Dinner in Ricci’s

We ate our dinner in a restaurant in the Dean Clough Mill complex in Halifax, a restaurant called Ricci’s Tapas and Cicchetti. Tapas is Spanish, as many people know, and cicchetti are somewhat equivalent, it’s a Venetian word, cicchetti exist in Italy only in Venice and are somewhat similar to Tapas. So a fusion restaurant.

We were at least fifteen years older than anyone else in the restaurant and it was full, it was only by arriving very early that we managed to get a table. This was on a Tuesday evening in February – obviously scope for development in Halifax.

The waitress, a young woman named Lizzie, was happy to chat to us a bit after I was friendly to her, I think she was a bit puzzled by who we were; she had given a big kiss to a young woman who had come in to eat, a friend of hers presumably, and shortly after she told us what flavours of ice cream there were, one of which was bacio. Bacio is a type of Italian ice cream with hazelnuts but it is also the Italian word for a kiss, which I mentioned to Lizzie and she didn't know that and was rather intrigued that I did so we got onto the topic of languages. She said she had got grade 1 German at GCSE but did not get much opportunity to do much with it.

‘Ich langweilig’, she said, which caused me to correct her grammar when what I should have done was to ask her what she was bored with, was it talking to me or life in general? Whatever it was I thought it was a great shame – unless it was just me that was making her bored, though I don't think it was that. 

A great shame, that Lizzie is bored, when there is so much of interest to do and see in Halifax. Though I suppose you do need a bit of time and money. And it is potentially dangerous too, if there are too many bright people in Halifax like Lizzie, who are bored.

Wainwright’s Folly

In the morning of our day in Halifax we were looking at a building that we subsequently discovered to be called the Square Church. We became engaged in conversation with a man in perhaps his seventies who was in Halifax to see his brother in a nursing home. He was from Halifax and worked there in his youth in a machine-tools factory, but now lives in Leeds. He had no idea what were the names of the buildings we were at that point looking at, he came from the other side of Halifax, he said.

We asked the man about going to see Wainwright’s Folly, which is an elaborate tall chimney built to form part of a dye works that was never completed, it sits at the head of a steep hill outside Halifax and so can be seen from miles around.

Wainwright’s Folly

‘Oh no’, said the man, ‘you can't walk there, much too far, you need to get the bus, the Sowerby Bridge bus’. But we did walk there, and it was not at all far, and on the way we passed through the Muslim area.

Halifax has relatively few Muslims as the carpet mills stayed just-about profitable for longer than the mills that produced cloth and so had less pressing need to import cheap labour from Asia, but it does have some, and what they work at I have no idea.

In the Muslim areas there were a number of Muslim religious houses with shy-looking women coming and going -presumably religious houses, yes we natural cynics shall give them the benefit of the doubt on that.

As we were waiting to cross a road in that area there was a crump. A smart Jaguar has crashed into the back of a small red car stopped waiting for the lights to change. Out of the red car got four young Muslim men and from a side street appeared a largish number of their friends, and the elderly man in the Jaguar looked a bit frightened. But actually, the Muslim men seemed fine, if understandably somewhat annoyed, so we did not think it necessary to get involved. I guess the old guy must have fallen asleep or something, for there was nothing unusual in the traffic stopped at the lights. he made quite a mess of the front of his shiny clean Jaguar.

Halifax

Halifax, like Huddersfield, still has many of its monuments to the time of civic pride, religious fervour and confident hope for the future, in fact Halifax in many ways more so as one of the things that has been preserved is the massive carpet mill, which is now a complex of offices and workshops, some shops, an art gallery, and a Travelodge which is where we stayed – a room inside the old converted mill.

The woman on reception in the Travelodge at the old mill was very chatty. She was going on holiday to Latvia she said, quite looking forward to it. One of the cleaning staff is Latvian and had invited her. We were quite envious, why don’t we have any Latvian cleaning staff?

On our first evening in Halifax we ate in Weatherspoon’s. Dry cardboard chips with some processed meat or fish in batter. Not a stimulating experience, though the restaurant was busy, so someone must be liking it.

Halifax Town Hall

We looked into the grand town hall in Halifax and the manager there, a man with grey hair, grey suit, white shirt and yellow tie, for some reason took a shine to us and said that if we wait a few minutes while he makes an appearance at a meeting, he’ll show us round; which we duly did, and which he duly did. Quite why he selected us for this honour I have no idea; he seemed especially to be taken with Hilary, addressing most of his comments to her.

The motto of Halifax, on the coat of arms that forms a mosaic in the centre of the floor of the main hall in the Town Hall building, is ‘Except the Lord Save the City’. Can you work out what that means? We couldn’t. As the man informed us, it comes from Psalm 127: Except the Lord save the city, the watchman waketh in vain. Get it? Bit obscure though. But I suppose in the 1860s everyone, or everyone who was anyone, was expected to understand that without question. The motto is related to that of Edinburgh, which is ‘Nisi Dominus Frustra’, which does not mean don’t upset the boss, but instead is apparently from the same source, though equally obscure in translation. Or it is to me anyway.

But Halifax’s motto makes correct use of the subjunctive because of the implied ‘that’ after ‘except’. In Italian you still would use the subjunctive in such a sentence, or educated people would, and even I would, so that whereas ‘the Lord saves the city’ would be, ‘Il Signore salva la città’, ‘Except the Lord save the city’ would be, ‘Tranne che il Signore salvi la città’, i.e. salvi (subjunctive case) instead of salva (present tense) and you include the 'that' (che) in Italian, which you tend not to in English.

Also in Italian for ‘except’ you often as not use the verb to save, as you can in English, so the motto could in perfectly correct English be ‘Save the Lord Save the City’

 I think I might argue for a longer version when I become mayor of Sedbergh, ‘Save the Lord Save the City Holy Schmoley Save Us All’, arguing that with the use of the word ‘save’ as a preposition, a subjunctive and an imperative it is grammatically pure and what is more is of distinguished pedigree.

Inside Halifax Town Hall

The town hall in Halifax was built in the early 1860s with central government money. This apparently was common at the time, central government making funds available for local authorities to build themselves a base; in the case of Halifax the building housed not only the mayor but also the courts, the police station, and the cells in the basement. It was designed by Charles Barry and opened in 1863 by the Price of Wales, later King Edward VII. It was a big do, the opening, and was part of the general civic pride that was prevalent at the time, though interestingly in comparison to now this civic pride was largely engineered by state and crown, sort of anathema to the politicians of today who kind of have it in their mind that ‘the big society’ should be generating pride in local society rather than it being imposed from above, which I suppose it is in a kind of way, though perhaps not in ways that those of the establishment might have wished for.

Halifax happened to be blessed in the 1960s by indecision and procrastination among the city fathers, which meant that it missed much of the planning blight of the time, leaving many of the old buildings intact. There’s a lot to see in Halifax.

Huddersfield

Hilary and I visited Huddersfield and Halifax. The reason we went to those two towns was that, if we had ever been to either of them before, we could not remember it. And as with so many places, few people visit as tourists because the locations are not on the itinerary, yet both are full of interest and could be on an itinerary if anyone ever were to draw one up.

Both towns developed in the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries on the back of wool. Employment was in the mills, with ancillary industries like machine-tool manufacture. Now there are no mills, and thus no ancillary industry, so what do the people who live in those towns do? Halifax kept going a bit longer than many other northern wool towns as its speciality was carpets, but no carpets are made there now, they finished in the early 1980s.

In Huddersfield now a big employer is the ever-expanding university. This has had a lot of money pumped in, some of it from sponsoring firms, and the university campus feels quite buzzy. And of course if you have a university you begin to get things like restaurants and cafés appearing in town, some of which look quite good – we had lunch in a very pleasant café  – though as yet these are on a small scale.

As no one will should need reminding, Huddersfield’s most famous son is . . . Harold Wilson. There’s a statue of him in the square outside the railway station, which looks like he has just got off a train and is bustling to a meeting, which I think is rather good, very appropriate for outside the railway station.

Huddersfield Station is rather extraordinary, looks more like the headquarters of a bank than a railway station.

Outside Huddersfield railway station. White spots from:
Bolts on plinth
Discarded chewing gum
Bird shit (on Harold’s eyebrow and hand)

But the university will not provide employment for everyone and there are many dull-of-eye poor people shuffling about in Huddersfield, and pubs with angry-faced drunks outside having a smoke mid-afternoon. I was taking photographs outside the art gallery, innocuous enough photos:

Huddersfield Library and Art Gallery, A strange statue outside, plus hangers around.

Now the question is, do people gob their chewing gum onto the ground on their way into the library, or on their way out?

Shambling drunks made comments, obviously they don’t see many people taking photos in Huddersfield.

We went into the art gallery, which is not something we often do as once you’ve seen one . . . but with this one we wanted to see inside the splendid building as well as out – dating from the 1920s or 30s we guess – and the exhibition they had on we found to be rather good, a wide range of paintings on a local-interest theme.

But Huddersfield is in many ways a poor town, complete with the symbols of the lower market such as tattooists, in this case one called The Bleeding Art, which as a shop name we could not decide whether was very clever or very yukky.

And Huddersfield still has its buildings, some of them anyway, monuments to the time of civic pride, religious fervour and confident hope for the future.