It’s been a weekend of rediscovering old pleasures.
Like sleeping bags. I awoke in one yesterday morning for the first time in a couple of decades. Comfort and snugness aside, it struck me that a sleeping bag makes a very effective contraceptive. Why not make them available from machines in public lavatories? And just as our centenarian citizens get a telegram from the Queen, why not a Prince Charles celebratory sleeping bag on our thirteenth birthdays? It would reduce teenage pregnancies at a stroke.
We drove up to Huddersfield late on Friday night, where I still have a flat. Unlike everywhere else in the nation, property prices in this part of the world seem to have "remained stable", to apply some positive spin, or "fallen way behind the national trend" to be more realistic. It means that I don’t have much option but to rent it out, which in turn means occasional trips up here for bracing bouts of carpet cleaning, bath scrubbing and kitchen painting. I don’t include these activities in the category of rediscovered old pleasures.
I did my weekend long run on Friday (10½ miles before breakfast) because I didn’t know if I’d have a chance to run up here. As it happens, I did. In fact I almost entered a race. I discovered this week that there was a local 10K taking place this morning. Unfortunately I didn’t bring the details up with me, so I’d no idea where it was taking place, what time it started or how much it would cost me. All I could do was leave at a normalish race-time minus 1 hour, and drive around the town, looking for purposeful crowds and noting their footwear. An unusually high representation of trainers was the clue, and eventually it led me towards Huddersfield Rugby Union Club. Yes, the race was here, but it wasn’t starting for another 90 minutes. "I don’t think I can wait, I have a toilet to clean", I explained to the car-park marshal.
A shame, but I couldn’t hang around that long. Instead I drove back to the town centre, parked, and set off down the Huddersfield Broad canal. It was bitingly cold. Sometimes I wonder if I’m wise to stick with teeshirt and shorts when everyone else, even here in West Yorkshire where the folk are supposed to be as hardy as mountain goats, gets togged up in leggings and puffy jackets and gloves and bobble hats in this sort of weather.
These were my thoughts as I lumbered through the hail and the frozen puddles alongside the canal. 
This is a very different canal from my normal one. Here, there is no lake rich in migrating birds. The only lakes are the massive puddles on the grassless football pitches. There are no anglers here because, I suspect, there are no fish. The canal water is black and oily, and full of debris. The canal winds its way through the town centre and out through the dead industrial sector on the north-eastern fringes. We pass beneath massive monuments to the decline in manufacturing. Imposing Victorian mills, their windows broken, holes punched through the roof by the weather; huge winches and pulleys poised over the canal, now rusted up and redundant; factory chimneys that haven’t seen smoke for 30 years or more. On the other side we have the new economy. B & Q, the ‘drive-thru’ Macdonalds, the new bowling alley and the multiplex cinema.
And here is the site of the famous old Leeds Road football stadium, home of Huddersfield Town, now occupied by its spectacular replacement: the McAlpine Stadium. When I first lived up here, I used to delight in going to matches at the old ground, with its corrugated iron roof over the Cowshed, the enormous terrace along the touchline, and the ricketty wooden stand opposite. In an old English football ground, it’s still possible to reach out and touch the past.
I once talked to an elderly gent who recalled going to see Town as a child, back in the glory days of the 1920s. He told me he would walk up to Leeds Road after lunch to meet his father — who would have worked in one of those ancient, monolithic mills we just passed. He described the mass exodus of men from the factories on Saturday afternoon, all off to watch Town. Most would head for the ground but those who couldn’t afford it would climb Castle Hill, high above the town, where you could see most of the pitch. There would be 65,000 in the stadium and another 10,000 up on the hill. In this glorious era, under the management of the great Herbert Chapman, Town won the old First Division title three years in a row. Chapman then went to Arsenal where he managed to repeat his triple championship feat.
I was vehemently against the plan to replace the old ground. Cultural vandalism, I thought. But the design of the new stadium was so imaginative that I was quickly won over. It opened in about 1995, and even won the Royal Institute of British Architect’s annual design prize. For a while at least, the new stadium seemed to lift the club and the fans. They were promoted to the first division and came within a point of the play-offs to the Premiership. But since then they’ve dropped two divisions, and now languish in the Third. I don’t suppose they will ever repeat their achievements of the twenties, but I hope things improve for them. The town and the football fans need something to cheer about.
Three miles along this melancholy towpath, then three miles back. The return leg even had some sunshine, and was altogether a cheerier experience. The run was only 6½ miles in total, but I was pleased that it presented so little difficulty. The longer recent runs have made a difference. They’ve raised the bar. Until a few weeks ago, anything above my staple 3.5 mile morning run was noticeably harder. Now, I’m cheerily running 6, even 10 miles without feeling the urge to stop for a breather.
Another rediscovered pleasure was this evening’s visit to the Slubber’s Arms, my northern local. What a grand boozer this is. It’s a tiny oasis of civilisation in a rather bleak, dilapidated part of town. Just over the road is the railway bridge beneath which Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, disembowelled a prostitute, and tried to kill another.
The Slubbers is a twenty minute walk from the flat, and one I know well, though I’d forgotten how run down things are up here. Or have they got worse? The nearest pub, The Horseshoe, where I spent many a drunken night as a student, has now closed down. Further along the road is The Black Bull. The landlord was murdered here in a late-night robbery about 5 years ago. It never served another pint.
At least the chip shops are still in business. One of the local ones is called Witbits, a Huddersfield joke that won’t be understood by outsiders.
And the Slubbers is still open, and totally unchanged. The same arbitrary paraphernalia on the walls, the same glass-topped tables with the tickets and business cards pushed underneath, the same delicious array of Timothy Taylors beers and, most importantly, the same clientele. I walk in for the first time in five years, and there is Gary, leaning on the bar, sucking on a roll-up, just where I left him. He glances up. "Hi mate. Aright? You’ve not been in lately." He turns back to his pint. A classic Yorkshire moment. No effusiveness, no sense of surprise.
More and more people came in whose faces, if not names, I recalled. There was a lot of nodding in my direction and solitary words of acknowledgement. They are not a verbose people, though I did manage to tease out a few conversations before the end of the evening.
A gallon of excellent beer later, and M calls by to pick me up on her way back from the Chinese. What a corking evening, and a great way to end a month that started off so badly.
