visitor, I see the guardian at his desk, his capped head down on his crossed arms....

Calascibetta (from Enna)

This time we are greeted at the castle entrance by an enthusiastic guide, employed by the city and keen to tell all.  He shows us, and a couple from Florence, what there is to see, explaining that once there was a theatre here, but now there is no money for it.....  His warm disposition and pride in his post smooth away the centuries of Sicilian wars and changes of ownership.  It becomes his castle to share, and he communicates an underlying love for his island that informs us more than detail, and confuses the Florentines, who, having just provided Italy with their ex-mayor for Prime Minister, thought they had all the answers.  

Our Guide to Enna Castle

The extensive castle is both ruined and still standing, and where marigolds touch the stones, sunning themselves against the hard wearing ancient rock, I am reminded of how the tesserae of mosaics build glorious pictures.....

My 1989 diary ended with sunrise over Vesuvius, a few shining clouds and that threatening shape, lowering, jagged, naked.  Our 2014 trip ended as we dipped our wings over Etna; snow melting down into green valleys, a plume of smoke drifting into the clouds above.  From the air, the villages and fields, a mosaic.....

From my 1989 diary:   wandering these eerie streets I say hello to all those, few that they are, that I come across.  Without fail my greeting is civilly, if not even warmly, returned......

Osprey Watch

Osprey Dawn

Forgive me if I write quietly, but it is three a.m. and I am in the forward hide at the Osprey  Centre at Loch Garten and I dare not disturb the Ospreys.  It is a still, starry night, and the temperature is minus one degree Celsius.  I am watching two Ospreys: EJ, a seventeen year old female, who is currently sitting on her nest keeping her three eggs warm, and Odin, a male of indeterminate age (he is not ringed), who is perched looking like a cross between a King Penguin and a Griffon Vulture, on a dead branch not far from the nest.  I am able to see them clearly using infra-red light and cameras mounted near and on the nest tree.

The view from the forward hide at sunrise

My partner here (currently sleeping in the back room) is Dr L.... E...., retired Professor of Applied Hideology at the University of Blair Gowrie, who has perfected (in secret) a way of communicating with Ospreys using Encephalophony, a technique of conversing between different minds without the use of conventional language.  The signals transmitted and received are translated using a system which he describes as Helen Keller meets Enigma.  I bow to his inevitable superiority. 

The wonderful thing here is that Dr E has conducted an interview using his technique with Odin, proud father of three eggs by EJ.  However an additional hurdle that Dr E has had to overcome is that Odin is limited to thinking in Old Norse (we believe he originated in Scandinavia) and so his "words" have been double filtered.

It is three in the morning.  The sky is speckled with stars, like an old mirror, and there is no moon.  EJ nestles her eggs, her sharp eyes occasionally shut with her lower eyelids as she succumbs to the urge to doze.  Odin shifts his weight and periodically clutches and unclutches his perch, but in the dark he will not fly.  Nothing stirs. 

Loch Garten

Dr E asked me not to tell anyone, but I cannot resist.  This stillness, this lonely vigil through the night, my voluntary presence here to deter (and, if necessary, tackle) egg-collectors, who still, however much it stretches the imagination, desire to rob this marvellous nest.....  this position of enormous responsibility drives me to share with someone all that I have learned in the past few exciting days. 

Loch Mallachie

Before I arrived at Loch Garten, my knowledge of Ospreys was discreet, to say the most.  I have long harboured the belief that I once saw a number of them in Italy, seeming to be temporarily lodging in trees by the shore of Lake Bracciano, some fifty kilometres north of Rome.  I watched them spellbound for some time, seeing them diving in the lake and generally behaving as you might expect large fish-eating raptors to behave.  I was on my own at the time, with a Ducati 350 for company rather than binoculars or cameras, and I was pressed for time, so, in due course I had to leave, and leave behind this vision, or dream, never to recapture it. 

That was nearly 40 years ago, a time when few Ospreys nested in the UK, and, although I subsequently lived by that lake for fifteen years, I never saw them again, nor have I seen Ospreys anywhere else, especially not in my back garden nor in the fields around my home just north of London.  However, the Osprey, as a distinct species, is approximately a million years old, and I suppose that Odin may count as a reasonable representative......

Odin's demeanour in the interview was, apparently, quite relaxed, but tended towards the taciturn.  Dr E took the opportunity of quizzing him whilst he was on the nest, having just provided an eighteen inch headless brown trout for his partner, who had flown off to dine on a nearby branch.  I won't quote the whole dialogue, particularly as the word fish recurs somewhat too often, but Dr E first asked Odin how he had met EJ.  His answer, Flying, told us much about his lifestyle.

Odin on the camera tree

Subsequent questions about their relationship did not reveal particular warmth, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense, but he did give us some insight when replying Eggs to the question, what do you see in EJ?  He was asked what he thought of the nest, and said it was Robust, but when asked if he would like to see any improvements, he offered that he thought it could be nearer a source of fish and that it could be more private (apparently he sometimes has the sensation that his every move is being observed.)  As to how he came to be in the Loch Garten area in the first place, he panted, thermoregulating, and said he was just there.  Seemed nice, he said, just passing.  But why fly several thousands of miles from West Africa to this particular place?  Again Odin ruffled his shoulders and said Everybody's got to be somewhere.  Longer days here.  He panted again, his tongue lolling.  Short nights.  Fish.  Then why fly several thousands of miles to West Africa in the Autumn?  Cold in Scotland.  Dark.  Nice there.  Fish.

Odin had little to say about his eggs.  When asked which he preferred, he shrugged, and volunteered that he just liked sitting on them sometimes.  When asked why he brought EJ fish, he suggested that she needed them and would not leave the eggs.  When asked why he ate the heads of fish first, I understand he just stared, slightly severely, at his interviewer, as if to say, that's a daft question, how else would you eat a fish?  Dr E felt that there were strong senses operating within Odin that he could not articulate, and so attempted to delve into his character.  What did he like doing most?  Fishing.  What was his favourite food?  Fish.  One thing he would like to see?  More fish.  What would he like to pass on to his eggs?  How to fish.  What did he fear?  No fish.  But when asked to express some detail on how he would like to bring up his eggs, he used the word (or rather Dr E could find no alternative expression for this) Proportionality.  Dr E pressed him.  Fish too small - not worth the effort.  Fish too big - extremely bloody difficult to take off again.  Must be proportional.

In an attempt to broaden the discussion, Dr E asked if Odin had any fond memories, but the answer was Fish.  But when asked what his favourite moment had been, he cited a recent thermal, which had given him effortless lift, so he could smoothly glide to the fishing Loch.  Sound he liked?  Still water.  Sound he didn't like?  EJ's alarm call.  Any advice for other Ospreys?  Avoid Malta.

The conversation didn't go much further, as when Dr E was about to ask where Odin saw himself in five years time, EJ returned with the tail of his fish for him to eat, and, grabbing it in his left talon, he spread his wings, dropped off the nest and disappeared. 

As I whispered some time back, this technique is very hush hush and Dr E did ask me not to say a word, so I trust you will keep it to yourself?  But it is interesting, don't you think?  I mean, I am watching Odin now, nodding on his branch, and I could imagine he is dreaming of Africa, and the warm sun and big fish he no doubt enjoys there, but his mind is not like that.  He is clearly on a kind of automatic pilot much of the time.  What he does is what he does.  It's a bit like Ted Hughes's Hawk Roosting: My manners are tearing off heads.  There is no room for niceties.  I have watched him now for nearly a week, and he and his mate have taken it in turns to keep their three eggs warm and safe, and in between times he has fished and eaten and brought fish to his mate, and preened his feathers to keep himself in good condition so his dives into the water won't chill him, he won't get cold at night and he will be able to fly well.  Essential maintenance.  He has to survive so that his eggs will survive.  The expectation is that one in three might make it to maturity.  He (and his mate) may live up to 25 years (which could be equivalent to 100 human years, so 20 is more likely), and if in that time they produce more than two chicks that make it to maturity then the species breaks even.  More than that however is desirable so that the species does more than just survive.

Ospreys have been around about a million years, and mentioned in human literature for over two thousand.  The name (Pandion haliaetus) essentially means fish (or sea) eagle {medieval latin, avis prede - bird of prey; anglo-french, ospriet} and that is what it is and what it does, perfectly adapted with strong talons and a sharp hooked beak.  Why? is the same question for all forms, but from our slightly pedestrian position these magnificent fliers, beautiful killers, are greater than most.  D H Lawrence, in his typically controversial way, posed a question in Mountain Lion, when he encountered two men who had killed one in the Lobo Canyon in New Mexico:

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.

And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans

And never miss them.

It is not a question of which is better, but as the sun begins to rise in the East, backlighting the trees behind the nest, and Odin sits silhouetted against an orange sky atop a dead tree, I cannot help but think this is wonderful.  I am so privileged to see these magnificent creatures living, soaring, sitting, sleeping, and to catch their beady eyes once in a while. 

Caledonian pines at dawn

I focus the hide's ex-U Boat binoculars on Odin for a moment, the sun creating an aura around his spiky punk-feathered head, and I think I hear him say (in Old Norse of course) This is what it's all about.....Time to go fishing.....

In the room behind me Dr E snuffles, and turns over in his sleep.....

Hush!

https://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/tracking/lochgartenospreys/

http://www.rspb.org.uk/reserves/guide/l/lochgarten/abernethyvideo.aspx

Sheffield

Ghost City

The Hillsborough disaster, which twenty-five years on is still big news as relatives and friends strive to prise truths from the mailed fist of authority, was a turning point in the history of football, and of Sheffield.

The 96 ghosts created on the afternoon of April 15th, 1989 saw the end of football terraces, the concrete steps where men in flat caps would clutch mugs of OXO or Bovril after a lunchtime in the pub.  But also they became part of the mist that shrouded the change in Sheffield from city of heavy industry, to a city of indeterminate purpose.

Once upon a time arriving at Sheffield Midland Station (once Pond Street, and now Sheffield Station) meant stepping into steel air, with the odour of burnt scrap metal from Attercliffe mingling with the sweet fragrance of malt liquor from the breweries by the Don, which signalled the heat and thirst of mill-work.  On rare Sundays, when winds blustered down from the Pennines to scour the valleys between Sheffield's seven hills, the air would seem fresh, though the shut-down fortnight in August would also clear the light.  Otherwise, day and night, open hearth furnaces burned, in some cases with wires thicker than thighs pulsing and switching to the massive surges of electric heat, in others stoked with coke and pumping out dusty smoke through slender brick chimneys spiring up into the clouds.  Mills rolled, sparking and rumbling like manic giant mangles; forges hissed and thumped, their flywheels spinning and clicking, their operators starched with sweat; railway engines clanked and screeched, pulling and shunting backwards and forwards on works' sidelines.  In a thousand smaller workshops, steel was heated, stretched, thinned, beaten, moulded, wrought and finished in a din of clinking anvils, whirring belts and clattering machinery. 

In the grey mornings, feeling grey, my skin grey, my thoughts grey, I would board a bus and clamber to the upper deck, where similarly grey men in white cotton neck scarves and flat caps coughed in the bitter fug of Park Drive smoke, our snap bags on our laps, our uniform indicative of our employment at one of the many works in Attercliffe or Tinsley.

For a period (which marked me out from most in that mine was not a life sentence) I was an upset-forge furnaceman for Brown Bayley Steels, a member of BISAKTA (British Iron, Steel and Kindred Trades Association) sweating eight (sometimes sixteen) hours a day to produce blanks for axle rods, sometimes for domestic cars, sometimes for combine harvesters, sometimes for railway engines.  The shed I worked in was floored with steel plates, uneven and slippery in places; overhead giant gantry cranes would trundle up and down the bays with great bundles of shiny steel rods, or occasionally they would sway with huge rolls of raw steel, orange red hot at one end, sparking and scaling as they passed.  Dante would have recognised the scene as his Inferno, the damned toiling at hellish tasks to a universal cacophony of trip hammers, drop forges (including one which dropped 1,000 tons), the rapidly repeated whumphs of eight upset forges, the clanking of chains and the zinging of rotary sanders burring the ends of rough cut rods.

At tea break some of us would fill a six pint kettle with water and a quarter pound of tea and place it on top of a 1,000 degree furnace.  In minutes it would boil and we would stir in a pound of sugar and a pint of milk.  When we broke to go to the canteen we would eat bread and dripping, eggs, bacon, sausage, tomatoes and beans, sprinkled liberally with sauces and washed down with a pint of milk and a mug of tea.  I remember a discussion about health issues: that isn't good for you; that furs your arteries, etc, until eighteen stone Roy Hattersley, an expert forge-man, pronounced that, There's only one thing that's bad for 'ee, and t'doctors won't tell 'ee what it is, and that's work!

When we punched our cards at home-time, we would stop for a drink near the bus stop.  In the evenings, dry and stiff with salt, I would ask for two pints at the bar, and would drink the first before the second was pulled.

It was an education.  In fact it was a privilege to share for a while the lives and work of those men, and women.  Some, like a set of guys from Pakistan, worked permanent twelve hour night shifts, saving money to send home to support families with a hope that one day they might be brought over to live here.  Others, like Sam, my fat and breathless forge-man, came and went as regularly as a worker bee, doing what he did in order that honey was there for the young.  Then others, older and parked in light duty lay-bys, were held together by pins and plates having fallen prey to industrial accidents in their pursuit of an honest living in perilous surroundings. 

But all that has gone.  I returned to the site of Brown Bayley Steels in the 1980s and it had evaporated entirely; all that was there were storage units and offices, car parks and soulless blank buildings dressed with weeds and wire (this was then buried under the Don Valley Stadium, itself now a ghost).  The steel has almost all gone, with, I believe, only one special steel producer left in the area.  The cutlery producers, who also made razors, clippers, skates and scissors, have disappeared, presumably to China or cheaper climes.

And with it has gone the Castle Market, a tower block that once overflowed with vegetables, fish and meat, cheeses, fruit and life, drawing folk in from all parts of the city and beyond.  I remember the woman who sold winkles, clams, shrimps and whelks.  In her handbag she kept the shells of the only left-handed whelks she had come across in her long life as a stall-holder; five left handed whelks in a lifetime, and so interested and proud!

It is a city of ghosts.  The ghosts of Hillsborough, the ghosts of the steel industry, and the ghosts of long gone friends and memories.  I was there, visiting my brother at the university, the night that Hendrix died, and immediately, as if by spontaneous ghostly hand, the legend Hendrix Lives! appeared scrawled on walls.  I was there the night that Nixon resigned, though this made less impression on me at the time.  And the house I lived in at that time, in a room I had painted green, brown and black, was a kerb crawl from the spot where later Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, would be apprehended by the Yorkshire Police.

Recently, after many years, I returned to the city.  As I stepped out from the railway station into Sheaf Square, not only was the air rancid with commerce rather than industry but I was confronted with the towers of Sheffield Hallam University, a construct that had once squatted on its haunches as Sheffield Polytechnic. On Park Hill to the other side, stand the renovated flats, once known as San Quentin, but given Grade II listing in 1998, and famous for the Clare Middleton I love you will u marry me graffiti.  

Signs of demolition and reconstruction were everywhere.  The Castle Market building stood empty and for sale.  The West Bar Police Station where we had learnt of my grandfather's death is now a museum of emergency service vehicles.  While a brand new tram system dings its way up West Street, the old tram shed by the Don has become the Kelham Island Museum, displaying machinery that once drove the industries, and trades that put Sheffield on the map.  The Don itself, never a great river at this stage, slips quietly past ruined mills and litter-strewn car parks as if it is ashamed of itself, and seeks a hole in which to die.  The pub at the top of Lambert Street, where my brother lived for a time, is now a cheap hostel, while not far down the road the once elegant Queen's Hotel is derelict.

My friend Lindsay, himself a graduate of the University and a friend since those intellectual days, introduces  himself to the Porter in the Arts Tower, and we are welcome to step into the perpetual lift and ascend to the eighteenth floor.  

Looking down the city is spread out, not so much like a patient etherised upon the table, but as a corpse exposed for a post mortem.  There below is a row of three Victorian houses, where once I stayed, constrained by cold to eschew the outside toilet in favour of a night-time wee in a potty, except that the middle house, the one I stayed in, had been bulldozed, violently erased, leaving tattered edges to the neighbouring roofs.  

And there below, to the north side, is the Star and Garter, preferred haunt of the dons, including Lindsay's late great professor William Empson, author not only of The Seven Types of Ambiguity, but also of an episode of emesis over the bar of the aforementioned hostelry (though, as John Haffenden notes in his biography: Appalled onlookers were nonetheless favourably impressed by the way he made up for his gross behaviour with elaborate and winning courtesy).  In parenthesis I believe that one of Professor Empson's more memorable lectures consisted of him coming onto the stage, standing there for a while leafing through a text, and then saying, Well, after all, what can you say about King Lear? and walking off.

As we descend in the lift I am reminded of another distinguished member of the staff who is now but a ghost.  Joe Warrington taught philosophy, who I had met through mutual friends.  I recall meeting him in his office on the seventh floor one day, when he offered me a whisky from the bottle in his desk drawer.  Having nothing else pressing to do he invited me back to his home to listen to Louis Armstrong, for whom he had a passionate enthusiasm.  On the way we stopped at his local off licence to buy some bottles.  The lady shopkeeper politely reminded Joe that the last time he had passed by he had written her a cheque, but sadly this had bounced.  Oh, don't worry about that!  Joe smiled winningly,  I'll just write you another one!

Joe, and other members of the university fraternity, used to frequent a pub called The Raven,  of which now no trace remains, its site occupied by a glass and concrete edifice with little discernable purpose.  However, to my delight, I find that a favourite haunt of mine in those distant days is still there, even though John, my friend and owner at the time, has now retired, and it is being run by his brother.  This is Rare and Racy, a shop which specialises in buying and selling books and records. 

I enter, to the faint scent of joss and the music of John Coltrane, and I feel I am dreaming - this was how it was; wall to wall books and stacks of records, even now largely vinyl LPs.  The only real difference (apart from the shop sign) is that the front rooms of the first floor are also stacked with books, and the walls are covered with framed prints of local interest.  For me, this is a treasure trove, and I can hardly believe it is still in business.

But moving on, my last port of call is the Cathedral.  As Cathedrals go it is not the grandest, nor the most highly decorated, but it stands in a pleasant space, with some attractive Georgian buildings around.  One morning, many years ago, I remember wandering here at about the same time of year.  A number of homeless people were stretched out on the ground beside the ancient walls.  

Then, as now, the cherry trees were in blossom, and the sleeping figures were delicately decorated with fallen petals.  It is an image that has stayed in my mind, one that stands for a certain kind of peace.  As I stand under the very same trees, with their flowers softly falling, I see the ghosts of those sleeping forms upon the ground, I see the ghosts of friends, and I see a ghostly image of my own youth, drifting through the fallen flowers.

Paradoxically, the spectres remain.  Ghosts are elusive things: you see them; you don't.  My brother and I had learned of our grandfather's death by finding a note slipped under his door in Lambert Street when we came back from a weekend on the moors; Please come to West Bar Police Station.....  A day or two later, at three a.m. I woke with a start, my curtain billowing in a chill breeze on a very still, warm night.  Immediately I sensed that my grandad's spirit, not knowing where I had been in Yorkshire, had come to say goodbye.

In Sheffield, the familiar faces have gone; the steelworks have gone; the pubs, with their pianos and juke boxes have gone, or at least changed irrevocably (though the Kelham Island Tavern, which was The White Hart, a Stones' pub, is still a fine establishment, and the nearby Fat Cat, which was a Wards' pub, is also a survivor); the terraces (both at Hillsborough and Bramall Lane, where I spent Saturday afternoons clutching Styrofoam cups of OXO,  aching for a pee); the thick atmosphere of heavy industry has dispersed, and only a thin mist of vocational degrees and snooker remains.  Even the laudable Kelham Island Museum only represents a flickering shadow of what once was.  The cathedral is empty, itself now embalmed in cherry petals.

The clouds, which have been gathering all day, well up and cry.  Splashes of dirty water spot the pavement, and we hurry to the station.  A young man with a can of happiness waves as we pass.  In my head I hear the voice of Joe Cocker, once a gas-fitter in Sheffield.  I can stand a little rain.....  and we dive for shelter on the southbound train.

Puddling iron, blending steel;

Turn the fire on to anneal

What you feel about the siren;

Blending steel,

Puddling iron,

ROLLING STEEL.

Final chorus of William Empson's The Birth of Steel - a masque written for and performed before the Queen when she visited Sheffield and the University