The rotting corpse of Psalter Lane

Psalter Lane Art College is dead. Once a jewel in Sheffield's crown, a magnet for would be artists, designers, jewellery makers and film directors from all over Britain, it was swallowed up by Sheffield Poly, soon to become Sheffield Hallam University who took the decision, in 2008, to close it.

And close it they did. After years of rumours that its demise was imminent, it finally shut its doors in the summer. A skeleton of staff stayed on, moving stuff out for re-use down at the City Campus, tidying up admin loose ends until finally, in early September, the last handful of people walked out and the doors closed for the final and time. Contractors came and cut off the water and gas, though electricity remains for now.

With the removal of water and gas, the heating system, which for decades had kept the leaky buildings warm and dry, was dead. The interiors cooled down slowly, and the persistent, encroaching moisture, damp and drips from leaky rooves found itself unopposed.

So what is Psalter Lane like now? If you love the place, have fond memories of it, and decry the way it's been cast aside by the overlords of Hallam Uni, you may find some of these scenes distressing.

In late October, I had to pay a visit to the site, to inspect it and assess the risk of a fire being started there by arsonists (ie. kids who might break in). I visited all the buildings, alone, wandering through the deserted rooms and corridors. It was a weird and unsettling trip. Glad I wasn't on acid. Or am I?

I arrived just as it began to rain, on a chilly, damp afternoon, a truly leaden sky setting the tone. The two on-site security guards greeted me and let me in. They 'live' in the old caretaker's house at the back of the site. The main buildings are empty and silent.

To begin, I had a walk around the exterior, looking for obvious ways in. A few months ago, you were hard pressed to get a parking spot on the car park. Now, it lay empty, but for a few vans belonging to asbestos contractors working in the old substation on the edge of the car park

Click on the pics to see a full-sized image (they all look better full size)

Below: A Block, the orginal art college, empty for the first time in 150 years...

Below: B Block, home of the graphic designers and woodworking workshops...

Below: The car park is piled with rubbish and discarded furniture. A bonfire in the making...

Wandering around out on the open car park is eerie enough, but go round the back of the buildings and the sense of abandonment is worse, palpable. Nature, always on hand to exploit a loophole, is already seeming to dance amongst the stone and concrete.

Below: Behind A Block, vegetation running riot...

Below: a fungus, feeding on the damp wood of the fire door at rear of A Block...

...weeds gain a foothold next to a Victorian drain cover...

Below: The path between E Block and A Block, strewn with rotting furniture...

Below: The industrial, functional things, machinery, ventilation systems, which were humming with power until recently, suddenly look rusty and dilapidated...

Other industrial relics remain of a more remote past: old electrical insulators on the wall...

Below: rear of C Block, a fine piece of 1970s neo-brutalism...

Below: In places, even outside, you come across abandoned student artwork. The wooden frame is part of the 'Trebushed', a garden shed which converted into a working mediaeval siege engine (trebuchet), which was a 2008 final year degree piece...

It isn't just the old buildings which raise ghosts, real or imagined. Some of the external areas, particularly in that leaden Autumn weather, put me in mind of the sort of place you'd expect to stumble upon the speech-denyingly horrific scene of some child-murder, cold flesh and clothes scattered amidst the muddy leaves behind the concealing buildings.

Below: back of G Block...

Below: The windows of C Block staircase from outside, looking up...

In places, the drab greyness and air of silent emptiness is lightened, as here, by splashes of paint on a wooden door, a relic of a day when some art student leaned a board up against the door and splashed paint on it, Pollock-style, the paint now accompanied by the sucker roots of ivy tendrils...

Other colour comes from more industrial sources...

Below: the gnarled Victorian stonework looks old...

...but the 1970s concrete of C Block also now shows the scars and stains of its life...

C Block windows, clouded and opaque like the eyes of dead fish...

Below: E and D Blocks, and the 'quadrangle'...

...and a close-up of the rear entrance to E Block, once a smoker's haunt, now just haunted...

Rain on the roof...

Having wandered round the site, I was amazed at just how...dead it all seemed. I was used to it being such a vibrant place, a place I always looked forward to visiting. Now, it was like looking at the corpse of a dead family member. It resembled the place I knew so well, but was cold and silent.

I spent nearly an hour walking around outside, and time was moving on. I had to get inside and do my tour before darkness came. The main entrance was still decorated with the remnants of the big party which took place there back in summer, now like the xmas decorations in mid-January.

Below: Kid Acne's mural and farewell message, painted over the main entrance for the leaving party in June...

I went in, chatted to the friendly security staff, who'd opened up for me, and then I began my walk-round, alone in the echoing winter gloom of the deserted rooms and corridors.

I began with A Block, the old Victorian building which, being Grade 2 listed, will not be demolished. It used to host the library, the film theatre and a series of offices. Unfortunately the camera malfunctioned in this section so I didn't get all the pictures I wanted. I got no pics of the huge expanse of the deserted library, or the attic, which is every inch the attic in the horror short 'Drip' (see my earlier blog entry). The splendour of the Victorian rooms still peeked through the more modern imposition of the office environment, and being able to see the rooms stripped of their 21st century accoutrements was edifying. One thing which struck me was how much stuff had been left behind. Office furniture, stationery, personal nick-nacks, the place was far from being truly empty. It was as if people had left in a hurry, grabbing what they could along the way.

The other thing was the total silence. It was quiet outside, but no sound penetrated in here. I could hear every thump of my heart, and it was almost a relief when I entered a back room to be faced with a bank of still live telecoms routers, all flashing LEDs and humming relays. It was like finding life on Mars. Outside that room, there was a post-apocalyptic feel about the place, as if everyone had fled in the face of a zombie army or a plague of Black Death proportions.

The empty offices were unnerving, but the library was worse. Ever played any of the 'Silent Hill' computer games? The library was like being in a real-life version. I expected to be menaced any moment by split-headed dogs or lumbering mutants. What made it all the more poignant were the messages which departed staff had scrawled on the walls, the day they left...

Below: Click on the images to enlarge and read the scrawled messages...

My camera malfunctioned here, in the ground floor library, so I couldn't get any pics of the upstairs. I just continued my fire safety inspection. Eventually however, I fiddled with the camera and managed to get it working again, just in time to enter C Block, the former home of the fine artists. A lot of the bigger degree pieces from 2008 were still in situ, but the encroaching damp, leaky ceilings and bone-chilling, grave-like cold, were causing the hardwood parquet floors to swell and rise up in wooden billows, artificial waves breaking into pixellations of collapsed blocks.

Below: room 302, Heath Robinson guttering rigged to try and divert roof leaks out through the open window. Parquet floors destroyed by the wet...

Below: room 306 looking much as it did at the degree show in June, except for the erupting floor...

Below: student artwork in room 304...

...and in 401A...

In fact, C Block struck me, more than the other blocks, as almost a giant artwork in progress, commenting on decay, the disappearance of humanity, fear and isolation, loads of different themes, left behind by previous tenants or created by the new situation. It has to be experienced by walking around in there alone, but it speaks to you, in dozens of different voices all at once.

Below: series of pics of level 2 corridor, C Block...

The Level 2 corridor, with the familiar painted corner visible at the end...

Below: Level 2 corridor; dark and totally silent...

Below: a piece of artwork in a room on Level 1...

Below: the 'painted corner' on the C Block stairs...

From inside the building, the grimy windows offer new perspectives on parts of the outside...

From C Block, so familiar to me, I wandered through the basement studios and into D Block, former home of Metalwork and Jewellery, a single storey, one corridor building running between C Block and E Block, which used to be Printing and Photography. This section was particularly spooky. One of the security staff, a big bloke we'll call 'Bill' (because that's his name), swore he saw "something" moving across the landing of E Block stairs, as he came round the corner of the darkened D Block corridor at the stair foot. A pale mist or vague shape, it was enough (he said) to make him run back down the corridor to C Block and the main entrance. This was in my mind as I ventured into the rooms of D Block. I don't believe in ghosts, but isolation and silence, in an environment of empty rooms and silent corridors, can exert a malign influence on your imagination. I felt watched, though whether it was ghosts or just the place itself, I can't say.

Below: out back of C Block

Below: abandoned casting furnace, C Block

Below: the courtyard between C and E Blocks

Below: a thing in a cupboard, C Block basement.

Below: Mr Wilson

Below: left behind paintings display to spiders and silence

Below: The abandoned woodworking machine shops, C Block

Below: oh! Graffiti in C Block basement

Below: This huge composite portrait dominates the wall of one of the C Block studios, even now, nearly 2 years later

Below: clay head, suitably outraged at the closure

Below:Staircase windows in C Block

Below: C Block studio art

Below: C Block studios

Below: Where are they now?

Below: abandoned workbenches, with Record vices still attached

Below:Great Cthulhu waits, and dreams, in sunken C Block

D Block, the old Metalwork and Jewellery Department, ws utterly silent. The drip of a tap would have been a hammer blow there. You held your breath walking through, because the sound that came back from the cold walls was unpleasant.

Below: abandoned office, stripped of all but a chair

Moving into E Block, past the spooky, darkrooms, the print area seemed light and warm and full of sunbeams. Screen printing equipment lay untouched, destined for the skip, uncluding thei beautiful Victorian press (below).

B Block was creepy. Upstairs, the gloom of the dusk was seeping in like water and horror lurked around every corner until, suddenly, a beam of gold sunlight broke through the slaty sky and the dirty windows (below)

Below: deserted workshops in B Block

Below: The Sentinel

Update: It is now January 2010. Psalter Lane has been dead for 18 months. Over the past few weeks, a company have been employed by the university to remove all non-fixed items from the buildings. So that means that everything you see in these photos; all the benches, furniture, artwork, tools, everything that isn't bolted down, has been taken, most of it skipped, broken and nor lost forever. Most of it I guess isn't important, but what of the old victoriant press in E Block? Sledgehammered to manageable chunks of cast iron and weighed in as scrap? Probably.

Over the Yuletide holidays, a gang of people who knew exactly what they were doing broke into the buildings and methodically stripped it of lead and copper and anything else of use or value. The on-site security presumably slept through it. Is it any different to the methodical stripping-out already described? Other than sanction, I don't see much, and at least those removing the scrap metals were making some use of their spoils, not just breaking, burning or burying them.

In March, demolition contractors move in. Everything will be gone, except A Block, the original college building. I might have a chance to get on site before that happens. If I do, I'll try and take some photos.

What time is it...?

Seems I fell asleep sometime back in December, as far as the blogosphere goes at any rate. Ah well, not much has happened/loads has happened/the Universe is a completely different place now (delete as you see fit).

Went to the dentist today. Well, I say 'the dentist' but it was the dental hospital, actually. I'm not registered with a practice in Sheffield: you can't find a NHS dentist for love nor money. This allowed me to volunteer as a patient for nervous final-year students to practice on. And it's all free! You donate your time and your teeth. They donate the expertise and the treatment. Mutualism, eh? Symbiosis. Reciprocal back-scratching.

Whatever, my ivory is in pretty decent nick, apart from a small cavity and my perennially loose crown, Left number 1 lower. It went in my mouth in summer 1981, after I damaged my teeth falling from the top of Swastika Crack, a climb on Simonside in Northumberland. I was soloing. Fell about 25-30 feet onto a pile of rocks. Knocked out, bruised and grazed but the only things broken were my teeth. Lucky boy. So lucky. Death came over, had a look at me and decided "nah.."

So yes, the crown. Loose and with an occasional foul discharge from the ugly hole it sits in. They could leave it, they said. I looked appropriately crestfallen. They could take it out, replace it with a bridge. I brightened and it was a done deal. September 14th, out comes the crown. I'll be sad to lose it, so might ask to keep it. It's been an honorary part of my anatomy for 28 years after all.

Out comes the crown, then out comes the truncated incisor it's been standing in for all these years too. Not looking forward to that, all the wrestling with pliers, blood and crunching, then the hole and the gap. The gap will be interesting. I will have to deliver training courses with it, lending me a hissing lisp like the cartoon Lancelot (Sssssire!). It'll give me a piratical edge, perhaps, and once the ugly hole heals over, I might quite like it.

Sometime before xmas though, they intend to fit me with a bridge; another kind of artificial tooth, fixed to one of its neighbours, to restore my smile to its flawed glory. My student dentist is called Sayeda (possible sp.)

Some folk hate the dentist, or the treatment anyroad. I like it, usually. Like the hairdresser or the masseur. I like to lie and be pampered. Being given attention. I came out of there relaxed and calm, therapised, and with a smile on my face.



On the way home, I found a buddleia with flowers of the richest purple, just up the road, much like this one above. I pulled off a heeled cutting and poked it into a pot of compost when I got home. As I watered it, direct from the water butt tap, I saw that the water was full of freshwater shrimps! Little amphipods, Gammarus. The water butt is full of them. How they got there, I have no idea. The only thing that's gone in there is rainwater, so somehow they must have come with the rain, perhaps washed off a bird's leg or something.


Above: a pair of freshwater shrimps yesterday

Soft bugger that I am, I feel sorry for them, as they end up being watered into the various tubs and pots on the patio, to die and dry in the air. I'm planning to run the water through a sieve and put the shrimps in the pond and stream, to boost the community diversity, and provide food for the fish I suppose.

Best of Kendal Mountain Film Festival Day 2

It was the second evening of Matt Heason's 'Best of Kendal' roadshow, which for Monday and Tuesday had set up a high camp in Sheffield's cosy Showroom cinema, home to Kendal's precocious cousin, ShAFF.

Jude and I ventured from the cold comfort of our overpriced lagers in the otherwise Ikea-comfy surroundings of the bar, to sit right on the front row, for the full-on IMAX effect, dude, yeah?

As with Monday's films, these were a varied bunch. First up was Journey of a Red Fridge, directed and produced by Lucian Muntean and Nataša Stankovica. A hard-to-place docu about a 17 year old Nepalese boy, Hari, carrying a Coca-Cola fridge down from the high mountains to the buzz and fume of Pokhara to be repaired. All so he could earn some money to supplement the peanuts he earns from portering for expeditions (5 cents a day!)

Along the way he meets friends and relatives, fellow travellers and the odd westerner. All are gracious, open and warm, with little of the guardedness and mistrust which now seems to permeate our culture here in England. At one point, he encounters two teenage girls bearing heavy baskets of hay (on a head-strap, as is the custom). One is dark-skinned, obviously of Indian ancestry. The other has the asiatic, Tibetan-looking features of a Nepali. Both are beautiful by western standards, and both behave exactly as teenage girls do the world over, flirting with Hari, whilst laughing at the 'tourists' making the film, with their funny clothes (the Nepalis refer to all westerners as 'tourists', even the climbers, who for some reason like to think of themselves as being above that categorisation).

Running through the film, pinning together this strange road-trip, is the powerful desire of Hari to earn enough money to buy a good education and to escape from the life which is set out for him, earning subsistence wages as a porter. At one point, we see him squirm as his elderly, infirm father, whom he hasn't seen for some time, virtually demands money from Hari, who is torn between his love and loyalty for his father, and his need to save what money he has to further his dreams.

Whether Hari ultimately achieves what he sets out to do, we never find out. In the more prosaic journey of the fridge, he reaches Pokhara and the fridge is repaired, as Hari sits on the dusty step outside, in the traffic fumes, musing on his future.

For our part, we see the spectacular landscape he lives in, the beauty of it, and we ask, 'why would he want to leave that place, those people, their culture?' But to Hari, it represents hardship, poverty and a trap from which he must escape. We wish him success in his journey.

That was followed by a 2 minute short animation called Climber, directed and produced by Carlos Villarreal Kwasek, which is about an ice climber, soloing a hard route, who has a moment of doubt and fear, and has to face, quite literally, his inner demon. Shown at ShAFF this year, it benefits from the big screen but you can watch it in its entirety here.

The third film, directed and produced by Justine Curgenven, This is The Sea 4 - Circumnavigation of New Zealand, is another road trip, a home movie of sorts, following Justine Curgenven and Barry Shaw as they attempt to paddle sea kayaks 1700 miles around the South Island of New Zealand. The film shows the hardhips they encounter, both from the sea (tide rips, heavy swells and the killer surf) and from the land (sand flies and a decomposing dead whale right by their campsite). It also shows that two people, ordinary brits like us, can embark on a huge expedition like that, entirely self-supported, and pull it off, making it look like any other kayaking trip.

The fourth film was for my money the best of the 'action' films. Taken from Hot Aches Productions 'Committed Vol. 2', 'The Walk of Life' follows Matlock climber James Pearson as he works to complete the first ascent of the route of that name on North Devon's Hartland Point. The route climbs straight up a blank, rippled slab of shale(?), for almost a full rope length (50m). He describes it as his 'silly obsession' and the route has been tried and eyed by the likes of Johnny Dawes and other stars of the modern era, all unsuccessfully, though these early inspections/attempts left a legacy of rusting pegs in the tiny overlaps and slots which occur sporadically on the huge slab.

James, to his eternal credit, 'gives it a facelift', removing the pegs, some of which are little more than rust anyway. In doing so, he creates a line which is terrifying in its blankness and its boldness, and commits himself to what he must know will be a fearfully exposed and run-out lead.

We see him cleaning the holds on abseil, trying moves; just enough of that to give us a flavour of his approach to the lead. Then, without further ado, he is on the route, having to climb the first 10m just to get his first piece of gear, a psychological wire which he admits wouldn't hold a fall. He works higher and higher, now a long way above the boulders on the shore, adrift in a vertical grey sea. Two thirds of the way up, he loses it. Something, a foot slips, a finger loses purchase, he's off, and he falls. And falls. He takes one of the longest lead falls I've ever seen, down the steep slab, maybe 15, 18m or more. That attempt is over.

He returns later, mentally and physically armed for another try. He shows no sign that his big fall has affected him, as he works his way back to his high point, then passes it, the cliff top betraying its closeness by the tufted lichen growing on the rock around him. He is now in a terrifying place, but close to safety. A last tentative move and he is there, whooping, hugging his girlfriend, whilst poor Rich Mayfield, belaying below, scampers off the rocks to escape the incoming tide. E12! That's the grade he gave it. Time will tell whether that sticks but whatever grade it settles at, it's an incredible line (or lack of a line), inescapable, committing and frighteningly bold.

The last film of the evening was Hand Cut, directed and produced by
Nick Waggoner, about the AAAHsome (dude) powder skiiing on the high peaks of the Colorado Rockies. Graceful, almost balletic footage of skiers and snowboarders is accompanied by suitably subtle music, with none of the fist-thrusting metal edge of other films of the genre. Cut into the film are voice-overs from old-timers who lived and worked in these mountains when they were still frontier mining towns, giving the contrast between the hardship of that environment back then, and the way it has become a playground now, for the bold and the wealthy. The film tells us very little, outside the grizzled voices of the pioneers, but the majesty of the swooping figures surging through the vertical oceans of powder holds us spellbound, like watching big wave surfers on a frozen wave of snow and rock. Almost made me want to ski.

DRIP - you wanna see something really scary?

Are you the sort of person who finds it scary, being in a house on your own? The darkness of the empty rooms upstairs. The shadows. The silence, broken by unexplained creaks and muffled bumps from rooms you know are empty. Ever get that fear? That fear which defies logic and stops you going up those stairs, or which makes you glance up at the loft trapdoor as you cross the landing?

Yeah? You one of those people? If you are, then you need to watch this...



'Drip' was a short film, only 10 minutes long, which was shown oh, maybe ten years ago now, late one night on Channel 4. It went unnoticed by most people, but not by me. And now, after years of looking fruitlessly for it, here it is, popping up on Youtube. I suggest you watch this when you're alone in the house, and it's dark outside. Remember how 'The Blair Witch Project' is just a big laugh when you're with your mates, but how it assumes a completely different mantle if you watch it alone at night? Same here.

It's only short, but it has a powerful psychological fear at its heart, which taps into something primeval in us.

By the way, 'You wanna see something really scary?' comes from the opening scene of 'Twilight Zone - the Movie', which was the only scary part. If you haven't seen/don't remember it, here it is...

A Garden of Mud and Stone: Part 2

Hi folks. Sorry it's been so long since my last post! Things have got in the way. I'm too busy at work; I've been editing Jude's soon-to-be-published book 'Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law' and working on the garden as well. On top of that, I've had flu (the seasonal variety, not the much-dreaded H5N1!), necessitating three days off work. Returning to work once I began to improve, I then was alarmed to find myself relapsing, quickly becoming even more ill than I was before. I was diagnosed with a bacterial chest infection and instructed to stay off work the rest of the week and "take it easy". I think blogging counts as 'taking it easy' so here goes.

Once I'd explored the garden and ideas had begun to creep like rampant slime moulds through the recesses of my mind (nice simile, eh?), it was obvious that the first job was to clear the crap at the bottom of the garden. The previous occupants had simply used the bottom ten yards or so as a dump, piling it high with hedge clippings, timber offcuts from DIY projects, broken patio furniture, plant pots, tree branches, soil, stones, old bricks and broken concrete. It was a mess. The hawthorn hedge marking the boundary of the garden, where it meets the woods, was buried under this ton of shit, to the point where I didn't think it was even alive.

One of the first things I did was set light to the dry prunings and twiggy rubbish, which formed a barrier some four feet high, across the garden. This was very dry and the flames raced through it in seconds, reducing it in height and saving me a lot of work. I stamped the fire out before it reached the healthy hedges on either side, but had cause to regret the fire, when I discovered that beneath the mountain of rubbish were some perfectly healthy hawthorns, bent horizontal by the weight. Unfortunately, these got scorched and a couple of them never recovered.

There was still a hell of a lot to shift, so I got one of those garden incinerators from B&Q; one of those metal dustbins on legs, with a chimney in the lid. Know the ones? They are an ace way to burn stuff quickly and in a controlled way. For several days, I fed mine with the woody rubbish from the garden. It burned it up as fast as I could throw it in. All the plastic, metal and non-combustible stuff, I bagged up and took to the local tip.




Above: me burning the twigs and rubbish in my incinerator

It took me a couple of weeks altogether but I eventually got it down to bare soil. I lifted up the poor, flattened, scorched hawthorns, staking them until they could stay upright. Only two died as a result of my fire. The rest formed a fine, if leggy, hedge which was just begging for a man with a billhook to get cracking and lay it; a job for the autumn.

It was good to be doing this stuff. Moving into a new house is all very exciting but it's really only when you start getting to grips with the soil and the growing things out there that you begin to feel some sort of bond with the place. This was enhanced by the fact that our garden is so long and at the bottom, you are, quite literally, in the woods. Going down there from the house is like making a little journey to a different place and, when you're down there, you get a sense of being watched, not by neighbours, as might normally be the case, but by the trees, the birds, the unseen creatures out there. By the woods themselves, which I'm sure some of you will understand.

Once I'd cleared the bottom of the garden, I left it to its own processes for some weeks, whilst Jude and I converted the house into our home. When I came back to it, it was well into Autumn. The early November winds were bringing blizzards of brown and yellow leaves down, covering the ground in deep drifts. Sitting at the foot of the garden, the woods suddenly sounded echoey, empty. The air smelled different, now carrying a rich perfume of decay, laced with the exhalations of fungi, as contrasted with the oxygen pumped out by the green trees just weeks before.

I always reckon that you can tell when autumn arives, irrespective of 'official' starting dates, or of the onset of so-called 'autumnal' weather. The real measure of it is when, quite suddenly, over the space of a week or two, the trees, the big trees of the woods, stop breathing out. That change in the air, as their oxygen production shuts down for the winter, is the real herald of autumn.

That change is married to a change in the woodland soil, too. In summer, through into the weeks leading up to Autumn, any rain falling in the woods is quickly sucked up by the thirsty trees and other plants. The soil never really gets saturated, except during freakishly heavy rains. Come autumn however, the trees are going to sleep. They aren't photosynthesising. They are busy pulling all the goodness back out of their leaves, into their branches and trunks and roots, to store and re-use next year, leaving the leaves empty, the green chlorophyll removed, browns and yellows and reds of unwanted pigments and dead cells painting their drying, rustling remains. The trees seal off the join at the base of the leaf stalk, and it eventually drops off, blown by the wind, to fertilise the soil, the tree eventually feeding on itself as it takes up the nutrients released from its own decomposed foliage.

When this process starts, the trees no longer need the water. They no longer take it up and liberate the oxygen from the water molecule, releasing it to sustain our lives and those of all animals. When the rain falls, it sits there in the soil, only a few evergreens staying awake to drink, and to keep watch over their sleeping cousins. The soil becomes wet, a different wetness to that which you normally encounter in summer. That, and the change in the air, are the true signs that Autumn is here.

Most of us who live in urban areas, and many even in rural areas, have lost that connection with the seasons; our ability to smell the onset of Autumn. Not so long ago, almost everyone working out in the woods and fields would have known that smell, those signs, and would have nodded to themselves and checked their store of firewood against the hardships of the months ahead.

Spring is the same. You know Spring is here, not because you have a few warm days, or it's the 21st of bloody March, or because daffodils are out but because, all of a sudden, some time in March, the woodland soils dry out. What has been wet and cold, sticky and dead, becomes, over the space of just a couple of days, merely damp, seemingly warmer and somehow filled with life. It's hard to describe in words but...it's as if something has suddenly sucked up all that standing water from the winter-sodden ground. Which, of course, is what has happened. The big trees have woken from their winter sleep. The sleeping giants have woken thirsty, and they immediately begin to drink up all that rain and snow-melt. The breaking of the buds comes some days after this initial explosion of invisible activity but is, to most people, the first visible sign of life in the trees. For days leading up to that, however, the water being sucked up from the ground by these giants goes rushing up, through their trunks, to swell the buds and unfurl new leaves to the warming, life-giving sun. It even makes a sound that you can hear - the pulse of the living tree!

It's at this time, given a good reading of the signs, that certain trees can be tapped, bled of a little of their sap, which can be boiled down to make syrup (that's how Maple Syrup is made) or fermented into a delicate wine. The sap rises strongly enough to do this only for maybe a week, ten days at most, each year, until the buds break when it slows to a comparative trickle. To draw sap, you have to be able to read the signs. Tree hugger? You may laugh at the notion, but I know things that most people don't. I've rediscovered them, just by making connections, listening, smelling, observing the lives of things around me.

Anyway, where was I? Oh aye. Autumn in the garden. Sorry about the digression, but the woods are such a barometer of the seasons I just had to wander off into a bit of a Jack Hargreaves.

The hedge along the bottom boundary of the garden caught my attention. It was tall; some of the hawthorns were perhaps twenty feet high. But it was also gappy and leggy. Anyone could just walk into the garden through the gaps. What I wanted was a solid, thorny hedge; a living barrier to people, but not to wildlife. But, crucially, I also wanted to be able to get out into the woods whenever I pleased. So I needed a hedge with a gate set into it, Secret Garden style.

Outside the hedge, the slope of the garden flattens off, right at the top of a steep bank, dropping down to a small beck (a stream, to non-Yorkshire folks. Bloody off-comers!). The top of the bank was crowded with a tangled growth of a nondescript shrub, something like an old privet, with straggly roses growing through it. To help the hedge, I had to get rid of that first, so I set to with loppers and bowsaw, burning the still-green offcuts in the incinerator, until the top of the bank was clear, letting lots of light in (or as much as the overhead sycamores, ash, lilac and spruce would allow!).

Many years ago, in the 1970s, a moody teenage Brian used to spend a considerable proportion of his weekends undertaking a variety of practical conservation projects, in the Tong-Cockersdale Country Park, just South of Pudsey. I was a member of the Tong-Cockersdale Volunteers, or TCV. We were based in the old Stables Block of Tong Hall, which was then a public museum owned by Bradford Council (they later sold it off, scandalously, to become a 'Business Park', and the Stables Block became a private home).



The TCV were affiliated to the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, or BTCV (patron; Prince Charles). Indeed, should any BTCV members read this, I and my TCV colleagues were the first people to go and have a look at Hollybush Farm, then derelict, as a potential Northern HQ for the BTCV, who wanted to move out of their tiny place on Copley Road, Doncaster, to somewhere bigger. We were impressed. Our Head Ranger, Bill Shaw (who later became a Green MP, I believe), recommended it to the BTCV and the rest is history.

Anyway, whilst normal teenagers were drinking cider in parks and bus shelters, talking about imaginary girls they'd shagged, and mugging old ladies, I was out in the countryside, learning drystone walling, hedge-laying, fencing and footpath construction. Brilliant stuff, and I'm forever grateful to Bill and the all the rest (see list below) for giving my adolescence such an odd and lasting spin.

What the hedge needed was the application of my rather rusty hedge-laying skills, something I'd only done once since the end of the 70s, when I laid a huge hedge alongside the allotments where I used to have a plot, in Pudsey.

For the uninitiated, hedge-laying involves cutting partway through the basal stem of a healthy hedge tree or shrub, in such a weay that it can be bent over and 'laid', literally. Adjoining stems can be laid in turn, until one is left with a strong, interwoven, stock-proof hedge of horizontal stems, sometimes supported by stakes. It will regrow and is almost infinitely renewable. Look at any old hawthorn hedge and you'll probably be able to see some gnarled old stems at the base which are laid along horizontally, with new growth coming out vertically from them. That's where a hedge was laid, perhaps generations ago. And that's what I chose to do with ours, where many householders would have replaced it with a short-lived fence or just filled the gaps with wire. The old ways are the best. They didn't evolve and last for centuries without good reason, you know.

So I laid the hedge, all the way around the bottom of the garden. I have a small collection of billhooks, the choping tool used for this practice, because I love them; they are an tool which is redolent with history, and can be picked up for a few quid at car boot sales or on ebay. Go back four hundred years and you'd find men using billhooks identical to those in use today (indeed, the mediaeval military bill - a heavy spiked blade on the end of a long pole, was developed from the billhook). And to make it more fascinating, there are myriad regional variations on the blade shape and length, and each manufacturer had their own patterns within those regional styles. Lovely things, billhooks.

So I got to use my billhooks, which was fantastic. To begin though, I used loppers to trim bushy side-growth off the hedge, and to reduce the height of the tallest stems (which also encourages new growth and the production of defensive thorns). This made the laying easier, as some of the larger bushes were pretty big and heavy and, of course, covered in heavy thorns!


Above: this is from a later stage in the garden, but clearly shows the recently laid hedge behind me
I'm right handed, so it was easier for me to lay left to right, using the billhook in my right hand. It took me, all told, a whole weekend to do. A good hedge-layer would have taken half a day, probably!

A garden of mud and stone - part 1

When we moved into our house in May 2004, we didn't do so because of the house, an unremarkable 1930s semi. We did so because of its location, on a quiet, almost semi-rural backstreet, some three miles South of Sheffield city centre, and its situation. The street sits in the S8 postal district, which encompasses Woodseats, Heeley, Meersbrook, Norton Lees, Meadowhead, Norton and Beauchief.

It sits within an easy drive or cycle ride of the Eastern edge of the Peak District, which was important and, even more importantly for us, short of money as we were/are, it was (and remains) one of Sheffield's relatively 'undiscovered' areas, in terms of its housing potential.

Whereas areas like Nether Edge, Hunter's Bar, Walkley and Crookes have been colonised by incomers, looking for good houses in a nice area, well served by amenities and transport options, the S8 districts are only just coming to people's attention in that respect. The housing slump has put a temporary halt to any potential influx of house-buyers but I can see this part of the city becoming one of the main areas of interest once the market picks up again.

Well, I digress: I'm not blogging about the housing slump and the up and coming suburbs of Sheffield. Nope, what I want to say about our house is why we are here; what moved us to buy it in the first place.

We'd sought long and hard for a house we could afford. I, being from Pudsey, had few preconceptions about where I wanted to live in Sheffield. Jude however, had fixed ideas about that matter, wanting a house close to Nether Green, where her last house had been, so as to be close to her son, and also to the people she knew and felt comfortable with, to her area.

But the houses over in Nether Green and nearby suburbs were expensive; too much so for us. We had to look further afield. One day, hard at work in Leeds, I ventured onto an Estate Agent's website to look at houses on the market in Sheffield, and came across this one. It was Monday morning, and the house had just been added to the website. I rang Jude, who showed little interest, it being miles away from where she wanted to live. Well, a 15 minute drive or an hour's walk anyway.

But it was affordable and the description enticingly said "Backs onto woods". That last statement was enough leverage to get Jude interested enough to go and view it. We did so on the Tuesday, negotiating unfamiliar streets and driving past the house twice, before we identified it as the one we wanted to see.

The house was nice enough; a bit small, but enough for two of us and two old cats. We made an offer the very next day. The couple selling were desperate to move, and wanted a quick sale, so accepted our offer of the asking price immediately. What had really swayed us, and particularly Jude, was not just the price, nor the location, nor even the house itself, but its physical situation and what we saw, as we looked beyond the house to what lay behind it.

The house sits, somewhat paradoxically, in a tiny valley, which itself is high on a hill, some 3 miles from, and 350 feet above, the city. No risk of flooding here.

The house sits on a scarp of sandstone lying just a few feet under the soil, on a steep slope which runs down into the little valley. Out at the front, a tiny, paved patio overlooks the street and the long drystone wall opposite, and gives no hint of what lies behind the house.

The valley is bounded by broad ridges on three sides, and itself runs down towards the distant city. This has a peculiar acoustic effect, whereby the traffic noise from the various trunk roads, which run less than a mile away in three directions, barely register here, being deflected by the aforementioned ridges. Conversely, the small valley serves to channel the sounds of the city centre up the hill to us, so that on a Saturday afternoon the roars of the crowd at Bramall Lane reach our ears, and we can hear the clang and boom of distant forges away on the East of the city. But overall, we are in a quiet pocket of the land, something we never anticipated when we moved here.

On an average evening, the ambient noise is dominated by the song of birds, the sound of occasional passing cars on the street outside, neighbour's voices or music from back-garden socialising, and the wind in the trees.

Ah yes, the trees. The trees are probably the real reason we moved here.

Go through the house, and out through the sliding doors at the back, and you emerge onto a flagged patio, some 20 by 25 feet, as big as the entire garden for some houses of this vintage. This, in turn, leads to a couple of steps down onto a timber decked area, 10 feet by 20 feet, bounded on its downhill side by a wooden balustrade.

This is what we saw when we first viewed the house, as we looked out of the patio doors. And, nice though it was, it was what lay beyond that which really fired our imaginations and sold the house to us.

The decking is perched atop heavy poles, some 6 feet above the top end of a steeply sloping garden. A long, steeply sloping garden; altogether, the garden extends over 130 feet from the back wall of the house, being around 22 feet wide along its length.

The bottom of the garden is invisible from the house because, as the Estate Agent's blurb said, it "backs onto woods", to the extent that the trees swallow the garden. In addition, because of the steep slope, the house itself lies level with the canopy of the trees. Even though the woods are just a narrow strip, Ashes Wood, which is an offshoot of the larger Carr Woods (see my blog article about these woods), they are all we can see, at least when the trees are in leaf, as we look out from the back of the house.



The trees consist of numerous sycamores, some of them old and huge, with crazed and shaggy bark, so unlike the smoother bark of their younger cousins, oaks of various vintages, a scattering of silver birches, some giant ashes and venerable willows, and an underclass of hazel, elder, holly alder and hawthorn. Elsewhere in the woods are giant beeches, at the northern extent of their range, and the odd yew.

So, we bought the house. But this blog article ain't about t' bloody 'ouse, it's about t'garden. It were t'garden wot med us buy t'place, and wot really fired up me imagination, as ah stood an' looked arr it that day when wi went t'view t'place.

S'cuse my lapsing into dialect. I'm from Pudsey you know.

The garden, when we first moved in, was barely worthy of the name. The only kempt parts were the fairly new patio and decking: the rest of the garden, the other 100ft or more of it(!), consisted of a coarse grass and weed-strewn slope, with a few remnant shrubs and a clump of rhubarb, defiantly reminding me of long-past cultivation. This slope ran down the hill, past a huge weeping willow, to where an Anderson Shelter still stood, relict of the era of the house's birth at the outbreak of WW2, when it was intended to protect the occupants from German bombs.

The garden continued for perhaps 25 feet beyond the shelter, but this entire expanse was a no-man's land of weeds, rubbish, hedge-clippings, broken plant pots, dead branches and other detritus, so deep and tangled that it was a fight to make a way through/across it all, to reach the true termination of the garden. This was marked by a series of concrete posts, which had once carried a strained wire fence, but were now relegated to the role of boundary markers.

More interestingly, the boundary was also marked by a hawthorn hedge, leggy and gappy, and with most of its semi-mature bushes half buried and bent horizontal by the weight of crap plied against and on top of them. Most were still alive though, green foliage fizzing with life amidst the rot.

Stepping past the struggling hawthorns brought me to the rounded top of a steep bank, where the ground dropped away into what can only be described as a ravine, along the bottom of which, maybe 20 feet below, ran a little beck. On the opposite, even steeper bank, bluebells and ferns carpeted the ground under the trees. That bank rose, 25-30 feet, to meet a ribbon of a footpath contouring along through the woods, the angle above that easing, flattening out, until rising steeply again to meet a high mesh fence, marking the perimeter of playing fields belonging to the University of Sheffield.



Looking at all this, at my new playground, ideas popped to the surface of my mind like bubbles in lemonade, most bursting uselessly, but some floating there, coalescing around three immutable factors:

1. We have no money
2. The garden lies on a steep slope
3. The woods are full of stuff

These three facts are what led the garden to become what it is now. If you're interested in gardens, then revisit the blog and I'll tell the story. I have lots of pictures too, though unfortunately none of the garden as it was before I began to work on it.

It was late August 2004 before I even put a spade in the ground and well into 2005 before I began, in earnest, to form clear ideas in my head, and to begin to translate them into a physical reality.

One of my great personal weaknesses, almost to the point of inability, is concrete, scheduled, detailed planning. I tend to form ideas which become vague plans or intentions, and which I often begin work on without benefit of timescales or precise details. They develop organically, evolving and mutating as they go, depending on what problems may arise or whether my often unpredictable materials behave as I originally envisaged. My initial 'plans' were:-

1. Clear the rubbish from the bottom of the garden, burning the woody stuff and binning everything else, unless I saw a use for it.
   
2. Rescue the hawthorn hedge and lay it, traditionally.
3. Dig away the soil at the bottom of the garden to make a flat area, where I could build a shed and have a workspace for woodland crafts, woodcarving and the like.
4. Terrace the rest of the garden, to a greater or lesser extent, dividing it informally into 'zones', becoming wilder and more 'woodsy' as one progresses down the garden.
5. Have a pond, somewhere amidst all that.
   

That was my starting point. I had, effectively, a budget of bugger all and no materials other than what I could find or scrounge. What I did have, however, was a collection of good tools, a fertile imagination, physical ability and some of the skills needed to cultivate my ideas to fruition. Occasional injections of cash from unexpected sources enabled the odd luxury in terms of materials I mightn't otherwise have been able to afford, and allowed certain bottlenecks in progress to be overcome but, generally, I worked with found materials and made it up as I went along!

The garden has been one of my passions since moving here and, even now in 2008, it still is. It has a long way to go before completion, and continues to evolve, guiding me as much as I guide it.

I should have told this story from the beginning perhaps, but I'm a relative newcomer to blogging, and was certainly not blogging when we moved in here. My partner, Jude, has described parts of the garden and its evolution, on her blog. It's elicited such interest from people that I decided I'm going to tell the tale myself, going right back to the start of it all. I'll do it in instalments, recalling what I did and how the ideas became reality, and I'll continue, once we're up to date, so that the continuing evolution of the garden is broadcast to anyone who may have an interest in such things.

The significance of the garden's location and situation will become ever more apparent as the episodes unfold, as will our lack of disposable income. With ample money, there is no way that the garden would have ended up the way it is and is becoming. Poverty is the artist, every bit as much as I am. Hopefully I can show you that, even with almost nothing, you can create a fantastic garden, and that the resultant garden will be all the better for it, because you'll be pushed into using that most powerful and creative of the tools at your disposal; your imagination.

I intend to tell the story of how this...



Was turned into this...

I am The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Waters...

When I was a kid, in the early 70s, there were a series of Public Information Films aimed at children, mainly to do with learning to swim, staying away from railways and deep water, and not taking sweets off strange men. Some of them were genuinely disturbing, and probably wouldn't be allowed on telly these days in case they traumatised the kiddies, which perhaps wouldn't be a bad thing.

This one used to give me nightmares...



Lots of people felt the same about that one. For years it worked, and dirty, deep-looking water terrified me, and I kept away, unless there were lots of mates around to boost my confidence.

Another one I was fond of was 'Charley says...' which was a series of two or three, aimed at preventing young children being abducted, raped and butchered by sinister strangers. This was immediately in the wake of the horrific Moors Murders, where Ian Brady, aided and abetted by Myra Hindley, tortured and killed a number of small children, burying their little bodies on the moors above Saddleworth in West Yorkshire.

Charley was a stripey, animated cat, who spoke to his small boy companion in a kind of secret cat language. he was much cleverer than the boy, recognising the man in the park for the sick pervert that he was.

For a while, me and my mates used to talk to each other in Charley style. Not for long though.

This is the first in the 'Charley...' films...



I like the way "the man" walks.

Not only were we not to go off with men whose legs bend the wrong way, we were also to stay away from matches, according to our inarticulate feline guardian...



or teapots (!)...



stoves...



going away somwhere without telling your mummy...

and water, obviously, in case you meet a terrifying phantom in a monk's habit, who will make matches, hot teapots and paedophiles seem like a holiday, as your nightmares become reality...



The Charley ads, of course, formed the basis for The Prodigy's first big hit 'Charly' (note the mis-spelling), back in the late 80s. Still a stonking tune...




As for the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Waters, on YouTube, I found that someone has set it to a drum 'n' bass mix...




I'll be BACKBACKbackbackback......!

RIP Cyd Charisse

The woman with the million dollar legs died last night aged 86, in hospital, after suffering a heart attack on Monday. At the height of her fame her gorgeously long legs were allegedly insured for a million dollars (she later revealed that to be a publicity stunt by the studio).

She was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas in 1921, and began dancing with the Ballet Russe as a teenager.

She fell in love with, and married, a young French dancer, Nico Charisse, whom she met whilst on a European tour and who had been her dance teacher in Los Angeles. They married in Paris in 1939, providing Cyd with the surname which would later become so famous.

Her appearance dancing a ballet sequence in the musical 'Something to Shout About' in 1943, attracted the attention of the MGM studio. MGM gave her a seven-year contract and also (as they did in those days) changed her name, adapting her childhood nickname, Sid, to "Cyd".



Her great forte was her dancing, and her natural habitat was the lavish song and dance spectaculars of the 40s and 50s. Although I personally aren't keen on musicals, I can watch her in anything, and the dance sequences in films such as 'Silk Stockings' and 'The Bandwagon' are mesmerising, even for me. She was an undeniably beautiful woman, exuding a lithe, animal grace in her athletic dance sequences. It was often said of her that she wasn't a very good actress, something also said about Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. I could argue that point; something to do with them all being beautiful and great dancers, and the jealous sniping of lesser mortals. But I won't.

Whatever you think of her acting, you cannot fault her dancing. Just watch this scene from 'The Bandwagon', featuring Cyd and Fred Astaire.



Want more? How about this, from 'Singin' in the Rain', featuring Gene Kelly. From a gorgeous red dress, to a gorgeous green one...




In later years, after the demise of the mucical, and the hollywood bias against starring actresses over 40, her career waned. She was reduced to appearing in shit such as 'Warlords of Atlantis'.

Good bye Cyd. Your legs will still go on forever.

Congratulations Manchester United!

Bet you didn't expect to hear that coming from a Leeds fan eh?

Well whatever, I watched perhaps the most exciting European Cup Final match of modern times last night, and loath though I am to admit it, the best side won. They were only just the best side though, by a whisker, but I felt they deserved it.

High points and low points?

Ryan Giggs, whom I've always admired, breaking professional misery-guts Bobby Charlton's club record number of appearances, when he came on late as a sub. Nice one Giggsy. If only you'd been English instead of Welsh, what might have been...sigh...

Didier Drogba blaming everyone but himself, every time he cocked up, and typically play acting outrageously, feigning agony every time someone made a bit of physical contact with him. This from a huge man, built like an oak tree.

John Terry's heartbreak at losing Chelsea the match when he slipped and blew his penalty. I felt genuinely sorry for him.

Carlos Tevez, playing like a terminator, unstoppable and determined, for me the man of the match, for all Ronaldo's flowery skill.

Ronaldo literally dancing round opponents, seemingly touching the ground only fleetingly, as though he weighed no more than a feather. Love him or loathe him, you have to admire him.

Wayne Rooney's anonymity throughout almost the whole game. What's happened to the British Bulldog Chewing a Wasp? Where was he? The boy wonder of Everton and his early ManUre appearances was worryingly (from an England perspective) ineffective.

Joe Cole's head-slapping histrionics when the linesman failed to award the blues a (deserved) corner. Ho ho.

The ManU players applauding the Chelsea players as they trudged up in the belting rain, to collect their loser's medals and crackerjack pencils.

Avram Grant standing in the deluge, hugging a disconsolate John Terry, his suit darkening as the rain soaked into it, looking like a man comforting his own son. Touching.

The mediaeval style crimson and gold painted executive seats, which resembled the sort of throne-like seats rich robber barons and suchlike might have sat on at major jousting tournaments in the 14th century. Roman Abramovich was sitting there.

There were loads more; the certainty that Nicolas Anelka would miss his penalty. You just knnew it, as he stepped up to the ball, his body language that of a man who didn't believe in himself.

One last point: when Chelsea, and then Man United, all trooped up to shake hands with Michel Platini and the rest of the UEFA bigwigs, and to collect the trophy in the latter case, there was, strangely and slightly mystifyingly, a young woman, in beautiful national costume, standing in the row of football and Muscovite dignitaries. The players and club officials mounted the platform and shook hands with, hugged or spoke to, every man along the line of suits. The girl stood there, applauding the players, smiling bravely, as every single one of them ignored her completely.

It wasn't as if she was stood at the back, or right at the end; she was right there, prominent in the line-up. Her costume was magnificent, and made more so, flanked as it was by drab, if expensive grey suits. She herself was stunningly beautiful, so much so that the oversized, vulgar trophy that is the European Cup was completely outshone by her proximity. Not one of the players even looked at her, or offered a comment on her fantastic costume, or even acknowledged that she existed. Football eh? It's (still) a man's world.

Of course, the media this morning is predictably full of photos of the players gurning and waving their giant silver phallus at the crowd, but the invisible token girl proudly wearing her national costume can just be seen in this image (below) over on the far left...

Screen YOUR film at ShAFF 2009

Are you a budding or established film-maker who is making films about climbing, caving, mountaineering, surfing, BASE jumping, paragliding, bouldering, snowboarding, parkour, skateboarding, mountain biking, windsurfing, SCUBA diving, mine exploration, skiing, hang-gliding, ice-climbing, exploration, fell running, kayaking or any other activity which might fit under the term 'adventure', then we are looking for you!

If you fit the bill, or you know someone who does, and you think your/their film(s) might be suitable for screening at the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival in February 2009, then get in touch with me at briantrevelyan@hotmail.com and let me know about your film.



For ShAFF 2009, I'm working as film programmer, actively seeking new films to screen at the festival, so I'm interested in any films that might be appropriate, be they 5 minute shorts or hour-long professional documentaries.

The main festival programme features compilations of films, usually up to an hour long, but sometimes longer, often loosely grouped into common themes, such as snow sports, climbing or mountain biking. It makes no odds whether the film is made by a professional production company or one girl and a hand-held camera. What matters is that the film is interesting and/or exciting, has visual impact, hopefully says something or presents something in an original manner, and that the production values (visual and audio) are high enough for public screening on a full size cinema screen (we can determine that when you submit the film).



If you think your film fits the criteria, then don't be shy, get in touch and let's see it! If we decide it's not suitable for the main, ticket-selling programme, there is also a fringe programme where such films are shown in satellite venues for free. At ShAFF 2008, these drew audiences often as large as the main events!



In addition to these film programmes, ShAFF will also be screening a wide selection of the best adventure sports videos from YouTube. If you have a clip or film on YouTube, or have found one you think is good enough in quality and content, then please send us the link! Your help is valuable, and every link or suggestion is greatly appreciated.

For anyone who is interested in submitting a film, please note that we can not afford to pay you for the use of your film. However, there are several prize categories for films screened, to be judged at the festival's end, and your film could be a winner. Aside from that, you also get your film screened at a major adventure film festival, which is pretty cool in itself!



Information for submissions can be found at the useful documents page on the ShAFF website.