Wednesday the 19th of August - To Chesterfield

I was woken up by a young guy at the door asking for the key back, and telling me that a group would be in the building in the next 30 minutes, so I left a pile of flyers with a note and my contact details, and strode forth into Sheffield, flyering the City Hall, The Winter Gardens, the cathedral, and RC cathedral, where the woman said 'Oh, I just been reading about a man who's doing just the same thing as you' . After that, she turned the flyer over from the back page to the one with my photo 'OH' she said 'It is you!'

I was feeling like I 'hadn't really done Sheffield, and just before I left, I dropped into the Town Hall to ask whether the ''He's coming' press releases that Victoria said she'd forward on after Barnsley had come through. I couldn't have asked for a more helpful communications officer - her name was Natalie; she listened, and said 'Do you want to be on the radio?' She thrust me a phone, and I spoke to someone, then she gave me the names of three journalists on the Sheffield Star. I had my instructions: I was to go down to the Star office, and also wait for a phone call from the BBC Radio Sheffield.

I was walking -lost -around trying to find the office when Natalie appeared again, out of breath from running from the Town Hall, to tell me that 'The Radio wanted me at 1'. I found the Star Offices in York Street, and within 30 minutes, I'd given an interview to ..Tom, I think, and had my photo taken by a very friendly bloke who spoke about whiskey and the Electric Light Orchestra. The interview was fine, but he was desperate to get the 'Sheffield hook' to my tale. Yet again, it was the March that did the trick. He'd never heard of it, but when he recognised that something historical, which had passed through Sheffield was being referred to, that was his story.

Then I was hotfooting it down past what used to be the National Centre for Popular Music, which looks like four silver, ultra modern kettles arranged around one another, and into the BBC Building. I was welcomed, told I was going to be on the 'Rony (not Tony) Robinson show' and let into the waiting area:



Here, I waited with a young guy called Richard, who told me that he appears on the radio every month to answer people's 'insect problems'. He's an entymologist from the university, who got the job last year, when a woman rang the station claiming that a moth with an 8-inch wingspan had landed on her hedge. The station called the uni, and they sent Richard out to check. He turned up, very excited, to find that a bit of kid's decoration made of lace and bent wire had fluttered into her garden...It got him a regular slot, though. He was very interested in a collection of beetles he had, that look a lot like flies:



Fittingly for a man who studies flying things, he got a flyer.

I was ushered into the studio preparation room:



..and then into the studio, where I spoke to Rony Robinson live on air for about four minutes, and was heard by ALL OF SOUTH YORKSHIRE, AND A CHUNK OF DERBYSHIRE, TOO!


I'll admit that I left Sheffield feeling like the cat-who'd-got-the-cream. Even the BIGGEST HILL YET - through Woodseats -couldn't stop it, and as I reached the top, a car beeped, with the driver waving a hand in a way that made it obvious he'd heard me on the radio. It took a good hour and a half to walk out of Sheffield, to the roundabout at the top by a pub called the ...Norton, was it?, where I took the advice of a SteelTown guy I know back in Jarrow, Dave Hirst, that I should go through 'Dronfield instead of the route I'd planned'. I passed over into Derbyshire, and almost immediately into a really picturesque, and typically Derbyshire, landscape of wooded valleys, and towns -such as Dronfield - that have walls of bare rock face around them which makes them look like they've been plonked into old quarries:



It was a great walk, and soon I passed this hill:, which looks like some relic from the way Britain looked three thousand years ago. You don't see many hills with trees all over them thesedays. I passed this sign:





The route continued on in this way until I very- reluctantly had to tear myself off it to rejoin the dual carriageway, and its grass verges, at rush-hour: Luckily, it wasn't long, and it ended at the Red Lion, in Chesterfield, where I met today's host John Duncan, who bought me a pint, and ushered me to his house to meet his wife, Anne. Thus began an absolutely hilarious night of great food and drink. I've learnt to organise the A4SML straight away now, and after that, we just spoke all evening. John was born in Whitley Bay, and educated 'in Gosforth', and he was an engineer who organised the construction of the section of the metro between Tyne Dock and South Shields -he worked out how much of that stone you see before you get into Chi metro station needed to be blasted away, and he also built that metro flyover than takes the line into Shields just down from where OZ (a discotheque fantasy!..) used to be. He also built the 'roller coaster' metro bridge at Byker, which -he confirmed - isn't just held together by glue like everyone says it is. I remember the night ending with him getting out his old LP of 'The Blaydon Races and other Geordie songs' (classics like 'Keep ya feet still Geordie hinny' 'and 'Cushie Butterfield'), and then the three of us watching a DVD of Bruce Springsteen..

An absolutely brilliant day.