A single to Gilberdyke, please

This January I hope to have the pleasure once more of changing trains in Schenectady, New York. If ever there was a town was named perfectly for changing trains in, then Schenectady is it. Forget its erstwhile history as the home of Thomas Edison or General Electric - every since I read its name on an Amtrak timetable, I knew that this was a town that could surely only exist for the train station. It’s the place where you make schenections.

Meanwhile, while researching travel options from Sheffield to Selby, the town where our studio will be basing its studies, I found that most train journeys took about seventy to eighty minutes, and needed a change in either Doncaster or Leeds. One journey that was offered by National Rail, however, offered a completely different routing, through another place that surely was meant for changing trains in: Gilberdyke.

Gilderdyke, I could understand… but Gilberdyke?

I’ve never been to Gilberdyke, I don’t know anyone who lives there and I have no idea what it’s like as a place. But the name makes me think of a single track railway line with an open, unmanned, windswept platform. Since the weather on our first visit to Selby was simultaneously grey, cold and wet, I can’t help feeling I should turn down the kind offers of lifts in nice warm cars directly to our site in favour of a long and expensive train ride that includes a special stop at this small village with a glutenously poetic name. The landscape of this corner of the East Riding of Yorkshire is flat. In fact it’s the first time that I’ve been north of Sheffield and found a landscape as flat and featureless as the enthralling fens that I am so familiar with from train and car journeys home (south-eastwards) to Norfolk.

So as we spend more and more time in Selby, I look forward to making a diversion one day just to find out what it’s like in Gilberdyke. The opportunities to discover a whole new genre of tourism are opening up before my eyes. Even as a child, I always enjoyed pouring over big, hard cover atlases looking for bizarre or unusual place names. Perhaps I should follow my nose and explore these places more.

Er…

It’s funny how easily my French language skills can fall apart when I try to read something like this. Québec’s delightfully entertaining provincial tax service (which I suspect was designed to be both ineffecient and inept) has fired out a three page letter to me demanding I return a sum exceeding $350 which is not rightfully mine. This is based on calculations made on the tax returns I filed last February. Quite why it’s taken them this long to make these re-calculations confuses me, but not quite as much as the manner in which they have explained them. I suspect that event if this was written in English I’d be lost. Time to go hunting down the back of the sofa for small change, otherwise I might not be let back into Canada when I go to Montréal after Christmas.

Sunday crumble

The Sheffield University Architecture Society has launched a knitting circle. It’s started small, but will quite possibly take over the world, one Sunday afternoon at a time. The first manifestation of this event is taking place downstairs, while the dishes from Sunday lunch (home made broccolli and stilton soup) sit by the sink, a deep home made apple crumble waits expectantly for the oven to heat up. Darkness is setting in over Sheffield, and all is bliss in our little terraced house on top of the hill. When I left Montréal, I had many fears that there would never be a true substitution for Sunday nights around the kitchen table. In a small way, I have been reassured that my weekly routine is evolving into something new but no less comforting. All I have to do is learn to knit.

Yesterday I walked a few minutes up the hill to go shopping in Crookes. Crookes is both the name of a neighbourhood in north-west Sheffield, and the name of a long, gently curving street that runs through this district. Most Sheffield residents will know it from the bright illuminated sign on the front of the 52 bus, which is an occasional treat for those students who have chosen to live up here, a hundred metres or so in elevantion above most of the university. It’s a tough climb if you’ve spent all day in lectures, or all night in a pub. For us, it’s now home, and on a Saturday morning, it’s a fun place to go shopping to construct a weekend breakfast. This being Sheffield, you can find in almost adjacent shops both an organic fruit and veg store and a discount frozen food chain. That means quality muesli and native British fruit from one, and remaindered microwave chocolate puddings from the other.

Crookes sits on top of a hill that protects this side of Sheffield from the windswept Peak District. You have only to walk a few blocks from our house to be presented with a breath taking view down onto the countryside. The advantages of this location easily outweigh the inconveniences (always being out of breath when you get home, and most un-insulated drafty attics being colder than northern Québec in January): from my desk I can see out across the city, with the sparkling phosphorescent lights of the Don Valley stretching out like an unimaginatively-described sparkling carpet.

In Friday’s Independent The Long Blondes (a band based in Sheffield) described this city with the love that most of us can’t help sharing:

“Sheffield is like an eccentric aunt. There’s a lot wrong with it, but you it anyway … Historically, they always used to get the most radical architectural ideas and stick them in Sheffield. When you come into the train station, Park Hill is just a concrete wall. It just looks like something out of Eastern Europe…”

Gratuitous I-was-in-Venice photos

I hope the first picture tells you everything you need to know. Me, BMM and a late deal on a flight with BMI. Two nights in Venice to explore the Internation Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and to revisit some quiet corners we had both discovered on previous trips. I was delighted that we managed to skip the expensive hostel and stay with a friendly member of the Hospitality Club. We also managed to avoid the crowds of tourists and the infamous €15 coffees of the Piazza San Marco cafés.

Some other notable moments included…

Above: drinking too much red wine and then dancing our first night away at a discrete little social centre where a reggae night was pounding out, and several dogs from the local community had popped in for some rock and roll.

Above: plastic chickens hanging from a washing line in the Hungarian Pavilion of the Architecture Biennale (well, what were you expecting?)

The superbly designed Romanian exhibit, which involved visitors in a process of questioning how they would like their country to develop.

Will tell you more later…

No longer the egotist

Was there really a time earlier this year when I was blogging something every day? Wow… I really must have had a lot of spare time.

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m sitting in the Interval bar, enjoying a pint of stout and some greasy, salty, cheesy bar snacks (surely the best kind?). The chaotic six week rush of ‘Live Project’ work is now finished, and we are making our first faltering steps towards the studios that will occupy us for the rest of the year. In this quiet intermediate period, there is an air of calm in the department, as the sudden release from deadlines and work related pressure evaporates.

BMM and I spent the weekend very pleasently, enjoying for the first time a few days together in Sheffield without any work or deadlines. She was able to finish unpacking (I reckon that a month and a half from moving in to getting everything unpacked is pretty good going) and we were able to do lazy domesticated things like make soup, move furniture and go the theatre. Without warning we have suddenly done half of the term before Christmas, and with the clocks back on GMT, the days are suddenly feeling shorter and the evenings are feeling chillier.

Yesternight my financial standing improved somewhat, with the departure of an old friend and the arrival of a new source of income. Yes, the Saab has finally gone, sold to a man from Bradford who drove down with cash in hand to take her away from me. So I no longer wince at the price of petrol or worry whenever I see another car near mine with a window broken and the radio missing. Despite the financial foolishness of owning a motor car, the red 900 that I bought in Belfast was a great companion on many trips and a rather shabbily stylish mode of transport. But without a real source of income or any reason to keep her, there was no point delaying the inevitable.

Well, I say no real source of income, but that was the other change that took place last night. I have returned to my old haunt at the Union of Students. I’m back behind the bars of the Union nightclubs, and enjoying it already. The shifts are late, but short and fast, serving tanked up students with more alcopops and pints of Carling. I’ll likely be up to speed next week, working three nights a week and saving a bit of cash each week to pay for my future travels.

Until then, we’re off to Venice tomorrow. See you on Tuesday, folks.