Amongst the dross dropping through my letter-box (Denmark recently abolished its postal service altogether), a circular from my old alumnus Sheffield asking me to support a student... cheeky bastards.
Sheffield's own failure reflects mine own, hanging like an albatross around my neck.
It is most famous for its Soviet-style council cutting down the many trees that made it what it was, and jailing pensioners at the same time as we so like to do in the UK.
Its football teams are shit and it is the only substantial city without an airport, while it boasts two that are defunct.
They could be forgiven though, because post-Channel Tunnel the UK is incapable of building anything much aside from a sizeable tent on the south side of the Thames.
Contrast China, which whilst I was there took the top of a mountain so as to flatten it sufficient for an airport ~ and used a similar overburden to build a new airport for Hong Kong.
Sheffield's principal effort at establishing infrastructure was its City Airport situated to the east of the city in an area none of its inhabitants (including me at the time) dreamt of visiting prior the shopping mall, it formerly home to giant steelworks.
Looking at the map you can see the problem: the only means of getting to the airport (now flagged as the business centre) was the car, and there was insufficient space for parking; it largely explaining how by 2002 there were under three-dozen passengers per day.
I know because I called once (Ed. he didn't) to ask when one flight was scheduled, and they said "What time can you get here?".
In short though it is bound by motorways and high ground to the east, and moaning Minnies (as Thatcher liked to call people) to the west. The runway was 1200m long, whereas the ones I frequented elsewhere were as much as 4000m; so it catered for high-cost business flights at a time we were selling the industry off to firms based in Ireland, Greece or Hungary that provide the low-cost means of destroying a planet which we all enjoy today.
In the end it was sold to Peel Group for £1, who sat on it until they could replace it with a business park and profit by £1,000,000. (Southampton's council sold its airport to Peter de Savary along with permission for a business park, ensuring he pocketed £18,000,000 instead of the residents; councillors having the business acumen of a turnip).
The same fate awaited Sheffield-Doncaster airport even further to the east and once home to both V-bombers and latterly me, learning to fly. I returned at the helm of an Airbus decades later, and like your old school it all looked smaller than I recalled.
It too was and still is owned by Peel Group, a storied rags to riches (actually quarry-stone to landfill) northern company that you have to admire, having steamrollered its way to owning most of the country's infrastructure from a modest home in Bury.
But Sheffield's singular failure lies in not having awarded me an honours degree, in some ways appropriate given I'm not especially honourable. Hinging on a viva voce (and if you don't know what that is you don't deserve one either) it fell to a bearded academic from Leicester who queried why in one essay I suggested the two halves of Germany might one day be reunited... this being 1980.
"It's never going to happen, is it?" I was admonished.
Subsequent to the events of 1989 I wrote to the vice-chancellor of the university:
Dear Vice Chancellor,
In light of the reunification of Germany, give me my honours degree you fuckers."
Sincerely
Colin Hilton BSc (no Hons)
He wrote back to say that, this being pre-digitisation all test-papers were destroyed after seven years, they doubtless having drawn inspiration from the Stasi.
But that said, Sheffield: loved the place and the people. Tasked once with knocking on doors for a Geography project, its pensioners were only too happy to take part, often having spent fifty years or more down a coal-pit or forging steel.
And the best part of all of this is that the city is now the only one in the world with a car-park that includes a control tower.
(Ed. as to whether Germany might reunite, in fact Colin wrote: 'I'll take a punt on it, yeah.').
