At the side of Intake [Primary] School is Stanhope Road, which turned up in a Pulp song years later called Babies, and it was funny, because I was out in Sheffield the other night and I got talking to these two girls and one of them said they'd moved on to Stanhope Road - which isn't a very long road - because it was mentioned in the song Babies, and I said, "Oh, that's a shame".^[1]

And she came home round four
and she was with some kid called David
From the garage up the road

Yeah, underneath the city
through dirty brickwork conduits
connecting white witches on the Moor
with Pre-Raphaelites down in Broomhall

Beneath the old Trebor factory
that burnt down in the early seventies
Leaving an antiquated sweet-shop smell
and caverns of nougat and caramel
Nougat

Yeah, nougat and caramel

Yeah, the river flows on beneath pudgy fifteen-year-olds addicted to coffee whitener, courting couples naked on Northern Upholstery and pensioners gathering dust like bowls of plastic tulips. And it finally comes above ground again at Forge Dam: the place where we first met.

I went there again for old time's sake, hoping to find the child's toy horse ride that played such a ridiculously tragic tune. It was still there - but none of the kids seemed interested in riding on it. And the cafe was still there too; the same press-in plastic letters on the price list and scuffed formica-top tables. I sat as close as possible to the seat where I'd met you that autumn afternoon. And then, after what seemed like hours of thinking about it, I finally took your face in my hands and I kissed you for the first time and a feeling like electricity flowed through my whole body. And I immediately knew I'd entered a completely different world. And all the time, in the background, the sound of that ridiculously heartbreaking child's ride outside.

At the other end of town the river flows underneath an old railway viaduct; I went there with you once - except you were somebody else - and we gazed down at the sludgy brown surface of the water together. Then a passer-by told us that it used to be a local custom to jump off the viaduct into the river, when coming home from the pub on a Saturday night. But that this custom had died out when someone jumped and landed too near to the riverbank and had sunk in the mud there and drowned before anyone could reach them. Maybe he'd just made the whole story up. You'd never get me to jump off that bridge. No chance. Never in a million years.

Oh, this is as far as we got last time
but if we go just another mile
we will surface surrounded by grass and trees
and the fly-over that takes the cars to cities

And I used to live just by the river
in a disused factory just off the Wicker
And the river flowed by day after day
And "one day" I thought
"One day I will follow it"
That day never came; I moved away and lost track
but tonight I am thinking about making my way back
I may find you there
and float on
wherever the river may take me