A Boxing Day Walk

 I did it in high summer* - left Shrewsbury behind and headed for the hills one glorious day when the sun was shining and Shropshire's hedgerows were heavy with wild roses beneath a cloudless sky.  Now on a similarly bright day, albeit cold and wintery, I've done it again, and to the same hills too. 

Here - leaving behind queues on Pride Hill for the Boxing Day sales [already in place by 6.00am, would you believe], the Severn bursting its banks, and flood defences up on Frankwell Quay - is my Boxing Day walk.  Shropshire is a county rich with beauty. Shrewsbury is only one jewel in its crown, and the Long Mynd is another. See what I mean:

*PS. Here's that high summer post

How the Mayor of Shrewsbury [and his people] Escaped a Dire Fate at the Hands of a Giant [No, I'm not talking about our MP]

Shroppiemon will know this story, I have no doubt, but many of you won’t.  It was read as part of a paper to the British Archaeological Association in Shrewsbury in 1860.  According to its author, Thomas Wright, it was an example of the way the ‘crafty God Thor’ had become degraded in popular imagination.  The story, he said, was known amongst all classes and came in many variations. Charlotte Burne, who recorded this meeting in her Shropshire Folk-Lore in 1883, confirmed that she too had heard the story in many different version. Sometimes the spade full of soil that it features wasn’t to dam up the river but to bury the town. Sometimes the people of Shrewsbury went out to deceive their adversary with old boots and mouldy crusts of bread.  And the giant wasn’t always a giant.  As one elderly lady put it to Charlotte Burne, ‘Folk generally tell the story of the Devil, but the old ones say it was a giant’.

Burne’s retelling of the story is about a giant.  As it's also about Shrewsbury, I'm retelling it here:

Once upon a time there was a wicked old giant in Wales, who for some reason or other had a very great spite against the Mayor of Shrewsbury and all his people, and made up his mind to dam up the Severn and by that means cause such a flood that the town would be drowned.

So off he set, carrying a spadeful of earth, tramping along mile after mile trying to find Shrewsbury.  How he missed it, I cannot tell, but he must have gone wrong somewhere, for at last he arrived in Wellington, puffing and blowing under his heavy load, wishing he was at journey’s end.

By-and-by, alone came a cobbler with a sack of old boots and shoes on his back, for he lived in Wellington and went once a fortnight to Shrewsbury to collect his customers’ old boots and shoes to take them home and mend.   The giant called out to him. ‘I say,’ he called. ‘How far is it to Shrewsbury?’ ‘Shrewsbury,’ called back the cobbler. ‘What do you want at Shrewsbury?’ ‘Why,’ said the giant, ‘to fill up the Severn with this lump of earth.  I’ve an old grudge against the Mayor and the folk at Shrewsbury, and now I mean to drown them out and get rid of them all at once.’

‘My word,’ thought the cobbler.  ‘This’ll never do.  I can’t afford to lose my customers,’ and he spoke up again.  ‘Eh!’ he said, ‘you’ll never get to Shrewsbury, not today, nor tomorrow.  Why, look at me. I’m just come from Shrewsbury and I’ve had time to wear out all these old boots and shoes on the road since I started.’  And he showed the giant his sack.

‘Oh!’ said the giant with a great groan, ‘then it really is no use! I’m fairly tired out already, and I can’t carry this load of mine any farther.  I shall just drop it here and go back home.’

So the giant dropped the earth on the ground just where he stood, and scraped his boots on his spade and went home to Wales.  Nobody ever heard anything of him in Shropshire after that. But where he put down his load there stands the Wrekin to this day. And Shrewsbury still stands too. And the pile of earth where the giant scraped his boots has made Little Ercall by the Wrekin’s side.’

An Old Shropshire Oak Called Shroppiemon

I first came across Shoppiemon on Twitter back in January. In 140 characters this Tweeter was the living embodiment of Georgina Jackson’s Shropshire Word Book. I’m not native Shropshire born myself, but armed with my own copy of the Word Book I ventured a reply, saying Georgina Jackson would be proud of him. Little did I know what I’d started. Shroppiemon tweeted back almost immediately, with far more grace and verve than I had mustered, saying that his gallus chundering [ie. muttering, collected from Newport] wasna quite of Georgina Jackson’s standard but that I had galvered him [goodness knows where 'galvered' comes from - not everything Shroppiemon writes, by any means, comes out of the Word Book]. After that he started reading My Tonight From Shrewsbury and, the next thing I knew, the blogsite had found an advocate and I had found a friend.

For those of you who don’t know, published in 1879 Georgina Jackson’s Word Book lists words and phrases spoken in Shropshire dialect as it was back in those days. It gives a grammatical structure to these words and phrases, and lists the villages and towns in which they could  be found.  You’d be hard pressed today to find in common useage many of the words Georgina Jackson collected. So much has changed since then, including people’s speech. Even in the forty years I’ve been living in Shropshire, distinctions between village dialects have blurred. Is there anybody left who can tell the difference between Pontesbury voices, for example, and those of the Stiperstones, just a few short miles away? Who knows where ‘Upper Wonner’ refers to any more?  

Shroppiemon, I guess, would know. Regardless of what I write about, he has an uncanny knack of tweeting me that little bit extra and always knowing more.  He describes himself as a collector. It would be great to see his memorabilia exhibited in some way.  Great too, if he ever felt inspired to tell the story of Shrewsbury as he’s seen it through his own eyes.  Shroppiemon is a tweeter with attitude, and it’s attitude as much as anything that makes a good book. Shroppiemon has opinions - and he’s not afraid of expressing them.

Take Princess House for example, a horrid 1960s building [for those of you who’ve never seen it] currently being extended out into our historic town square. Here’s Shroppiemon on the subject of the Secretary of State’s role in this unfortunate state of affairs: ‘The s of s anna gotta look at it. It shudna bin put up in the furst place. Owd nick himsen couldna built a more drodsome pigcote.’

I’ve heard Princess House called a few things, but ‘drodsome pigcote’ beats them all. ‘Sebunctious’ is another of Shroppiemon’s favourite words, and in the interview below he comes up with ‘kerbiffleypump, which I can find no meaning for and I'm guessing is a word entirely Shroppiemon's own.  

If Georgina Jackson were alive today, then Twitter would be in her Word Book, listed as a source of words and phrases alongside Shropshire’s villages and towns. She’d be fascinated by what Shroppiemon’s doing with Old Shropshire, twisting it this way and that, reinventing it to work in new ways for new times.  After all, isn’t that’s what always happens to language? Isn’t that why Jackson recorded it, understanding that it would change? In her wildest imaginings, though, she’d never have countenanced what Shroppiemon’s doing now, putting Old Shropshire on Twitter and giving it a whole new life.

So who is Shroppiemon? I have to come clean and say that I don’t know. He and I have been following each other on Twitter for months now, and I’m no closer now to discovering his identity than when I began. All I can say with confidence is that Shroppiemon is to Shropshire what Batman is to Gotham City - and Twitter is the mask behind which he hides. 

However, after terse negotiations [how could they be anything else at 140 characters at a tweet?] I’m thrilled to be able to tell you that I’ve persuaded Shroppiemon to be interviewed online. ‘Ow do, lass. Here goes nothing,’ he emailed back to me with answers to my questions.   And of course they’re not ‘nothing’.  To the contrary. See for yourselves.  Shroppiemon in his own words. Enjoy. 

1. MY TONIGHT FROM SHREWSBURY:  Where were you born, and where did you grow up? 

SHROPPIEMON: I was born in Cross Houses hospital on my mother's 21st birthday. 'Er obviously didna want a boikin for a present and soon left. This meant that I got ter be that most Shropshire of Shropshireness - granny reared.

I 'ave spent most o'me life in the town of Salop but shroppieoomon says that 'er is still waitin' for me ter grow up.

2. MTFS:  Where did you go to school?  Can you share with us a couple of memories of school days? 

SMON: I went ter Wilfred Owen, then Holy Cross Cof E, an' then the Priory (the owd boys’ school, not the modern 'un). I had such a gud time at school that I forgot ter leave with many qualifications. The more we got towd off at the Priory for sayin' inna, gonna, canna etc the more we said 'em,

3. MTFS:  And town life?  What are your earliest memories of Shrewsbury?  How do you remember it, looking back?

SMON: I dunna think that Salop has changed too much, ter be fair. Salopians 'ave changed far more - the fust couple of verses of "Think For A Minute" by the Housemartins sum this up so well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnLFCY2vWoI 

When we was childers we had a milkmon an' a breadmon, the Corona mon brought pop, Davenports brought beer and Mr Jones brought the veg on his horse drawn dray - an' I miss em all. Havin' worked at the Abbey, the Castle, Clive House, Rowley's House and shops and cafes in the past, I feel that the town is gettin' on jest fine without my meddlin' these days. But I still love ter help promote it, an' the rest o'Shropshire, whenever I con.

4. MTFS: Was Shroppiemon created specifically for Twitter, or was he active before that?

SMON: I am a barley child o'twitter. John Wood Warter wrote "An Old Shropshire Oak" about an anonymous tree watchin' over our sebunctious county an' I thought that through the power o'twitter I could do summat similar. (So far I 'ave bin muchly wrong)

5. MTFS: When and why was the decision made to use Old Shropshire for your tweets? Do you talk the way you write?

SMON: That is a gud question Fitzyoomon,I dunna think that I use it enough, but shroppieoomon thinks that I use it too much.

6. MTFS: Georgina Jackson died before publication of the Shropshire Word Book, and it was her friend, Charlotte Burne [of Shropshire Folk-Lore], who brought it to public attention. Do you know much about these two interesting women, who I presume both came from Shropshire?

SMON: Georgina Jackson was actually thrum Cheshire, Charlotte Burne was a vicar's daughter and moved several times around Shropshire. I anna got a clue when I furst discovered 'em.  They both jest snuck in ter me sub-conscious somehow. They jest allus sim ter 'ave bin thar. I con still remember the kerbiffleypump feelin' when I walked out of Candle Lane books clutchin' my copy of the Shropshire Wurd Book.

7. MTFS: Over the last year there hasn’t been much I’ve written about – and I’ve written on a wide range of subjects – that you haven’t been able to add something to.  Putting it baldly, how come you know so much?

SMON: Ar, I know a little about a lot lass. I love Shropshire and everythin' ter do with 'er, so I love findin' out things that I didna know an' I love ter share it too. I have ter howd me sen back when I realise that I have crossed the very thin line betwixt interestin' others an' borin' em - shroppieoomon thinks that I tend ter realise this too late for 'er likin'.

8. MTFS:  As far as you’re concerned, what’s the best thing about Shrewsbury?  What’s the worst thing about Shrewsbury?  What’s the biggest threat that Shrewsbury faces today?

SMON: Wurst = Princess House. Best = jest about everything else

9. MTFS: Caped crusaders are renown for the things they do for their home towns.  What would you like to do for Shrewsbury?

SMON: How long have I got? I 'ood save the Stew, knock down Princess House - or at least stop 'em filling the bottom in - open a university, restore the Shrewsbury Cut (canal), make all public transport and out-of-town parkin' free of charge, and fund it by dearer parkin' in the loop. I would mek Sunday the day ter be sin in town, a sort of modern version of the monkey walk.

Selfishly I 'ood reinstate the Loggerheads back on the Shrewsbury Town  shirts.

10. MTFS: Is there ever a moment when you’ll feel it’s right to take off your mask and reveal yourself to the people of Shrewsbury?

SMON: It would be more like revealin' me sen ter one or two on twitter than the whole of Shrewsbury.

11. MTFS:  Be kind, Shroppiemon, to those of us who are gnawing away, like a dog with a bone, at who you really are. Give us a clue.

SMON: A clue 'oodna help as I inna well known, but I will buy yer a drink one day lass, shroppieoomon ull join us too.

 MTFS:  Thank you, Shroppie. I’ll hold you to that. And thank you for your support throughout the year. Knowing that you’re out there cheering on the sidelines and retweeting My Tonight From Shrewsbury’s posts has been a massive encouragement.  Writing this blog has been a bit like running a marathon. It needs all the supporters it can get, and what you’re doing is greatly appreciated.  When we meet I reckon I need to buy you a drink too. In the meantime, though, any final words you’d like to say?

SMON: I love anything an 'eveything ter do with Shropshire, not jest Shrewsbury. I collect books, pictures, signs, postcards, owd tat memorabilia, bottles clocks etc

I never realised until ternite how important women are ter Shropshire folklore - G.Jackson, C, Burne, Lady Milnes-Gaskell, M.Webb, E.Pargeter, yer gud sen, H.Stretton, Shroppieoomon, thrum the Caradoc & Severn Valley Mrs Hayward, Jean Hughes. Less famous but equally important, Annie E Smout, Sheila Hamer and Valerie Kilford.   

The oomon I left until last is Val Littlehales. She is an artist, storyteller, teacher, farmer and best of all a poet. She writes and recites her poems in Shropshire dialect (sadly I have misplaced my copy of her live cassette).

Thank 'ee very much for yo'em interest.

regards, shroppiemon

PS. One other addition I'd like to make if possible is to mention how terrible that Mary Webb's Spring Cottage m'appen ter be demolished. They conna, wonna an' inner gonna:  http://www.stcra.org.uk/2013/10/spring-cottage-application-to-demolish/

The Phil Gillam Double Interview

We arranged to meet on Thursday. Then we changed it.  Monday. I even mailed to check I had the right time and place. Then I promptly forgot and carried on with my life, Thursday lodged firmly in my brain.  Monday evening, and an email from Phil arrived saying he’d waited in the Boathouse pub, nursing his drink, but no prize-winning children’s author had turned up. Was I all right? Embarrassment. You can imagine it. Tuesday, and we tried again - same time, same place, both of us there this time, one of us apologetic, the other gracious.

It was billed by me as the Phil Gillam/Pauline Fisk double interview.  He’d ‘do’ me for his column in the Chronicle. I’d ‘do’ him for My Tonight. Throughout the year, I’ve enjoyed Phil’s column and sometimes I bump into him on Twitter.  Now here was the man himself, tall, smiling, slightly self-depricating, a fairly laid-back sort of chap who, after thirty years in journalism, had had more to contend with than being stood up.  

So, Mr Gillam, where do we begin, and who goes first? Phil wanted to know about my writing life and where it had begun. I, in return, wanted to know about his life as a journalist for the Midlands News Association, for whom Phil works as one of five Editors, running ten newspaper titles across the region [including the Shrewsbury Chronicle]. 

Phil said that for him it all began in Shrewsbury. He was born in Springfield and grew up in Castlefields, where he went to the Lancastrian School [yes, the same Lancastrian School that was designed by Charles Bage of Flaxmill Maltings fame]. As a child he was aware that he lived in an interesting area that was rich in history. He caught the writing bug early, and so did his brother. ‘We spent our time making up comic magazines populated with super-heroes,’ said Phil.  ‘It wasn’t particularly that we were good at art, but the stories had us in their grip.’ 

A couple of years ago, Phil’s brother self-published his first children’s novel.  For him and Phil, the love of writing is as strong as ever.  ‘It’s something I can’t leave alone,’ said Phil. ‘I’m not a particularly practical person, not that hot on DIY, which is a shame for my wife, Carol. I’d rather spend my time writing.’

Phil belongs to that lucky generation of young people who went straight into a newspaper from school.  Fresh from Shrewsbury Technical College, the Midland News Association put him through five months of intensive training.  They took on twelve trainees a year, Phil said. Afterwards he began his life in journalism at the Shrewsbury Chronicle.

‘It was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee,’ Phil recalled.  ‘I certainly had my fill of buntings. There was a female reporter who did weddings, and my job was to do obituaries.’

From there Phil went to the Sunday Independent in Devon, then on Yorkshire’s Hull Times, in which city he and Carol met. He returned to the Midlands to work on the Staffordshire Newsletter, then came home to Shropshire in 1988, spending sixteen years on the Shropshire Star, both in features and on the news desk.  After that, Phil had a seven year stint on the Wolverhampton Express and Star before taking up his present position, Editor of Market Drayton's and Newport’s Advertisers, just a couple of years ago. 

Over the years, Phil has interviewed everybody from Neil Kinnock to Michael Heseltine, Joan Collins to Jimmy Tarbuck. What was Collins like, I wanted to know.  Frosty, Phil replied. And Tarbuck? Naked but for his underpants, Phil said. He was doing his show, it was the interval, he was in his dressing-room and he was running with sweat. 

And on the subject of sweat, Phil had also interviewed Tony Blair.  Blair had just made a speech and the sweat was pouring off him.  This was not long before he became Prime Minister, when he was still regarded as something of a hero. He’d got on the stage, taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. That had impressed. Back in those days, politicians didn’t do that.  

During the miners’ strike Phil interviewed Neil Kinnock.  He’d covered a meeting at which Kinnock had been speaking. When it finished, Kinnock swept through to the back of the hall and Phil and his photographer followed him. They ended up sharing a few whiskies.  Phil got his interview.

Another time Phil found himself huddled in the back of a car with Roy Hattersley.  It was the mid-eighties.  The world seemed more politicized then, Phil said.  Hatterley had given a good speech and as he left somebody asked Phil if he fancied coming along too and grabbing the chance of an interview – which he did.

What was the best thing about being a features writer, I wanted to know. Going into people’s homes, Phil said. Seeing their books on the shelves, their pictures on the walls, having time and space to bring those things into the feature.  It had also been great to do unusual things like flying in a jet fighter, or going to sea with the RNLI.

Phil and his wife, Carol, have three sons, David, Tom and Alex. David spends much of his time these days in New York, though his company is based in Bristol.  He’s a graphic designer. Tom’s area of interest is the charity sector; until recently he worked for the Red Cross. Alex is just off to Cardiff University to study Physics and Maths.  Theirs had always been a noisy house, Phil said. It was going to be strange to have all three boys gone.

When my own children left home, I found extra time freed up for writing. Maybe Phil was hoping for the same. Being a writer, he said, and being a journalist were two different things.  One was work whilst the other, more than just a hobby, was a labour of love.  Over the years, Phil has started and abandoned a number of writing projects, including a novel for teenagers. Recently, however, he's brought out his first novel, joining the growing trend of authors who’ve abandoned traditional publishing for doing it themselves. 

The book’s called ‘Shrewsbury Station Just After Six’.  It’s available on Amazon [where you really can look inside, unlike here] and in Pengwern Books [pengwernbooks.live.co.uk if you want to reserve a copy]. ‘Happiness. What exactly is that?’ runs the byline. ‘Finding happiness is not always as easy as it seems.’

People who’ve read the book, and know Phil, say that it has his voice all over it. He hopes to write a series of novels set in Shrewsbury, possibly following the fortunes of the same group of characters. I tell him I’m thinking of setting my next book in Shrewsbury too, and he laughingly says we could be the start of the next Bloomsbury.

I’m not so sure about that, but there definitely is something about the Shrewsbury air that makes one want to be creative. A week or so ago, selling books out at the Battlefields 1403 Farmshop and Visitor Centre, Phil came across Linda Edwards doing the same with her lovely ‘Sunny Side of the Street in Shrewsbury’ tea cloths and mugs.  Our town is full of creative people like Phil and Linda. And it’s a town people want to know about. A woman came up to Phil at Battlefields and picked up his book.  ‘This is exactly what I’m looking for,’ she said.  ‘Do you know Shrewsbury?’ said Phil. ‘No,’ she said. But she bought the book.

In his life as a journalist, Phil’s love of Shrewsbury is plain to see.  He once ran a column entitled ‘Down Your Street’, which had him knocking on doors all over Shrewsbury, getting himself invited in to talk to people about their neighbourhood. 

In his Chronicle column, too, Phil is always banging the Shrewsbury drum. He wouldn’t want our town turned into a museum piece, and he’s keen to see us make the most of what we have, which means no more old buildings being knocked down. ‘Who in their right mind came up with the idea of getting rid of the Raven Hotel and replacing it with the building that’s there now?’ he said.  We can’t allow that to happen again. That’s why I think we need to save The Stew.’

For a while, Phil and I had been agreeing on Twitter about The Stew on Frankwell Quay, an eighteenth century merchant’s house and warehouse with a medieval history.  Now here was our chance to do so in the flesh. Phil said Shrewsbury had as many fine buildings as Chester, maybe even more, but it didn’t sell itself enough. ‘It’s a gorgeous place,’ Phil said. ‘The other day I was crossing Kingsland Bridge, and I just stopped and stared.  I couldn’t move on. The view was just breathtaking.’

Somewhere on my camera, I knew, I had a photo of the view from Kingsland Bridge.  When I returned home, I dug it out.  Here it is. What do you think? Beat this for an entrance to a town.  

A.E. Housman, Annie Cockburn and those Blue Remembered Hills

As if the last post wasn’t enough, here’s more summer lyricism from Shropshire, England. This time it comes from ten miles out of Shrewsbury.  For a while I’ve been thinking how good it would be to do a My Tonight From Shrewsbury outside broadcast [by which I mean outside of Shrewsbury broadcast] and where better than this?

I’m on the edge of the Long Mynd, looking down at the garden of Annie Cockburn, specialist in play therapy with troubled children, occasional belly-dancer [Annie loves to dance] and long time friend. Annie I first met back in the early Seventies as ex-Londoners and newcomers to the county.  Our children were born around the same time as each other and today we’ve been going through Annie’s albums, looking at her old photographs.  Over the years we’ve watched each other’s families grow up.  Now one of Annie’s sons is planning his wedding, and a couple of years ago one of my daughters celebrated hers in a marquee on this meadow, looking down upon Annie’s house, with the Lawley and Caradoc behind it.

The view here from Annie’s top meadow is world-class.  In the distance, rising out of the Shropshire Plain, is the Wrekin and beyond that, somewhere in a hazy green mist, is Shrewsbury.  In the field behind us, sheep are grazing and skylarks are singing high up in air. From where I’m standing, I can’t see the A49, nor can I hear it.  The only road I can see in this entire landscape is the lane running down the side of Annie’s house.  Drovers would have used it once to bring sheep off the Mynd. ‘We drove animals because it has always been this way for as far back as any of us can remember, as our father and grandfathers have done,’ I read earlier today, courtesy of the old Welsh drover, Mihangel Pritchard.  ‘We are drovers because it is in our blood, and being on those roads lifts our hearts and makes our spirits sing.  It is part of who we are as a people.’*  

Several times I’ve been here and seen Annie’s lane filled with sheep, though not driven from Cardigan, which is where Mihangel Pritchard would have started.  Those days are over now,  as is much of the old country way of life.  The barns and farmsteads remain though, as silent witnesses.  Annie’s barn stores lawn-mowers now, and garden chairs and the barbecue. Its upper section is used for parties and other social gatherings and it houses nesting swallows. Occasionally though, I’ve slept up there, and I swear I’ve awoken in the night to a scent in the air, lingering like the ghosts of long-forgotten harvests.  

Slowly Annie and I walk back down the fields towards her house.  We reach her garden and she opens the gate. In her early days here, there used to be hens picking the dry earth beside the pond, vegetables in rows between the apple trees and goats in the pig shed, waiting to be milked.  Now the dry earth has grassed itself over into a luxuriant lawn, the apple trees are an orchard and the goats are no more, not even chops in the freezer. 

But the pond remains unchanged, willows hanging over it, turquoise damsel-flies cruising its surface and lilies opening out in blossom.  It’s surrounded by yellow irises in bloom, dots of forget-me-not and as many kingcups as I’ve ever seen in one place.  Beyond the kingcups, a wilderness of monkey flowers – planted in the pond as just one single stem –  tumble in bright yellow profusion, dotted with pinkish grasses known in flowering time as Yorkshire fog.

This is the perfect month to be in Annie’s garden.  All her roses are out, and some of their scents - especially the intensely pink roses along the front of the house - are deep enough to drown in and strong enough to carry you away.

Annie’s always trying to find ways to share her garden and land.  The sun only has to be predicted by the weatherman and she’s on the phone.  ‘Why don’t you come over? It’s going to be a perfect day.’  Sometimes she’s right, but not always.  Today, however, she is spot on. We sit on her terrace, sheltering from the hot sun under a huge umbrella held steady with a shoe.  We’re eating thick slabs of granary toast and scrambled eggs, washed down with home-made nectarine wine and strawberries and ice-cream.  There’s not a cloud in the sky.  This is England at her most beautiful.  Shropshire in her summer colours.  And what colours they are - green upon green, the white of wild roses up against the heady white of elderflowers, sunshine upon foxgloves, dots of yellow buttercups just about everywhere. 

Once every other year, Annie’s sons put together a little music festival on this land, bringing together bands and musicians who happen to be friends from as far away as Leeds and Cardiff.  This is a private family event, no Glastonbury here, but tents will go up in the fields – and a few hammocks– a bonfire will be lit and there’ll be barbecueing and music. Annie’s ex-husband Bob will come up from Hastings to perform with his guitar.  Their son’s band, The Seven Inches, will sing their own idiosyncratic and highly original songs, and my family’s own small band, fronted by my husband, will bring to life an eclectic mix of blues and folk with a bit of doo-wop jazz thrown in. 

It’s all fairly homespun, just people who like each other getting together - in some cases growing old together, in others growing up together and doing it in a spectacular landscape. All over Shropshire, people have their rituals; their ways of marking the changing seasons and enjoying the land. Part of the beauty of Shrewsbury is its surrounding landscape.  Often people drive through it, heading for Wales, no idea what they are leaving behind.  For those who linger, however, the fundamental elements of the landscape are recognizably the same as when the poet, A.E. Housman, wrote wistfully about the county in the early part of the 20^th century.  ‘A Shropshire Lad’ he called his book of verse, and if Housman were to come back now, even though he'd find the way of life very different, this would still be his Shropshire - just as it’s mine.   I moved here forty years ago, a young woman without roots, raised a family and found a home.

Here’s Housman on the subject of Blue Remembered Hills:

Into my heart an air that kills,

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went,

And cannot come again.

* When I can locate the name of the Mihangel Pritchard book, I'll put the details here.  

Jim Hawkins In The Evening, at Frank's

A while back I wrote an Open Studio piece about illustrator, Linda Edwards, which I entitled On the Sunny Side of the Street.  Now here I am on the sunny side again, interviewing the owner and director of Jim Hawkins Ltd, otherwise known for his BBC Radio Shropshire 'Jim Hawkins in the Morning' show.  This is a man who couldn’t be more sunny if he tried.  Is it something in the water, I ask myself.  Is it in the air?  Why are so many Shrewsbury people so upbeat?

Jim can’t answers for the rest of Shrewsbury, but for himself, he says, he made a decision years ago to stop being a ‘pint half empty’ type and become a pint three-quarters-if-not-brimming-over type instead.  ‘I can’t see the point in not being positive,’ he says.  ‘Life was so boring the other way. And negativity’s corrosive.  On a personal level it eats away at you.  And it’s not good for society either.’

Jim’s definitely not the sort of person you’d find saying ‘there no such thing as society’. Life for him is all about interacting. He hates it when people view each other with suspicion, and he hates the way the media plays a role in this.  We talk about what happened a month or so ago to young Police Commissioner, Paris Brown. It infuriates Jim sometimes the way that bad news is presumed to be the thing that people want to hear.

Jim has worked in radio for over thirty years, starting with a university radio station, then ‘moving with a bunch of us to a commercial station opening up the road’.  Over the years, he’s witnessed radio being bland at one extreme, and playing devil’s advocate at the other, with a tendency towards bullying.  ‘How often is radio journalism sword of truth stuff, and how often is it just a matter of wanting to start a fight?’ he says.  ‘People are encouraged to judge each other. There’s a real lack of empathy sometimes.’

Jim gave up newspapers over a year ago - and he hasn’t missed them. They’re bad for his mental health he says, and he’s not joking here. Jim has a twenty year history of mental health issues and now knows to remove all obstacles, be they news stories, online articles or indeed negative and angry Facebook and Twitter followers, that might be a bar to his continued good health.

‘Once I used to be a three-newspapers-a-day man,’ Jim says.  ‘I told myself I liked to be well informed, but reading the news was upsetting me.  So often the world it described wasn’t the one in which I live, where people care about one another and take time to make a difference.  Then one time somebody said to me look for the good, and I started to see things in a more balanced way. Seek out the celebratory, they said.  Look for the inclusive. And those words made sense. They shifted something inside my head.  Since then my tectonic plates have fitted together in a new and better way.  Initially living that way involved an act of decision, but not for long.  Quickly it became a way of life.’

I’m enjoying talking to Jim.  We’re in Frank’s Bar on Frankwell and the sun’s shining outside.  It’s the end of the day - time for feet up, a drink and a good yarn.  We get onto the wealth of community ventures around town.  Jim mentions the Street Pastors who go out at night to help people in difficulty around the pubs and clubs. Then there are the Food Banks, of which there are now two in Shrewsbury, as well as ones in Telford, Market Drayton and Bridgnorth. 

We talk about the Severn Hospice, and the thousands of families whose lives it’s touched.  Jim tells me about the Telford Hospice, for which an appeal was launched bringing in five million pounds. Jim was at the sod cutting ceremony.  He says it was very emotional.  There’s a spirit of generosity about, he says. Again and again he’s seeing people caring for each other. He’s definitely of the opinion that people are mostly good, and that they definitely deserve to be regarded as such, unless they prove themselves otherwise.   

Jim was born in Romford, and moved to Shrewsbury ten years ago for the job. I say something about radio being his platform, and he corrects me.  Radio’s a portal, he says.  His shows aren’t about him as the presenter. They’re about the people. To make his point, Jim quotes radio guru, Dan O’Day. Radio actually doesn’t matter.  You’ve got to love your audience and the people you’re talking with.   ‘It’s not a matter of coming into people’s homes and saying here I am,’ Jim says.  ‘It’s a matter of saying there you are.’

So who stands out in ten years of people featuring on the show? Jim mention the two Bens - Ben Bebbington of Big Busk fame, and Ben Hughes, a man with a life-limiting illness whose bucket list includes campaigning to get people on the organ donor register.  ‘Both these men have stories that are engaging and make us all think,’ Jim says.  ‘I’ve been accused of not caring for Shropshire society, meaning Society with a capital S.  But these two are true Shropshire society.  If I’ve had anything to do with persuading people to pay them attention, then that’s great.’

I like this man. He’s full of stories about people - and we haven’t even started yet on the bench. Do you know about Jim Hawkins and the bench?  It’s over five years now since, equipped with a hand-held recorder, Jim first headed off across the county to sit on a bench and see who’d come and talk to him. He’s been doing this ever since, which means more than two hundred and fifty benches, unless Jim returns to certain benches more than once. All weathers he’s to be found out around the county, at all times of year. 

‘Why?’ I want to know.  ‘Because of the power of story-telling,’ Jim replies. ‘I stroll down a street, I sit on a bench and I see what happens.  People come along and we start to chat. So many people have stories to tell that may not be regarded newsworthy, but they’re worth hearing all the same.  And this is my way of getting to hear some of them.’   

All sorts of people come along. The other week in Newport, Jim met Cintia from Brazil who told him all about the long journey that brought her to the UK. Then another time, elsewhere across the county - on a rainy day Jim will never forget - he met an old man from Manchester who last saw his wife alive the day the doctor came for a home visit.  That doctor was Harold Shipman.  There’s a story for you.

Plainly not everyone’s as good as Jim would like to think.  But that doesn’t dent his faith in human nature.  I ask whom a one year blog on Shrewsbury shouldn’t leave out, and the answer he gives me is as long as his arm. One of the first things he noticed when he moved to Shropshire was how generous local people were. ‘The county’s beautiful,’ he says.  ‘But its people make it particularly so.’

On the subject of Shropshire people, have you seen Jim’s photographs? An increasing amount of his work is as a photographer, and his work is every bit as positive as the man himself. ‘It means a lot to me when reluctant subjects tell me they’ve enjoyed the experience,’ Jim says.  ‘For some this may be happening for the first time, and that’s great.’

Plainly Jim enjoys making people happy.  Twice a week he’s to be found in local venues playing music for people to chill or dance to.  ‘Taking music for a walk’ he calls it.  His Sunday Socials are at Eighty-Six’d, in Waterloo Street, Ironbridge, and his Saturday Socials are at The Coffeehouse, Castle Gates, Shrewsbury.   More can be found on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/SaturdayandSundaySocials

It’s time to go our separate ways. Last calls here for anything Jim wants to say.  ‘One in four people will experience some level of mental health issue during their lives,’ Jim says.  ‘It’s great when people listen to something said on the subject on the show, and get the point that’s being made.  If there’s anything I can do to remove the stigma surrounding mental health - on the show or off it - then I will.’

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