Graves & Meersbrook Park
I usually start my day around 6am. I think as you get older you wake up earlier, mainly just to check that you haven’t passed away during the night. Anyway, I get up, make myself a pot of M&S Empress Grey, get a shower, and then take my dog out for a walk.
On realising I’ve left my house with no clothes on, I go back, get dressed and off we trot. I live next to Meersbrook Park so we usually walk through there and down into the woods at Graves Park. Unfortunately, I’ve not been flashed at by a naked man in a balaclava or shot at by a teenage assassin, which is by and large incredibly disappointing as I know people who have! It is, however, nice starting my day climbing to the top of a hill with my four-legged friend and seeing the whole of the city in which I reside, closely followed by an intense – yet sensual – asthma attack.
Moor Fisheries
After a good two-hour walk I’ll get a bus down to Cumberland Street around 10am and visit that Sheffield institution of happy, healthy scran, Moor Fisheries, where I’ll order a cake butty and a mug of tea and just sit and listen, meditating on the conversations of salt of the earth people. There was a lady in there the other day talking about going to see a psychic in her local pub with the hope she’ll find out where her dead husband hid the holiday money they were saving so she can take his ashes to Bridlington.“If I don’t find it, he’s going in the bin,” she said.
As a writer of northern prose, it’s a palace of gold is Moor Fisheries.
Hungry Buddha & Poundbakery.
Come lunchtime, I’ll either hit the Moor Market to visit Hungry Buddha for one of the tastiest Nepalese thalis in the city. Again, the market is just a hotbed of source material: business people, students, construction workers and hipsters all mingling with the elderly, their mothballs and a cup of tea that they make last all day. If Hungry Buddha has sold out of food, I’ll pop over the way to the Poundbakery and get a couple of cheese rolls for the price of one Greggs vegan sausage roll! Cashback!
The Red Lion
After lunch I’ll find myself a quiet space in a boozer, usually The Red Lion on Charles Street. I love The Red Lion; there’s a tiny old room at the back of the pub that a lot of people don’t know about but which my friends christened “The Flanagan Suite”. I’ll sit down with a pint of Moonshine (God bless Abbeydale Brewery) and reply to a mountain of e-mithers and talk to music industry dickheads on the phone. Doing music as a profession amounts to 70% admin, 20% travelling in a tin can on wheels and 10% making music, so it’s important for me to try and do my work out of the home otherwise I wouldn’t see any humans or talk to anyone normal. This makes quiet pubs the perfect places to work in, do interviews in and have meetings in. I couldn’t bear being in an office, clinical places with evil strip lighting, I like working in the glow of the amber nectar.
The toilets at John Lewis (formerly Cole Brothers)
After a curry, talking to record label dweebs and a few pints of the good stuff, one likes to purge one’s innards in the bogs on the second floor of John Lewis. The toilets are lovely and warm there and it’s a safe bet that the seats have recently been straddled by a quality middle-class derrière, so one can have a relaxing poo and a quick read without running the risk of STDs. Upon leaving the toilets, one likes to take advantage of the aftershave testers on the ground floor, where I’ll douse myself in Sauvage and head for the door – a free spruce up for the modern man on the move.
Bear Tree Records
Whilst in the vicinity of Division Street I’ll usually be spending my hard-earned dwindling royalties from Moonlandingz records on other people’s records in Bear Tree, which is Sheffield’s finest emporium for buyers of vinyl. It’s nice that Sheffield now has a place where I can buy stuff that I used to only be able to get off the interwebz. I’m a big fan of foreign language music, library music, soundtracks, psychedelia, weird electronica and nine times out of ten I can find what I’m looking for at Bear Tree. If not, Joe will order it in for me. I usually get Joe to change the price stickers on the records I’ve left with so the wife doesn’t know I’ve spent 50 quid on some record featuring a Chinese bloke yodelling over a fuzz guitar and drum machine. If music be the food of love, then I’m endlessly hungry!
