Looking out from the Bole Hills yet again. It’s not a photo-stitched representation, but the picture was taken with a wide lens setting that achieves a similar effect. That’s clearly the case if you know the area and compare the representation with the reality. I see a memorial apple tree to the left of the frame, and I know it doesn’t contort itself in that fashion when seen with a standard passively receiving eye, or whatever you might want to call it. You might not even be able to pick out the detail I am talking about.
The Mound ov Krekja on the horizon, and distant moorland out that way beyond it; the sunset again, or the approaching sunset; the Rivelin Valley; the edge of Stannington; the heights of Stannington; the triple towers of Stannington (Satan Town) peeping, as it were, from behind a tree; and all of this in the distance. To the right, the foreground blocks out the background, the far ground. The photograph flattens the descent that really exists between the upper tufts of grass, the major rock, and the ground to the left of the major rock. There are three descending plateaus in this domain, but it could be taken to be one level space.
There was something strange about the light. It was amplified, brighter than you might expect. Perhaps it was an effect of the surrounding fog or mist. I was on the opposite side of the road from Just Natural, just up the way from the post-box, just past the estate agents, just to the right of the little stretch of hedge between the estate agents and the sylvan alleyway – that’s stretching the point a bit – at the back of the houses on Chichester Road. There are quite a few of these so-called sylvan alleyways around Crookes, and I have often thought of exploring at least one of them, even though they are fundamentally uninviting and unhomely. They look as if they should be wildlife havens, but they emanate an oppressive sterility that stands at odds with that notion. I imagine I’ll get round to exploring at least one of them one day. I’ll let you know how it goes. I might let you know. I don’t think I’ll do it in this form. I’m sick and tired of this form of expression. It’s painful at times. Not necessarily in the moment, but somewhere along the line. It can turn out well in the end, but the satisfaction that might arise from that realisation does not cause the pain encountered during the process to go away – although maybe it does go away, it passes, but it does not cease to exist.
The whole business is a pain in the arse: fugitive, pointless, subject to interference and suddenly arising discontent. But where was I?
A vaguely remembered strange light in darkness. A discarded bird’s nest in a recently cut hedge. How do you know that the nest was discarded? Because there were no birds in it. How do you know the hedge had been recently trimmed? Because there were thick wooden elements plainly visible within it, clearly indicating that the hedge had been cut after being left to run wild, or relatively uncontrolled, for an extended period of time. How do you know this? Because if the hedge had been regularly attended to, with the aim of trimming it to keep it in check, then those thick wooden elements, relatively thick wooden elements, would not have been there to be seen in the strangely bright light.
I have walked across the Bole Hills, along St. Anthony Lane, across Clough Fields, pausing at the Mound ov Krekja before proceeding along the path that leads to Marsh Lane. Upon arriving at Marsh Lane, I cross the lane and begin a short but rapid descent down the road situated not quite directly opposite the place where I emerge. The road I walk down is called Stephen Hill. It is renowned for its cherry blossom trees, which are at the height of their beauty in April. This road, Stephen Hill, is not to be confused with Stephen Hill Road, which also leads from Marsh Lane to Manchester Road, and terminates at a doctor’s surgery. Delph House Road lies between Stephen Hill and Stephen Hill Road and, like them, also leads from Marsh Lane to Manchester Road. All three roads share striking similarities in the neat semi-detached suburban dwellings that line their pavements, but neither Delph House Road nor Stephen Hill Road is transformed so delightfully in cherry blossom season.
Stephen Hill is not only the name of a road – or two roads, if you include Stephen Hill Road in the reckoning – but also the name of an area once commonly recognised as distinct from neighbouring Crosspool, or Cross Pool as it would more commonly have been known at the time. It is now commonly recognised and described as part of Crosspool. I note in passing that something similar applies in relation to Steel Bank and Crookes, where what was once referred to as Steel Bank is now referred to as Crookes. This development seems to be a consequence of the gaps in formerly rural areas being filled in by houses.
Stephen Hill Methodist Church is not on Stephen Hill, meaning the road known as Stephen Hill, nor is it on Stephen Hill Road, which implies a road that leads to Stephen Hill. So the name Stephen Hill, as it is applied to the Methodist Church, must relate to the area known as Stephen Hill, which would now commonly be considered part of Crosspool.
There’s another church on Manchester Road, very close to Stephen Hill Methodist Church, known as St. Columba’s. Although St. Columba’s is an Anglican church (or temple of absurdity), the two churches enjoy close ties, to the extent that they present themselves as the unified entity St. Columba & Stephen Hill, proclaiming that they are an inclusive church which welcomes and celebrates human diversity in all its richness, allowing space for people to ask questions and grow in their faith and spirituality. Sunday services alternate between the two places of worship. I don’t know if this is a common arrangement between Methodists and Anglicans, or something peculiar to Crosspool (or Stephen Hill), arising from falling church attendance combined with close proximity.
The question to ask when you reach this funerary statue is, “Excuse me, love, can you tell me the way to the nearest off-licence, please?” You might not grasp why that is the question to ask because of the position from which the photograph is taken. Most SPG photographs of this subject clearly show that the angel is pointing upwards, towards the sky. Her forefinger is prominent when the statue is faced head-on. You can make this out from this angle, if you can be bothered to look closely in passing.
This is one of the most striking monuments in Crookes cemetery. It lies just to the left of the main path, shortly before you reach the first set of stone stairs leading upwards. Because it is one of the most striking objects in the cemetery, which we regularly walk through, and because it is encountered time and time again as a matter of course, without extraneous effort, the monument is regularly photographed. This being so, I imagine that I deliberately took up a novel position from which to take this picture, in the interests of fostering variety, transforming common perspectives, or rendering the familiar unfamiliar. Not only is her indicating finger less obvious than it usually is, but her feet look uncommonly large, her outthrust knee seems far more pronounced, and the bouquet she carries in her left hand looks far more significant than it does when the angel is seen at standing level from the front.
The question to ask yourself when you reach the Catastrophe House is this: how is it still standing? But the idea that it is in a precarious state is based on appearance rather than structural soundness. It obviously looks like a tumbledown shack, but it is perfectly secure. So you look for other questions to ask yourself: for example, is that a series of makeshift gallows clambering up the wall from left to right as we look?
Maybe I’ll have to change my approach to projects of this kind. I find myself in a position where I feel compelled to write something about the image that accompanies this text, although I don’t really have anything to say about it. Or anything that I particularly want to say. But, lo! Hark and behold! Something arises. It’s bound to, isn’t it? But so what, and why bother? The answer to “so what?” and “why bother?” is to quit the adolescent posturing, the angst-imbued pretence.
I know that, in the moment I was taking the photograph, I would have been acting on an impulse to do so, and that impulse can be equated with a guiding principle, and that guiding principle yields significance. But the thing is, I can no longer remember the impulse, the principle, or the significance that occurred to me at that time. Maybe it’s all just a question of timing. And somewhere in the programme there resides the intention to deliberately forget and revisit the image, to see what it yields in the moment of returning to it.
Converging diagonals. Movement from bottom to top, and from top to bottom, which a peculiarity of vision can relate to a ship upon the sea. The darkness at the bottom is an absence become foundation. The brightness at the top, in the region of the upper right-hand corner, speaks of the land of the rising sun.
I am walking along the little parade of shops on Sandygate Road. If I were to carry on along this path, I would eventually come to Lodge Moor, but I don’t go out that far these days, given the state of my lungs. Even if I had been heading out to Lodge Moor in former times, when my lungs were in better condition, I would not have come this way, but would instead have followed the high paths overlooking deep countryside valleys, which aren’t that far from where I am now, though they are reached by following an entirely different trajectory. I am going to turn left at the end of the little parade of shops, just past the bus stop, and follow the course of whatever the name of that road is until I come to Manchester Road. The furthest I have travelled along this road in recent years is the tree near the terminal point to the right of the frame, which indicates the spot where the Crosspool well-dressings take place.
This butcher is very assertive. There’s a sign featuring an exotic long-horned cow directing people to his shop from the junction of Manchester Road and Sandygate Road, and, as you can plainly see, his retro-style window lettering is very noisy, as it were: it stands out from and dominates its surroundings. I can also report that flags of St George can often be seen flying from the heights of his premises, courtesy of cunningly devised flagpoles constructed for that purpose.
Flags are never a good sign. They are proprietorial and domineering. The Irish flags, Union Jacks, flags of Ulster and associated coloured kerbstones you find in Ireland can be extremely disconcerting. We haven’t reached that level of tribal assertion of ownership in most parts of England yet, and long may that remain the case. Nationalism is evil. Nothing good comes of it. And nationalism is based on fantasy and contention. What is being celebrated when an English flag is flown? William Blake and the post-war development of the welfare state, or Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage? The same flag cannot represent both constituencies. It is usually deployed as a tool of oppression by the Thatcher-Farage contingent of the double dyad just outlined for illustrative purposes.
It seems that war memorials erected after the Second World War were of a fundamentally different nature from the war memorials that preceded the First World War. Nineteenth-century memorials tended to celebrate the vainglory of individual leaders, presented as national heroes. Nelson’s Column is probably the most notable example of a memorial of this type. They also boasted of victory as an indicator of national superiority – think Marble Arch in this context. This groundless boasting, which is a manifestation of hatred of the other, seems to have subsided following the mechanised slaughter that characterised the First World War, and the typical memorials of that painful conflict are simple and relatively unadorned. I suppose the consequences of that particular war were so widely known, and had such a widespread impact, that it became impossible to celebrate the fiction of glory in war.
Many combined memorials to the dead of the First and Second World Wars, obviously erected after the latter conflict or disaster, move away from the typical abstraction of First World War memorials and include sculptural representations of the soldiers involved in battle; that is the case with the memorial in Weston Park. Here, as elsewhere, the representatives of the battalions and regiments do not flaunt themselves in triumph, but seem beset by weariness and sorrow, almost on the point of collapse. The boots of the soldier shown here are worn and ragged, like the individual who wears them.
But the fellowship of the fighting men is not absolute; the numbers of the dead are reported in terms of “officers” and “men”. And the figure of the Winged Victory that stands at the top of the tall monument is a residue of the myth of glory in battle, even if she looks somewhat mournful as she balances on tiptoe, holding a laurel wreath, presumably in her right hand.
This was the second of the photographs used to illustrate ‘The Nine O’Clock Service: An Exercise in Power and Control’, the fabulous 7,000-word article published in ‘Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion’.
The image relates to four passages from the article, including this:
“I saw what I referred to as the black-clad squares of NOS wandering about the suburb of Crookes, and I witnessed them pretending to love each other in the local pubs, including the Cobden View, which would have been our shared local, and the Old Grindstone, which was just down the road from St. Thomas’s Church. For some reason, I can’t recall coming across them in the Noah’s Ark, which was directly opposite the church, although I did spend time in there with individuals who regularly attended NOS acts of worship but were excluded from the inner workings of the group by virtue of their perceived deficiencies.”
And this, which is an account given by a woman who was involved in the group:
“I moved to Sheffield from Wolverhampton to take a teacher training course at the Poly. I was living in a shared student house in Crookes. I didn’t really get on with the other people who lived there. I used to spend a lot of time on my own in the pubs around the place I lived in. I was in the Grindstone one Sunday evening when I noticed a group of young people come in. They looked really happy and together. One of the girls in the group smiled at me and eventually we got chatting…”
I spent a long time working on ‘The Nine O’Clock Service: An Exercise in Power and Control’, a 7,000-word article about the notorious Rave Vicar Chris Brain and his ghastly postmodern Christian Evangelical crew. The work was published in ‘Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion, Volume 4, Issue 2’, and I think it turned out very well. The last part of the article focused on Brain’s trial, which concluded with him being found guilty of 17 counts of indecent assault against nine women. During the period I was writing about the trial, I took to the streets of Crookes to take numerous photographs of locations associated with Brain and his ardent and willing supporters, and a couple of them appeared in the article.
The text that goes with this photograph runs as follows:
“I lived in a house on Western Road that backed onto a large NOS dwelling on School Road – I once shovelled a path through thick snow to allow my beloved cat Alba to pass from the NOS den to the home she shared with me and my partner. I believe that this property was the dwelling place of Lori Camm, the mysterious female counterpart to the latterly infamous Rave Vicar cum Techno-Shaman Chris Brain, who, like Brain’s wife Winnie, seems to have passed out of history.”
Although there can be no doubt that Brain was a horrid malefactor fully deserving of contempt, I remain disappointed that his fellow travellers in NOS have not been held responsible for their actions at the time he committed his offences, and even more disappointed that the Church of England establishment, which was absolutely essential in enabling the abomination of NOS to continue, has escaped without being subjected to the level of criticism it so richly deserves.
Looking back on the article, I see that I noted Brain is due to stand retrial on outstanding charges: a further four counts of indecent assault and one charge of rape, with that trial scheduled to start on 1 September 2026 (4 days from the date of me writing this), and expected to last about four weeks.
Sheffield Patrol Group 