1) My Overall Sheffield Experience improved significantly when I found the Hygge coffee shop about seven minutes away from my hotel. A couple lattes and a chocolate croissant in a quiet atmosphere set me up for the day.
1a) The room filled up with both with gray sunshine and with people. A family group were playing something like Monopoly at a table near mine.
2) Packed up, dropped off my key, and I trundled my bags off to the train station, filled with sunlight and . . . live music. A piano was there, and when I walked in a girl about eight years old was doggedly working through “Let It Be” while being filmed by her mother. Later more experienced musicians tickled the ivories, and I was especially happy to hear someone play “You Don’t Know Me.”
2a) The maps are outdated in this station; the first class lounge no longer exists.
3) Overall confusion on the platform when the train arrived, but somehow I was in the right place for the door of my car to open directly in front of me. As it happened most of the people boarding had mistaken my train for another train, and an announcement had to be made over the public address system.
3a) An announcement also had to be made, sotto voce, by the only other occupant of first class, a Woman Older Than I, who kept looking disapprovingly and saying “They are not supposed to be in here.”
3b) But once they were gone and our journey begun, and my seat supposedly right by hers, she became a nearly unstoppable chatterbox. Wouldn’t you know it, she was en route to join a Cunard cruise! So we talked Cunard until I turned my attention to Queen James.
3b.i) This encounter reminded me vividly of an old woman I met in a Texas airport when flying home in the mid-1980s. I remember her sniffing about airport food — “not as good as this good roll” she said, referring to her cheese sandwich from home — and her astonishment that I was a Methodist since she was as well. (She may have expected me to be a Communist or something.) Very conservative and homophobic, something I filed away since at that point I was far from coming out.
4) Walking into my hotel, the Alan, it felt instantly like a Hotel for Young People. This was because there were two steep steps to the entrance, and then two further steep steps to the lobby, tough to maneuver with heavy bags, not to mention the derisive laughter of a young woman (which probably was about something else, but still . . . ) The lobby was very modern, lots of cream stone; I remembered Spy Magazine had once described Cher’s New York kitchen as “Fred and Wilma Flintstone as cocaine dealers.” This room was a lot more relaxed. But the staff were all delightful, and my room was all dim light and spacious warmth. I felt welcome.
5) After unpacking and settling in, I ventured to find some dinner and was pleased to discover a great restaurant not too many blocks away. Negroni, pork chops, chocolate pistachio cake — heaven.
6) I sank into bed happy to have gotten safely in, and ready to contemplate the next few days.