Running the Gauntlet : Paranoid and Harrassed In The City Of His Birth! By Alfred N.Muggins

1/7/24 (events of about.2 weeks before, a Friday in June 2024)

    Alfred set off to town (technically still a city, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the state of some aspects of ‘town’) to drop off Mrs Muggins’ son at the blood donor centre. Unfortunately, and unexpectedly there were roadworks as they went down the road from the University area towards the central backstreets area where it had always been possible to drop off, and even to park if you used the parking meters. In this instance he did not need to park. When he received the call he would return from his nice dog walk at the lovely Crookes Valley Park, where there was a beautiful lake, adjacent to the other fantastic Weston Park, next to the University and the Museum and Art Gallery, to pick up Mrs Muggins’son.

    But this time there were suddenly false kerbs and roadworks across the roundabout where he would have gone up to the drop off, and there was effectively just one road where there was no option to turn into the city. ‘What on earth was going on?’ Alfred swore to himself, and to Mrs Muggins’ son. They were filtered down to the next roundabout, past the police station (Was that still there? He didn’t have time to look as they were swiftly funnelled past!) Alfred thought surely there he would be able to turn right into the Town of his youth. But it was not to be. Full kerb bollards again blocked any possibility of getting into the city as far as he could tell.

    He wondered how anyone who worked there would be able to get in there? What about the lawyers and their clerks, the civil servants in the job centres, and the poor inhabitants of the inner town flats and buildings? But perhaps many of them did not have cars anyway if they lived that close to their work. He was spewed out around other streets further out, onto the ring road, panicking, as it was already the time of Mrs Muggins’ son’s appointment. If there had been no roadwork/false kerbs he would have been out of the car and walking one block into the blood donor centre by now!

19/7/24

    His mind was working overtime now, as the minutes ticked by and Mrs Muggins’ son was soon to be running late for his appointment. Alfred was on the road which was taking them further north out of town to the ring road. He would have to have another go at reentering the Town Centre from where he was. If necessary he would go round the ring road up to the University roundabout and reenter  the main road he had already been down earlier, but turn right through to West Street (or as he had sometimes thought of it over the years as ‘Wild West Street’ as you could see the hill on the other side of the city in the distance down the street, and it looked like a wild western mountain). Alfred found an opportunity to cut through a traditional cutlery industry area on the outskirts of the centre, but he fully expected the road to be blocked off as a result of the excessive traffic calming measures over many years. Luckily instinct rather than knowledge did bring him through it to join Broad Street once again. Alfred had a plan and he could now put it into operation. He took a right and came onto the tramlines of West Street, where drunken students spent their allowances in the many bars at weekends. The only question was how far the City Council would allow him to get down this important road before jettisoning his passenger to make his way down the rest of the road to the Blood Donor Centre on foot?

    Suddenly he was at the final point before the turn off, but where to halt the car legally to eject his passenger?  There would probably be a proliferation of CCTV cameras or sensors to prevent illegal stops by vehicles which were not taxis or buses, and therefore had no right to stop anywhere near the centre of Town! Alfred saw his last chance before the turn away from the Blood Donor Centre area. It had to be the bus or taxi stop. He steeled himself, suspecting this unauthorized stop could lead to fines, and who knows even removal of his driving licence? but how else to eject his passenger near his destination. It would have to be here!

    His wife’s son, the Passenger, ejected and was now heading for target, not much after the appointment time, he quickly got back into his lane in the thankfully empty street and hoped nobody had noticed.

    He knew this road, but at the next junction, where he would always have taken a right over the years to head back out of Town as quickly as possible and return efficiently towards north Sheffield, the road signs forbade it now. Swearing under his breath he wondered how long this new road ‘blockage’ had existed. Vaguely he remembered that a year or two ago he had discovered this road change, but had since forgotten it as he didn’t bring the car this far into Town normally.

    He and his car were funneled without the slightest choice of route through Town and into the southerly Eccleshall Road roundabout, always busy, and he had no choice but to join the constant traffic jam on the ring road to get northwards again. He wondered why someone in the Council had thought it was a good idea to channel more cars into the roundabout and the traffic jams on the ring road, taking them far south of where they wanted to go.

    This intensive traffic jam experience did not seem very ‘green’ to Alfred at all. It inevitably wasted petrol, made the air quality worse, kept more cars with their engines pumping in the city, and Alfred missed the time to walk the dog at all in the lovely parks, which was his intention, and would have normally been possible in the past if he could just choose a sensible easy route back out towards his northern part of the city. Unfortunately as he waited, irritated in the traffic jam, he realized there would not now be enough time to walk the dog in the lovely parks, not too far from the town centre.

    He decided he could not afford the time or the hassle to go into his old home Town Centre by car any more, at least while these new West Bar roadworks, whatever they were doing, were being carried out. The centre was becoming cut off from much of the populace, the elderly and the motorists in particular, unless he ever decided it was worth taking the bus in, which was unlikely given the time that would take! He would become estranged from his own city!

Postscript

2/7/24

The town which is no longer a town! A row of shops opposite the Town Hall and the Peace Gardens is soon to open as a luxury (Radisson?) hotel? So where have all the shops gone? The markets were ‘merged’ years ago, and the original market on the north side is now an empty closed down area, although wild rumour has it they might be thinking of rebuilding the castle which was there until Civil War times(?). Skyscrapers which are not quite yet rivalling New York have been beginning to appear in recent years. Every time Alfred goes to town, rare these days, he seems to focus on yet another unrecognizable building which he feels he has never seen before, which has mushroomed out of nowhere to dominate the new skyline. But who works in these offices? He thought a lot of workers in Town now worked from home (since the Covid Outbreak!). Cole Brothers (John Lewis) closed down, in the Covid period, so all memory of his childhood trips to the department store and its restaurant/cafe with his mother and sister disappears. Where are the record shops, the bookshops, where a young man could browse, wishing for the time to absorb all this culture (and for the money to pay for it).

    On his enforced drive through Town he hoped to be able to see the old Cole Brothers building, and see what they had made of it, but it was not to be seen as the roads dictated by the Council refused to take him anywhere near it. He would have to get rid of the car somewhere. Where? And go on foot if he wished to once again spend quality time in the City /Town of his youth.