Bob Dylan is 83

 It's Bob Dylan's birthday on May 24th. He will be 83. He has inspired me since I was 21. I saw him live twice. Here's a piece I wrote about a Bob Dylan convention in Manchester.

                                             

"I met him once. Yeah, really. Bob Dylan," said Larry Eden, 40, flicking back the shoulder length black hair that draped his Dylan tee shirt.

"I was going to be so cool. But when I approached him for an autograph my mouth just dried up, my legs turned to jelly and the words were strangled in my throat.

"As he signed the picture I was shakily holding I just stammered 'thanks' and he said 'why, you're welcome man'.

"I stood there, frozen in wonder."

The times may be a-changin' but Dylan fans' adoration of their Messiah is both enduring and obsessive.

Damn the Guardian critic who claimed he sings "like a sea lion with emphysema".

His hardcore followers would buy tapes of Dylan gargling mouthwash.

Larry, in Manchester for Bringing It All Back Home, a Dylan convention, is arguably his most devoted British disciple.

Whenever the increasingly crumpled troubadour from Duluth, Minnesota appears at the Hammersmith Odeon Larry, known as Lamb Chop, is always in the front row in the same seat, A 18.

He makes sure because over the years he has badgered Dylan's concert promoter to confide in advance when tickets will go on sale.

Larry is always first in the queue, sometimes 36 hours before the box office opens, with his portable barbecue.

So methodical, he evens organises a queueing system using cloak room tickets so that when other fans turn up they can go for a drink or a stroll knowing their place is safe.

His contact in the promoter's office was stunned when Larry found out his birthday and sent him a card.

Once, touched by Larry's commitment to Dylan, the man offered to post him two tickets in row four.

No good, said Larry. It has to be A 18. And anyway, it's not right to accept such a perk. Larry has to prove his devotion through the pavement vigil.

A professional gambler from Ilford, Essex, Larry is always first with news of a new tour. Then he'll run up a £500 phone bill to inform a network of fans.

                                               

He has been known to stand up at concerts and round on casual ticket holders in the audience by screaming at the top of his voice: "You don't deserve this."

Talking of birthdays, Larry, who is divorced but has a Dylan-loving girlfriend, always celebrates Dylan's on May 24th.

Coincidentally, his daughter, now 10, and called Bobby, of course, is exactly half a year older on the same day, so she gets half a cake.

His greatest momento is one of Bob's plectrums which the legend threw into the audience.

"Without me moving it landed straight in my hand," said Larry. "Amazing."

He also treasures a plastic cup Dylan once drank from on stage, which Larry begged from a roadie.

Sacha's Hotel is now filling up with more than 350 fans from Somerset, Stuttgart and even Surinam.

In the foyer a young man, who clearly wasn't even born when Dylan erupted onto the pop scene in the sixties with his leather cap and protest songs, strums It's All Over Now Baby Blue on acoustic guitar.

The strains of Mr Tambourine Man are echoing down the corridor from a video theatre showing eight film compilations.

Next door the first of three Dylan lectures is about to start and in the main hall there's a sale of Dylan memorabilia, tapes, CDs, books, photographs and posters.

Larry converted to Dylan aged 14.

Ten years later his entire record collection, including other artists' work, was stolen in a burglary.

When he came to replace it, he realised no other musician compared to the great Robert Allen Zimmerman so since then he has never bought or even listened to any other singer.

Is he completely barmy?

"Some people may think so.

                                          

"But I believe Bob Dylan is the most important human being of the twentieth century and in two or three hundred years' time, if we haven't blown ourselves up by then, he will prove to be as great an influence on culture as Shakespeare."

Larry's flat is a shrine, filled with 900 tapes.

But even that doesn't match John Green's collection.

He's what Dylanologists call a "completist", one of only a handful in the country.

He has a tape and/or CD of every single Dylan concert where recording equipment - official or unofficial - was present.

Such is the global organisation he has built up that within two days of Dylan performing anywhere in the world John will receive a copy of the playlist and within about a week he'll have a tape of the show.

Sometimes a CD and a video of the gig will follow too.

A 38-year-old accountant with Touche Ross, he reckons following Dylan costs him £10,000 a year.

"It seems impossible to justify such expenditure. But it's like an addiction," he admits.

Here I declare an interest, admitting that I was once a Dylan buff and years ago sent postal orders off to an address in Liverpool to receive tapes of obscure Dylan shows so crackly you could hardly hear the music.

But when, in the eighties, Dylan "got religion" and produced a trilogy of appallingly bland albums my devotion lapsed and family, career and other hobbies shunted his LPs to the back of the wardrobe.

John, a bachelor, from Northampton, looks on disapprovingly.

                             

His collection of more than 2,000 tapes includes a much prized 40 minute recording of Dylan "messing about" on guitar in a Denver hotel room in 1966.

He also has recordings of people giving Dylan talks.

Since 1990 he has followed the singer abroad at least once a year.

In July he's off to watch three gigs in France, returns home for two days and then flies out for two more shows in Germany.

He and 13 friends also compile a monthly magazine called Freewheelin' now on issue 105, which they circulate just between themselves.

"Dylan is just the best. A wonderful songwriter but above all an incredible stage performer," says John.

"He's incapable of playing a song the same way twice.

"It's always fascinating to watch him, even when he's off form and murdering his own songs, as he did repeatedly in shows in 1991.

"You sit there enthralled by just how bad he is, knowing that next time he'll sparkle again."

In the main hall 35-year-old John Hume is selling copies of some of the 10,000 photographs he has taken of Dylan.

No photographer in the world has had the great man in their viewfinder more often.

But John, from Belfast but now living in Cradley, Worcestershire, is not a professional snapper.

He's a management trainer who first saw Dylan at Earl's Court in 1978 and later began taking his camera along to provide a souvenir of each show.

                                          

Since then he has photographed more than 100 performances, always without permission.

"I've only been seriously hassled by security men three or four times," says John, who is as discreet as possible and never uses flash.

"They took my film off me in Boston, Saratoga and Luxembourg. But I've never been thrown out."

His greatest triumph was covering the now famous Supper Club concert, a highly secretive Dylan appearance before just 400 fans in a tiny New York venue last November.

But the most ethereal location, he reckons, was Juan Les Pins, France in July 1992 where Dylan played in the open air with the Mediterranean lapping at the back of the stage.

John is now so well known at gigs that even members of Dylan's backing band ask for copies of his pictures.

He also met the woman in his life, Di, 44, at a previous Dylan convention.

Equally, Dylan has also split up many couples.

Derek Barker, 40, the co-organiser of the current get-together doesn't actually blame Dylan for his own divorce.

But his wife's antipathy certainly didn't help their childless relationship.

"When I told a friend we were parting amicably," confided Derek, a security consultant from Coventry "he replied 'thank goodness for that. I thought she might have scratched one of your LPs'."

Derek underwent a Pauline conversion to Dylan at the Earl's Court concert in 1978.

"It changed my life," he confessed.

Almost every waking hour outside work is now devoted to The Man.

He launched a newsletter called Isis which has now grown into a 60-page bi-monthly A4 magazine, with a print run of around 2,500.

                                 

It's available on subscription and on sale at Virgin and Tower record stores. But the £3 cover charge only just meets overheads.

"It's a labour of love," says Derek, who produces the entire publication using desktop technology.

The current issue, on sale at the convention, includes a record of the playlist for each concert in Dylan's Far East tour in February 1994.

On the letters' page is a lengthy discussion on whether Dylan's song Went To See The Gypsy could in fact be a veiled reference to a meeting with Elvis Presley, though scholars are sceptical.

And among the advertisements is one for a book of transcripts of radio phone-ins with Dylan between 1966 and 1974 with expert analysis of what him cryptic responses really meant.

Hungry As A Racoon (Bob Dylan Talks To His Fans And Other Strangers) is priced at £9.50.

In the evening the fans are entertained by a handful of Dylan sound alikes, including 32-year-old Geordie Mike Kirkup, a cinema's publicity officer.

"The songs are easy to play because there are only three or four chords to learn."

Last year's imitators contest was won by American Steven Keene who flew in from New York just to perform and has now recorded an album of Dylanesque music.

Just before I leave I tell 34-year-old Dutch journalist and fan Sjoerd de Jong, about John Green's annual investment on Dylan.

"Wow, £10,000," he says, shaking his head.

"Not even Bob Dylan spends £10,000 a year on Bob Dylan."

For a moment he'd forgotten he had fixed a week's holiday to coincide with the event.

Well, even obsession is relative.

TKR

 One of the most colourful journalists I ever worked with was Trevor Kennard Reynolds, of the Daily Mirror, who happened to live close by in Stockport. He always rode around with a “Doctor on Call” sign in his car window and a stethoscope on the back shelf, so he could park as close as possible to a house where rival journos had gathered. His number plate was ACE 1.

Sometimes to gain access for an interview he’d hobble to the front door on crutches, which he always kept in his boot. He would also don a green, gilt-buttoned suit, with a pair of wings pinned on the breast, resembling, at first glance, an Aer Lingus pilot’s uniform. When off duty he'd walk around our village in a burgundy velvet tracksuit with the gold monogram TKR on his left breast.

The old saying “facts are sacred, opinion free” was slightly lost on Trevor. Once when doing a story about actor Paul Newman helping a motor racing garage in the North of England he filed copious quotes from the Hollywood star. When his boss asked for a phone number for Newman in case there were any queries later on, a red-faced Trevor blurted: “Well, it’s what he would have said.”

Once we got a one-line news flash about a train crash. Trevor immediately put copy paper into his type-writer and wrote: “There were tears in the eyes of emergency services staff as they found a young girl’s mangled doll on the trackside.”

He once came away from the door of a widow, who had turned away 15 reporters with a no comment, saying: “I couldn’t shut her up.”

He would go to the local  pub used by the Press pack and ask the barman to call out: “Is wing commander Reynolds in?” A mutual friend, Phil Braund, came into the office one day to see Trevor writing a story but with Phil’s name on it. Trevor said it was “to give it credence”.

Trevor, who died in 2007 aged 71, even wrote his own obituary in 1997 and left it with a close relative. 

Actually, he’d first ask colleague Maurice Chesworth to pen it. Chessie said: “He asked me to write his obit and spent an hour telling of his escapades on the Daily Express, many of which I had witnessed. The next night we were on lates together and I presented him with the obit. He said it was too far fetched and he’d write his own.”

The envelope was sealed and when it was opened after Trevor’s death, his self eulogy ended with: “Let’s hope it’s another 20 years-plus before you have to use this. Best wishes and give it a good show. Pictures to follow…”

PR Bullsh*t !!!

 First a confession. As a dyed-in-the-wool journalist I used to loathe PR people. Much later when my career morphed into media training I mellowed a little because a lot of my work came via PR firms. But in the end, what would you rather do: expose Thalidomide or open a store using a giant haggis? That said, Tony Tighe is - or was - a supreme PR operator and his achievements are stellar. He is rightly proud of them and some of his associated "non-exec director" forays, including working on the museum of his beloved football club Everton. I was around in the North West when he was in his pomp and the book joined up a lot of loose dots for me. The morality of the profession, for me, is still questionable. Tighe, for example, admits he trousered an extra £10k when a client wrongly paid his invoice twice in an accounting error. And on another occasion, he ended up pinching an account (worth a fortune) from a friend who brought him in to help for 20% commission. "Phil never spoke to me again," writes Tighe. No sh*t Sherlock. The book is an easy read but it is a bit of an auto-hagiography. It benefits from Tighe's undoubtedly incredible memory, especially for expensive meals and staff who stitched him up. PR people will lap it up and anyone around in the media in Manchester and Cheshire over the last four decades will find it very entertaining. Tighe does love an exclamation mark, though.

Panic as Man Burns Crumpets

I read this book in 24 hours and I didn't want it to end. I had a similar career path to Roger. But thank God I was a generation before him...before the bean counters and the internet arrived. I also made it to national papers. But many of my fondest memories and staunchest friendships were made on local papers. 

The way the internet has combined with ruthless Capitalism to largely destroy an institution which was right up there with the NHS as part of the fabric of our society is criminal. Local papers informed and entertained and also held the wrongdoers to account. I recall writing a story for the Northern Echo about a woman whose gas had been wrongly cut off. Within a few hours the gas company reacted and sorted it out. 

Nowadays (as Roger points out) we have situations like the Grenfell fire which might have been avoided had more local reporters been around to sniff out and act upon residents' complaints. The general public has no idea of the amazing work local journalists do to keep things ticking over as they should. Sadly they have been largely replaced by drivel on social media. This book is a very thorough (and sometimes very funny) account of how this regrettable decline affected one newspaper group and the author personally.

Amazon link is here:    tinyurl.com/3r5keyea  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Panic-Man-Burns-Crumpets-Journalist/dp/1472145798/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=panic+as+man+burns+crumpets&qid=1637768569&sr=8-1

Like a Virgin

Would you ask someone to build you a house who had never laid a brick? Of course not.

Yet in 1995 a company entered the financial services market for the first time with a personal equity plan and took £75m worth of investments from customers, the largest share in the industry.

That company was Virgin and people trusted Richard Branson with their money because they believed he was a winner, despite no financial track record.

Branson’s enviable brand loyalty owed much to his clever manipulation of the media and businesses of all sizes, even the smallest, can learn from his success.

Statistics that show the public has increasingly less faith in the media obscure a powerful truth. Visibility and recognition are the keys to marketing your product and service.
And the beauty is that if you are media savvy and invest a little time you can achieve incredible results without spending a penny.

The trouble is most people, including businessmen and women, fear the media. They remember how one inappropriate joke cost Gerald Ratner £500m. They wince as Jeremy Paxman puts yet another MP through the Newsnight wringer. Yet every day, lower down the media food chain, legions of hard-pressed print and broadcast journalists struggle to fill acres of newsprint and miles of audio or video tape with material that will interest their own “customers”. They need stories, they need interviews and they need expert knowledge.

So one simple way of promoting your business is to become a perceived “thought leader” in your field of expertise. Note the word “perceived”. You don’t have to be the best or the biggest. You just need a story and you have to tell it simply and with passion. If you do, you will be invited back.

This was the way American Suze Orman catapulted herself from waitress to multi-millionairess. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, in 1951 to poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, bad stock market investments later caused her to lose the 50,000 dollars a customer loaned her to start a restaurant. Angry and unable to repay the debt, she trained as a stockbroker and became a financial planner. What differentiated her from tens of thousands of similar advisors is she began to write books and articles. She was soon noticed by TV and radio producers and the exposure they gave her helped to quickly build a 32m dollar fortune.

The technological revolution means that there are now many more ways to reach your target customers than traditional routes of newspapers, radio and TV. But you can alert so called “mainstream” media to websites and blogs that contain good content, video or podcasts.

Exactly how you identify your story and then make it sing, maybe I’ll explain another day. For the moment remember that editorial is 10 times more powerful than advertorial. “You’ve got to be in it to win it” was the slogan used by The Sun years ago to launch a major competition. And so have you. Journalists feed off what they see and read in other media.

Look at what happened to Guy Goma, the out of work computer technician who went for a BBC job interview, blundered into the studio and was wrongly interviewed about an IT lawsuit. Watch here. He went on a media merry-go-round which included appearances on GMTV and CNN and talks about a Hollywood movie. And he didn’t even know what he was talking about!

Taddington Travelogue

And so to Taddington, a Derbyshire village tucked away 1,100 feet above sea level, that could look charming if it made the effort. 

It grew around farming and quarrying for limestone and lead. From 1863 to 1967 the village was served by Millers Dale railway station, some two miles away, which was on the Midland Railway's extension of the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock and Midlands Junction Railway.

Its main attractions are Five Wells, a chambered tomb topped by a cairn, and the 14th-century church, with the remains of a 7th-century Celtic cross in the churchyard. We didn’t bother.

Notable local buildings include Taddington Manor and Marlborough House. Fields around the settlement show evidence of both Celtic lynchett terraces and of Mediaeval strip farming. Kinky.

What first greeted the Wednesday Wanderers, however, was a pair of skinny, tights-wearing legs sticking out from the wall of the Queens Arms meeting point, like some undernourished burglar making his escape through a ventilation shaft.

I think the members of the Tidy Village committee should have a word.

 

We set off at 9.47am, turning right coming from the pub car park and walking up the main road.

After 120 yards we turned right onto a footpath across some fields, climbed a wall and turned right again.

This brought us to the A6 which we crossed and went straight on. At a crossroads of tracks we went straight on again, over a stile and down a steep embankment which Mr Davison described as a “dip” but which, if snowed over, would have tested Franz Klammer.

We went through a gate and onto a track where we turned left. After 50 yards we went right, climbed a wall and found ourselves facing an ice covered pond.

The opportunity to revisit Mr Davison’s Jesus impression was too good to miss.

It was a year or so back when the Wanderers’ answer to Evel Knievel tried to walk on ice on the canal near Marple golf club, Stockport and ended up soaked.

Although egged on, here, he was a bit more circumspect and after an ominous cracking noise retraced his steps immediately. What a wuss.

I think Dynamo can sleep easily.

Mr Davison walks on water…for a second or two.

We negotiated a wall and were afforded a wonderful view of a valley. Cressbrook Hall was away on our right.

We walked along a limestone wall which Mr Rooney described as “Chasing the Devil” because we were actually following a lead mine’s “vein”.

This was Millers Dale, a popular beauty spot in the Peak District of England, much of the area being preserved as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

 Millers Dale

Nearby is Ravenstor and Cheedale, both popular with rock-climbers. Just to the north of the Dale lies the village of Wormhill and the lesser known valleys of Peter Dale and Monk's Dale.

The local landmark is the viaduct, first built by the Midland Railway in 1866. Increasing traffic meant that a second viaduct parallel to the first was built in 1905, increasing the number of tracks to four.

The area is of great interest to geologists, particularly where the strata have been exposed by quarries and railway cuttings.

In Station Quarry, which is owned by the Naturalists Trust, two layers of limestone can be seen, separated by a bed of shale. At one point there is a dip in the lower layer, possibly from a watercourse, millions of years ago. This is filled with the shale and a large limestone boulder can be seen within it. Elsewhere in the area there are signs of lava flows from long-ago volcanic activity.

As we descended what looked like a harmless track Mr Rooney and Mr Davison were both fallers.

We went down some steps and turned right onto an old railway track.

This, indeed, was the former Buxton to Matlock line which later became the main rail route to London.

It is better known now, of course, as the Monsal Trail, about 8.5 miles (13.7 km) in length, starting at the Topley Pike junction (in Wye Dale, 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Buxton) and running  to Coombs viaduct, 1 mile (1.6 km) south-east of Bakewell.

It follows the valley of the River Wye and runs parallel to the A6. For many years the Trail could not trace the trackbed  as rail  tunnels had been closed for safety reasons, such as at Monsal Head and Cressbrook, meaning that the Trail was diverted.

The tunnels were walked by Julia Bradbury as part of BBC TV's Railway Walks: The Peak Express.

Many resulting access points and diversion paths were unsuitable for those using cycles or wheelchairs or with difficulty walking due to steep uneven stone steps or narrow paths.

Plans to make the tunnels safe and re-open them to the public were given the go-ahead at a cost of £3.78m and the tunnels were opened officially for use on 25 May 2011 at a ceremony at the Headstone Viaduct (they had actually been open 12 days earlier).

As a consequence, the Trail is now virtually level (though the former diversions are still usable, if desired).

Below, to the left, is the notorious Litton Mill, downstream from Millers Dale station, where orphans from major cities were abused by Ellis Needham, with the graves of many to be found in local churchyards.

Here the Wanderers split into three. The main body, led by Mr Davison, took a path on the right, over the first two tunnels. Mr Rooney took a path to the left. Your diarist and Mr Cunliffe decided to walk the tunnels and were afforded the sight of hundreds of ice stalactites.

 The splintered groups converged about 500 yards after the second tunnel and entered the third tunnel - Headstone - as one.

Train drivers back in the day used to say when they emerged from this tunnel  (coming the other way to our walk) that they thought they were “in the Alps”.

As this was long before Judith Chalmers was born, we must assume their knowledge of the Alps was limited to picture books. But the simile is fully justified.

A few hundred yards from the third tunnel we took a path to the left following a sign which said “Little Longstone”. We reached a road and turned left, passing an expensive barn conversion on our right, to arrive at the Pack Horse (which opened in 1787, incidentally) at 12.03pm.

There was an array of guest beers, including Kipling (ABV 5.2) at £3.35, Lord Maples and Wild Swan both at £3.10, Black Sheep at £3.05 and Jaipur at an eye-watering £3.55. We left the pub at 12.50pm, turning right and passing the rather pretty church.

At this point by a quirk of my iPhone's camera a dismembered hand seemed to appear in front of Mr Fairman recreating a scene from the 1966 classic horror series Dr Terror’s House of Horrors.

  Mr Fairman and the Hand

Film buffs may recall Tarot card reading oddball Peter Cushing - all scary eyebrows and German accent - foretelling the fates of five rail commuters in this trend-setting horror film. 

While the movie never quite tops its jaw-dropping earlier episode in which legendary BBC Radio DJ Alan Freeman wrestles with a deadly vine with plans for world-domination, it comes close with the episode “Disembodied Hand”.

Christopher Lee is perfectly cast as a pompous, pretentious art critic, particularly fond of lambasting the work of artist Michael Gough. Subsequently he’s hounded by Gough, even after he runs him over and causes the artist to lose a hand.

Was there a subtle nod to Van Gogh (who famously lost an ear) in choosing the fictional name Gough, I wonder?

We passed the Monsal Head Hotel on our left and went down some steps to our left.

We crossed a bridge and found ourselves in the Wye Valley.

Approaching the A6 again,we  crossed it and went straight over and up a hill following a sign saying “Taddington”.

This was a long and quite exhausting climb that took its toll on a few Wanderers.

We reached what appeared to be the top at 2.05pm only to find that a further climb was required and we swung right up a new incline to reach a road.

We walked on to a T-junction where we turned right and the outskirts of Taddington hove into view.

We reached the cars at 2.30pm, de-booted and entered the Queen’s Arms where Chatsworth Gold was £3.20 and Barnsley Bitter £3.

A sign by the fire said it all……

Join me soon for another wander.

Every Bosley Cloud has a Silver Lining

Fancy a wander?

Snowdrops

Rambling in North Staffordshire. No, it's not another NHS scandal.

Spring is here! The first snowdrops of the year to be seen by the Wednesday Wanderers were recorded on this enjoyable walk. From snow to snowdrops in just four weeks.

We came out of the car park behind the Knot Inn at Rushton Spencer and walked past a building carrying a plaque which said “Ruston Station 1844”.

The railway station was built for the Leek and Macclesfield Railway and was eventually taken over by the North Staffordshire Railway. It  is now a dwelling house, of course.

I’m sure the Wanderers, like me, admired the coursed and dressed sandstone; banded and shaped tile roof; verge parapets with finials on corbelled kneelers and the circular and diamond shafted corniced stone stacks.

The poor commuters of yesteryear never had the pleasure of a cheery wave from the wide-eyed Polish Big Issue seller and the aggressive  tramp with the Tam o’ Shanter and can of cheap cider.

 We took a path on the right and then went down some steps to the left. We crossed a stream, went over a stile, up some steps and through a wood.

A short climb was involved. This took us to Raven’s Clough.

At 10.07am we saw the snowdrops (above) and worrying also heard gunfire (just a clay pigeon shoot hopefully?).

We went over a stile on the left and Bosley Cloud hove into view.

                                                              Near the top of Bosley Cloud

Another climb was undertaken and this brought us onto a road where we turned left.

At 10.29am Mr Fairman stopped to remove a stone in his shoe, without the aid of a Swiss Army knife or anaesthetic.

We dog legged right and saw a sign which said “to Cloud Summit”.

                                                      View from near the top of Bosley Cloud

We duly ascended some steps and by 10.40am had reached the top of Bosley Cloud.

                                     The Chief Druids discuss how best to get a sacrificial virgin on such a small altar

At 343 metres (1,125 ft) in height,Bosley Cloud is one of the highest hills in the area. Its heather-covered summit plateau is crowned by a trig point from which extensive views over Congleton, Biddulph, Macclesfield, Holmes Chapel, and the Greater Manchester area can be enjoyed.

The Cloud sits at the northern apex of a triangle formed by the broken ridge which runs along the border between Cheshire and Staffordshire and the hills stretching south through Biddulph Moor into Staffordshire. To its north, the River Dane wraps around its lower slopes whilst the A523 road runs to its east through the village of Bosley in Southeast Cheshire.

The place is linked to a phenomenon known as the double sunset ,  an extraordinary astro-geographical phenomenon, which was traditionally seen against The Cloud from the churchyard of Saint Edward the Confessor in Leek, in Staffordshire, on the summer solstice.

In clear weather, the sun sets on the summit of the hill, partially reappears from The Cloud's steep northern slope and soon afterwards sets for a second and final time on the horizon.

The occurrence was first recorded in writing in 1686 by Dr Robert Plot in his book The Natural History Of Staffordshire, and may well have been observed for centuries before then.

The spectacle is no longer visible from its traditional observation point because of tree interference, but can still be witnessed on the summer solstice from Leek: from the road to Pickwood Hall, off Milltown Way, and less well from Lowe Hill on the outskirts of the town.

Better observation sites of the phenomenon are from the A523 above Rudyard Lake, and Woodhouse Green.  Both of these events and their locations are described in detail in Jeff Kent's book The Mysterious Double Sunset.

A double Sundowner would be more appropriate for the Wanderers.

After a brief stop to admire a metal map that amazingly had not been defaced (vandals clearly haven’t the puff to get up so high)  we took a path to the left and began our descent.

At 10.49am Pie Time was declared and Mr Cunliffe asked if he could “borrow” some loo paper.

None was available but certainly no Wanderer would want it to be returned.

Mr Cunliffe duly disappeared into the undergrowth, presumably armed with either  a handful of grass or that day’s Sun newspaper.

After a full 10 minutes of gourmandising we set off again down the hill.

We went down some steps (11.15am) and followed a sign saying “Gritstone Trail”.

We reached a road and turned left, then took a path on the right.

This brought us into “Timbersbrook Picnic Area”, essentially a large car park with a seated area just about big enough to accommodate a family of four.

Clearly picnics aren’t that fashionable in Staffs.

Back in the day there used to be a bleaching a dyeing works nearby.

Workers would hurry on their break or after work to seek sustenance at a café run by a woman called Old Fanny Moss, which sounds more like a gynaecological condition.

Sadly Google could shed no more light on Fanny, although the search engine did helpfully  throw up a few interesting sites that occupied your diarist for an hour or two.

The tall chimney of the Silver Springs Bleaching and Dyeing Works at Timbersbrook could be seen for miles around before it was demolished by Blaster Bates in 1966.

Water from Timbers Brook was once used to power the silk mill and the old Mill Pool is now a locally important breeding pond for toads. 

According to a council website,  “lucky” walkers might even see a Kingfisher or Heron silently waiting by the waters edge ready to pounce on any unsuspecting fish they spot. Sadly our luck was out.

Within a few hundred yards, however, we did spy a peacock, adorning a very sumptuous abode, as we turned right out of the car park.

                                                                            Peacock

What kind of person keeps a peacock on their front lawn (done in a Lloyd Grossman voice) ?

We went left onto the Gritstone Trail, through a kissing-gate and across a field.

This, at 11.55am, brought as to the “half way point” the Coach and Horses, not the Waggon and Horses as Mr Fairman had forecast. A moot point.

Unicorn and Dizzy Blonde, both £3, were on good form.

Mr Cunliffe tucked into his obligatory plate of chips.

                                                                         Tom’s lunch

We set off at 1.38pm, going out of the pub and straight over the road.

We turned left and then right into Cherry Lane.

Within a minute we were approaching Llamaland a large house and surrounding fields featuring dozens of inquisitive llamas and other creatures.

As every schoolboy knows, llamas are members of the South American camelid family and are mostly found in the high altiplano regions of the Andes in Peru, Bolivia and Chile.

They are the domesticated cousin of the wild guanaco and are extensively used by the Andean people and in the past by the Incas, as beasts of burden, for food, for fibre and their hides used as leather.

The British Llama Society has been set up to promote all aspects of llama and Guanaco ownership - good husbandry, breeding, trekking, driving, showing and much more. It publishes a quarterly magazine, Llama Llink, a magazine that surely has been featured on Have I Got News For You.

We then past Overton Hall. We joined a road that came in from the left and after a few hundred yards went left over a stile.

We went up a narrow path with prickly leaves to our left. At 1.03pm lunch was declared.

We set off again at 1.11pm carrying on a straight line past Flowery Fields Farm.

We reached a road and turned right. This was Pines Lane. At a T-junction we turned left. We passed Green Meadows Farm. We crossed a muddy field and onto a road where we turned right.

We passed Deepdale House and took a path on the right (1.50pm).

We crossed a field, reached a road and went straight on.

This brought us to St Lawrence Church, Rushton.

                                                              St Lawrence Church, Rushton

There is a whiff of Midsomer Murders here.

The grave of Thomas Meakin, who was buried in 1781, is the only one in the churchyard facing east.  Thomas, a groom, was in love with his master's (an apothecary) daughter.

The old man did not approve  and eyebrows were raised when  Thomas suddenly died and was hurriedly buried (in Stone, Staffs).

His favourite pony kept returning to his grave and pawing the ground. When his worried friends finally exhumed the body they found him lying face down.

Had he been poisoned and buried alive? The apothecary had the motive and the means. Sadly John Nettles was not around. 

After that, Thomas’s family brought his remains back to Rushton they were reburied at St Lawrence's.

We went over a railway bridge, dropped down a slope and turned right to go under the bridge we had just crossed. At 2.20pm we were back at the cars.

After de-booting we drove to the Old Kings Head at Gurnett, where Speckled Hen and Tim Taylor’s Landlord were both £3.20 and Banks’ was £3.

Join me again soon on another wander.