Hathersage and Hope

 

The Sheffield City Hall Ballroom

The dining ballroom in Poseidon

When I was repainting my bedroom that smart navy I cleared out lots of clutter and flotsam.

Amid the detritus of 59 years on this planet, I found a box of photographs.

We don’t seem to have or keep boxes of photographs anymore do we?

Amongst them, , when I got to sort through the memories as I was sitting in the bedroom window seat, was a postcard of the moors above Hathersage in the Hope Valley.

I remembered who had sent it before I re read the inscription on the back

Sorry, call me please….Adam x …it said simply 

I had met Adam at the unlikely sounding Poptastic back in 1995. I was on a break from a boyfriend and a relationship that was fraught with difficulties and too much drama, so wasn’t looking for anything in particular. 

Poptastic was a camp-as- Christmas gay night at the city Hall Ballroom  in Sheffield.

I loved the night, not particularly because it was gay themed….it was more that the surroundings reminded me of the Art Deco dining room in The Poseidon Adventure . 

A middle aged gay movie buff’s fantasy .

Adam was a farmer, well to be absolutely pedantic , he was a  powerfully built livestock feed salesman who used to be a farmer and he looked every inch of one, what with a rosy expression, a tweedy jacket with brogues,  and several young female friends from Hathersage and Grindleford and Hope all determined to have a great time on the works night out. 

He was perhaps 32 and had genuinely never kissed a man before 

I was a tiny bit older and had kissed a few so I was surprised that only after some mild flirting on my part

he came home with me. 

He was closeted, gauche, sweet and very serious and he fell in love with me after that first fumbling evening, even though he was terrified of his family’s and friends’ reactions to the fact he’d gone to bed with a scruffy nurse from Walkley. 

I fell for him too.

For he was a gentle, kind and old fashioned soul

Who couldn’t of? He was a big puppy of a guy. But I was in the throes of a destructive relationship where my boyfriend was already closeted and secretive and at the time ashamed to be gay and I was realising what I could cope with and what I wanted and so a man who was so new to the the gay world wasn’t quite what I needed .

But I saw him again, and again, when he would turn up sweetly with bunches of flowers and an uncorrected assumption  by his parents that he was visiting a girl in Sheffield . 

Then my ex started to call too…..we’ve all been there…..

When I finally broke up with Adam , he cried like a baby. and broke a pane of glass in my kitchen door as he stormed home …..soon after that I disastrously revisited my former relationship which lasted and limped on, like a sick rat until the millennium.  

In retrospect I’d probably been better staying with Adam 

It was a timing issue  I guess. 

It often is…….

The postcard arrived six months later . 

I kept it but never replied to it

I’ve always liked Hathersage 

Such a pretty place.