Tha's nowt so Queer as Folk

My parents entertained seldom, being shy, very, but most people in our road were just like them only with bigger or littler noses and hopes the same way.  They woke then worked.  Then they ate and admired sunsets. The same sunsets.

It was the ridiculously simple routine of daily life that sent my mum crazy; she took Bex, Aspros and Vincent's Powders that she slid pinkly down her teeth mixed with Myra Plum Jam 'to take the taste away', and fled the dreary scene that way with some more fascinating interior view of existence that got flattened out flatter than the pikelets she made on a flour-board made of tough white plastic.

My main memory of the growing-up teenage years is of her baking lots of moist or very dry fruitcakes, depending upon what drugs she was taking and their influence.  Her good ones required lots of hard vigour; here's how she did them thirty-five years back.

First she got big bowls out and rinsed them very clean with lots of boiling hot water.  Then she dried each with a crisp tea towel until each was gleaming in its way, with a kind of sparkle. She rested the bowls on the stainless steel sink and patted down a few clean pages of The Herald newspaper on her limited work-bench.  Upon this she set the packets of O-So-Lite Flour.


Extract from Unparalleled Sorrow by Barry Dickens.

In the Last Hour of 2012

Unidentified Grocer's shop, Darnell, Sheffield, South Yorkshire

 

 

 

The Lord of Thunder went out one day

To ride on his favourite filly

I’m Thor he cried

And the horse replied,

“You’ve forgotten your thaddle, thilly.”

 

 





The Butcher's Bill

Unidentified blacksmith's shop, Sheffield

In the Great War, my paternal grampus Bill served in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Bill was injured after being kicked by a horse. After the Armistice, the brigade was kept in France and informed they were now going to be sent to Russia to fight on the side of the White Russians against the Red Bolsheviks (a futile cause as we now know).


After being told of this new posting, most of the brigade, including Bill (and his brothers), deserted and made their way back to England; knowing well that if they were caught, they would be shot. The authorities later caught up with some of the deserters and although they were not court-martialled, because public opinion was against British involvement in the Russian War, they were denied the right to return to their pre-war employment and they never received their war medals.


It is thought that Bill was a mere Porter with the Grand Central Railway before the war, becoming a Guard after completing his war service. Perhaps Bill joined under the GCR "colours" although I would think this detail of  branded a deserter may mean that his name is expunged from any GCR records.

Seems unfair that he was denied his medal in recognition of the service he did perform, but such is the bloody-mindedness of the English authorities and unwillingness to admit the cause was futile.

Several young lads from Sheffield were executed for "desertion".

The Execution of Sheffield Soldiers in the First World War.

C. Thompson, Butcher, most probably Colin Thompson of Totley Rise & Dore, Sheffield

 

Honey, have you seen where I left my anvil?

Vulcan - Sheffield Town Hall, Yorkshire

Shamanic Process is an integral, relational and inclusive way of living, and by that definition, of, by and with the spirits and not 'religious' or spiritual',but merely Spiritist. We live in a holographic universe in which we are connected and interconnected at pan-dimensional levels, the Shamanic life is one by which we appreciate, relate and journey at those levels.


At times our incarnate selves 'loses the plot' and becomes distracted or lost and our spiritual connection gets 'interference' or becomes 'disconnected'. This 'disconnection' can be a result of physical, emotional, mental or spiritual trauma. Our soul being fractures and those fractured parts or essences, disaffiliate, becoming lost or exiled from us.


At this point our lives can become seemingly pointless or without direction and we wander from physical experience to physical experience searching for connection and meaning. And all the while our spirit, our soul is calling and searching for us, yearning for return.

 

Sheffield Snow: a Frosty Pact

Clumber Park - Sheffield, South Yorkshire

 

 

The Undutiful Daughter  recounted the tale of how the daughter of a wealthy London gentleman was tempated by the Devil to poison her parents. She was spoilt and capricious and after one display of disobedience her father decided to punish her by confining her to her room. As she sat sulking one night:

 

The Devil to her appear did straight,

In human shape and manner like a man;

And then he seem’d to take her by the hand.

He said, fair creature, why do you lament?

What is it fills your heart with discontent?

She said my parents cruel are to me,

And keep me here to starve in misery.

He said then if you will be rul’d by me,

Revenged of them thou shall quickly be …

 

 

The Devil’s pact may have been portrayed primarily as a physical contract, a deliberate appeal to the Devil, but religious teaching implied that the committing of sin was in essence a tacit pact as well - a concept that was well embedded in eighteenth-century religious education, as evident in Anglican catechisms and the responses of child witnesses at the Old Bailey. Unlike the confessions of accused witches who said they were beaten by, married to, or slept with the Devil, people, primarily men, actually attempted to make written pacts with Satan in the tradition of Faust.

(Excerpt from Talk of the Devil: Crime and Satanic Inspiration in 18th Century England
by Owen Davies, Cunningfolk)

Image by Carlie167, stolen from Sheffield History Photo Gallery, Winter
.

The last Time I saw Sheffield

Sheffield General Cemetery

 

......for the Peak District and you know what I mean when I say that because everyone
in Sheffield does

for when your dad drove us home for Christmas from the house filled with damp
and it was snowing like a bastard and you were changing the radio
every thirty seconds because you wanted music not chat


for telling me I was stronger than I thought when I couldn’t feel my way away from
my own mind


for the fight between dragging paralysis and explosive creativity and all things it
makes us do


for the tide that might just might slowly turn


for the future we might just might just might deserve


~ Edd Mustill

Deep in the Heart of the Wimmera

 

 

O, come, o, come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

 

O, come, our Wisdom from on high,
Who ordered all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

 

O, come, o, come, our Lord of might,
Who to your tribes on Sinai's height
In ancient times gave holy law,
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

 

 

 

Boldog Asszony

Once in royal David's city
stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for his bed;
Mary, loving mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little child. 

 He came down to earth from heaven
who is God and Lord of all,
and his shelter was a stable,
and his cradle was a stall.
With the poor, the scorned, the lowly
lived on earth our Savior holy. 

Jesus is our childhood's pattern;
day by day, like us he grew;
he was little, weak, and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew;
and he feeleth for our sadness,
and he shareth in our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that child so dear and gentle
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

 

Exiled Christmases: Coal to Newcastle

Thomas Nast's most famous drawing,

 "Merry Old Santa Claus," from Harper's Weekly,

 January 1, 1881.

 

 

It started, our lifetime of lonely exiled Christmases, with a fight. But it didn't really start then. It started in pre-history, or pre-my-history, in ancient bitternesses, deaths and sins unforgiven from before I was even born.

 

 

By the time the fight happened, my mother and grandmother were the sole survivors of a small, intense and insular family, and I was almost grown up. A father and husband had died, a brother and uncle had died, a powerful grandfather had died, a two-year-old son had died, making my mother an only child. Things were said, their partial estrangement began, and increased, and our many years of bad Christmases began.

 

 

At first it was got through pleasantly enough on the surface, but at great emotional cost to my mother. Then it became an annual awkwardness, the problem of somehow dealing with Christmas in a way that kept my mother and grandmother apart — or at least, bubble-wrapped, like two delicate presents sent together through the mail. [read more]

 

 

 

Image Sourced from

Bill Casselman's article on Thomas Nast: The Man Who Designed Santa Claus