baublebag

I'm a bit of a fossil myself and I've never felt out of place in any of the well-known Shef rock venues, they mostly draw very mixed crowds. Even when the bands are young enough to be your kids you can always stand at the back with the proud parents :-) The Grapes on Trippet Lane is my favourite. (Classic Rock Bar is a bit out of the way for me, but when I've been there it's been excellent too.) If you are at Shef Uni there is a mature students social group but it's not exactly rock'n'roll and only for undergrads, postgrads are stuffed. The great thing about Sheffield though is the tradition of nattering with strangers, nobody bats an eyelid if you talk to them at a gig (unless they're snotty southerners and who wants to talk to them?) and it's very easy to make friends outside university, in fact most of the people I know here now are non-students. Good Luck!

I posted a birthday card first class in a box on West Street on Saturday May 29th, as of today Monday June 7th it has still not arrived in Norwich, which is not exactly a million miles away. Who knows some web sites for birthday e-cards?

check gig guide and previews at http://www.sandmanmagazine.co.uk/sheffield/index.htm

That was This Floating World, they are top. You can always check the gig guide and previews at http://www.sandmanmagazine.co.uk/sheffield/index.htm TFW were profiled in the mag a couple of issues back. cheers!

Short Sharp Shocked is an old fave of mine, I didn't know she had new stuff, thanks. I am playing the new Blur album a lot at the moment, it's wonderfully melancholy.

They seem to have been wheeling them out piecemeal. I saw some being delivered over six weeks ago up Grenoside way but ours only arrived last week, and just our road, not the next road nor the one at right angles. Weird. Doesn't seem to be any pattern to it. I'm as eco-friendly as they come and habitually recycle but I have some issues with these blue bins. i. they are a bloody dreadful colour. Why couldn't they be green?? they stick out like sore thumbs. ii. where are we supposed to put them? On our terraced street there is hardly room for all the regular grey wheelie bins as it is. My neighbour is 87 and simply cannot make her way along the pavement on wheelie bin day. Furthermore when they are emptied on a windy day they then skittle about like ninepins for the rest of the day, smashing into cars. I have two large dents on my car attributable to tumblewheelies. One windy day I came home and found mine thirty yards down the street, lying with five others in a distressed heap like beached whales. Now it's going to be twice as chaotic. iii. who is going to corral strays and deter rustlers? Not everybody is that possessive about their blue bin, their having been dumped on us without a by your leave. Twice already I have seen yob scum kids rustling them away, and nobody's bothered. The blue bins are nice and clean inside, so one top trick is climb into one and have your mate push you fast downhill until you topple over. The blue bin is then left down the hill cos it's easier to nick another one at the top then to push the first one back up. I prophesy that before too long all the parks, woods and rivers of this fair city will be strewn with blue bins, in fact I am thinking of writing Dutch and Swedish greetings in mine for when it turns up on the far side of the North Sea, having floated down the Don and done a wheelie-Kontiki. iv. it's all I can do to remember to put the grey bin out on a Tuesday, usually it takes the noise of the dustcart to remind me. They must be joking if they think I can remember one day a month. I have programmed all the dates into my moby and stuck the sticker on my fridge but I still don't hold out much hope. Yet in our terraced street my bin stands only two yards from the edge of the curb all the time, how much more can it possibly cost for them to have a quick look in them all as they walk along?? OK if they're tucked away in big gardens fair enough to expect them to be put out but in terraced studenty streets where the bins are always visible and people tend not to lead regular lives, they're going to have to be more positive and helpful on the collection protocol if it's going to work.

I would also strongly recommend the Norfolk Trail, I learnt so much about the history of Sheffield and had a top roast pork breadcake in the Norfolk Park cafe into the bargain. It's worth getting the little photocopied leaflet if you can find it, I think we picked ours up at the Graves gallery. I mean, you know, a stroll round Florence it ain't, but we enjoyed it. Another nice walk (if you avert your eyes from the litter) is Rivelin Roughs from round Den Bank way, overgrown old allotments, woods, dams and even a bit of moorland. I am grateful to our gay friends for enhancing this lovely spot with so many attractive KY jelly tubes and eco-friendly used condoms. Who could possibly fail to respect a lifestyle that makes such a contribution to the maintenance of our wild places? Oh, and the old Walkley cemetery is fantastically atmospheric, especially the overgrown Jewish end. Access from Waller Road.

Bit of a leftfield input - I am covering the Manor area for the breeding bird atlas http://www.sbsg.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/atlas_2003_intro.html I was surprised after all I'd heard to find that there is an amazing amount of green space, even in what is supposed to be a core urban area. It's an interesting place to wander round at dawn, though I take my cheaper binoculars As well as singing Meadow Pipit and Stock Dove, at the ruined Manor itself there is at least one Whitethroat territory, and around the old barns and associated scrapyards (Manor Oaks?) are the only Swallows I have seen in the inner city. None of these are what you would call core urban species. Compared to what I've seen in other cities, Sheffield's 'worst area' looks like a green and pleasant land. There's a hell of a lot of boarded-up houses though.

Unlikely though it may sound Walkley is my study site (for a PhD in urban ecology). For the last year and a half I've been walking round the area at all kinds of odd hours and have seen very little in the way of dodgy goings on. The worst problem we have in our Walkley street at the moment is blue bin abuse.

I just voted by text message and it was completely cool and painless, it said on the card it might take an hour for the receipt to come through but it appeared straight away. Most exciting (I should get out more

How did that end up here? :oops:

"..because they know to drink in moderation and when to stop. " A common myth. In fact, one in three road deaths in France are linked to drunk driving. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2265058.stm

Whenever you get a route from theaa.com it defaults to Sheffield Cornwall as the start point. You have to explicitly select Sheffield S.Yorks.

Bear in mind that in a university-heavy city like this it's not just first time buyers buying 2x2s. Typically a post-doc or mature student is here for 3 years, so he/she sells a terraced house in the last city and buys one here, then ditto somewhere else for the next contract. That's what I've done, anyway, used to be a no-brainer, long term always better to be in the market than out. Point is, it's not necessarily the resources of first-time buyers that set the market price for small houses in a city full of mobile professionals who are already in the market but not necessarily trading up - I can't be a**ed to rattle around in a big expensive-to-heat house. Unfortunately now terraced houses have gone over £60k you get clobbered each time on the [unprintable] stamp duty (a totally counter-productive tax on labour market mobility IMHO) so it's a finer calculation. Nonetheless two colleagues in this lab are about to exchange on £80k-plus terraced houses. Disclaimer - I lost my life savings in the last property crash . But, once you're in the market you're keeping pace it whichever way it goes and ateotd you gotta have a roof

According to 'The Natural History of the Sheffield Area' (1985) at that time Grass Snakes were increasing in the east but scarce in the west of the city (limited by altitude). Check out the Sorby Natural History Society website if you're into wild stuff. http://www.sorby.org.uk/