Welcome to A Time and a Place. Where are we? I don’t know. It’ll be fun finding out.
Two weeks ago I spent a drizzly afternoon in Denby Dale (between Sheffield and Huddersfield for the Yorkshire uninitiated) standing next to broadcaster, poet and all round literary hero Ian McMillan underneath a photograph of an 80 kilogram pie. We were there to make a radio programme about ordinary objects, and so of course we began by contemplating a swimming pool’s worth of pastry.
They’ve been making giant pies in Denby Dale since 1788 when villagers and farmers came together to celebrate the recovery of King George III from illness. Next there was a Battle-of-Waterloo victory pie which contained two sheep and twenty fowls (presumably dead). The 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws pie was never formally cut, because a riot broke out after it collapsed, causing at least one person to fall into it.
Ian treats such incidents as matter-of-fact. He has to: he’s from Barnsley. We’ve have a long-running, unfinished conversation about ‘South Yorkshire surrealism’, a highly specific literary phenomenon I’ve identified in the work of poets like Ian, Geoff Hattersley and others. It’s characterised thus: readers think your imagery is surreal, but you’re just narrating something everyday-weird that you observed on Doncaster high street. Other regions have their versions too, of course. In my debut novel ‘Black Car Burning’, I described a man walking down the pavement in Glossop wearing three hats simultaneously (one beanie, one baseball cap and one trilby if you really want to know). I seem to recall editorial questions about plausibility. It was, of course, entirely true.
It seems in vogue - increasingly so since lockdown - to say that you are a writer of place or (even more enticing) a ‘nature writer’. I’ve often made claims along those tenuous lines about my own creative work, most of which circles obsessively around the gritstone edges of the Peak District and the streets of Sheffield where I live. The more unanchored we feel in global time-and-space, the more we cleave to what we can see and feel around us. The more aware we are of climate emergency, the more urgent it becomes to appreciate our surroundings and the species we co-habit earth with. But I’m always dissatisfied with the term ‘place writing’ as a description of what makes me tick.
I’ve come to realise that what I’m truly interested in is local weirdness of the kind encompassed by ‘South Yorkshire surrealism’. The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction-ness of life and its geographical specificity. I love things that appear out of context and things that find a context and burrow down into it, embed themselves eccentrically. Events and facts that have all the surprise and inevitability and joy of a great metaphor.
This newsletter will be a celebration and an excavation of all these things: the unpredictable and the implausible-real, things that might be best recounted with the caveat ‘you had to be there’. There’ll be literature and song, psychogeography and anecdote, moments of minor revelation. There may even be the occasional French Bulldog or elephant. I can promise you that each post will begin with co-ordinates: a time and a place. But that’s all the grounding you’re guaranteed. What follows will be a delightful foray into un-belonging. I can’t promise you any sense of decorum. There’s a time and a place for that sort of thing (and it’s definitely not here and it’s definitely not now).
In 2017, I led a ‘psychogeographical’ walk for the Ted Hughes festival in Mexborough (yes, we’ve got a South Yorkshire claim to him too) along the banks of the River Dearne. We meandered from the town, stopping to appreciate poems by Hughes and Sylvia Plath along the way. As the walk leader, I had a bright orange flag to make sure everyone could see me. On the way back, we noticed that some local lads had spotted our unusual party and annotated our return journey for us in chalk. They had helpfully circled path features (‘PUDDLE HERE’), turds (‘DOG SHIT HERE’) and suggested extra activities: the edge of a bridge now read ‘JUMP’ in bright pink. But my personal favourite? An arrow pointing to the direction we’d walked it which simply remarked ‘CUNTS WITH FLAG’. It was my finest hour.
Dear reader, I hope you agree I’m extremely well-qualified to lead you astray through time and place. Please join me on the adventure.
(The feet in the above picture should be credited to my friend Rotherham Bob)