SHEFFIELD

I went to Sheffield for the weekend once, when I was about fourteen or fifteen and, to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never been back and I’ve never wanted to. I’d like to say that this is not Sheffield’s fault, but, for once, I’d have to admit that it possibly is.

Although it probably isn’t and has more than a little to do with my own neuroses rather than anything else, but we’ll come to that.

The point is... NEVER. Been. Back.

You see, when I was a youngling, one of the labels that you could level at me was that I was a Methodist, and one of the things that Methodists did with their offspring in those days was to send them away twice a year on weekends of activity and fun courtesy of the MAYC which was not a misspelling of Mayo, but was an actually thing which involved an Association of Youth Clubs of the Methodist persuasion.

Once a year this would be in London and involve sleeping bags, church halls on the Isle of Dogs, picnics at Alexandra Palace, concerts in the Albert Hall, and a march through the streets, past Whitehall (my first “Maggie… Maggie… Maggie… Out! Out! Out! Occurred on one of these, three days after her election in 1979), and on to a rally in Trafalgar Square.

The other weekend each year would be allocated to “A.N. Other” British city which led to such exciting weekends as “Tyne Time”, “Lincoln Imp-act” and the “Mancunian Way” as well as the “Sheffield Shuffle” which explains why I was there that day.

Whilst I’m sure that I had a lovely time, nowadays the only thing that I can recollect about that weekend was the window being shot out of the coach that I was travelling on and, given that it is the only time so far that anyone has actually taken a shot at me, I have tended to take it personally, even though I hope that it wasn’t personal, and Sheffield has been forever branded, in my mind at least, as a “war zone” and a place to be avoided at all costs.

Was I traumatised by these events? I don’t think so, really, but I have stayed away from the place ever since. After all, it might have only happened once, but of all the places in the world that I’ve been, it happened there, and, given that I’ve only been there the once, in my mind that means a full one-hundred percent of my visits to Sheffield involved me being shot at.

I’m sure that it’s a lovely place, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s never going to be high on my personal list of places to go.

After all, I only really know it for three things; The Shopping Centre, Sheffield Steel, and the World Snooker Championships.

And let’s be honest, there are other shopping centres to go to, most of my personal steel requirements can be acquired pre-rendered from elsewhere, and I can watch the snooker perfectly happily on my television without having to spend any time in a room full of other people (which is a scary enough thought as it is) worrying about whether I’m going to start coughing or worse at a crucial moment.

So, I’m sorry, Sheffield, but you’re not the place for me, and I can’t really see anything bringing us together any time soon. You have nothing that I can think of that you can tempt me with and, whilst I’m sure that you have your fans, and a fair few people with fond memories of you, I don’t think that I’m ever going to be one of them, and I think we just need to accept the fact and move on with our lives, dodging the endless stream of whizzing bullets as we go.

Just wait until I tell you what I think of Portland, Oregon…