Pause for Thought: What happened to Joe's statue?

And how sweet if a day’s perplexity can be solved or enlivened while wandering about and pondering over coffees.

On some “mystery days” I discreetly take on the persona of some great television detective.

Lights! Action! Camera! My cameras inevitably are the CCTV ones that follow me every day wherever I go!

A mystery/famous sleuth day for me can some days start (in my imagination) with a local police bobby approaching me on the street.

It seems that the police need my help on a regular basis and as I am in town a great deal and am known to haunt cafes they often seek me out.

Sometimes they ask me to accompany them to help resolve a problem that has them mystified. We usually walk to the police station. Let me tell you it is murder, on my feet, as we hoof along too fast for my liking. Flaneurs’ shoes are meant for meandering not marching.

Yes, some days it is, figuratively “deerstalker on, pipe firmly clamped by teeth and cape flapping as I rise phoenix-like to whatever challenge.

One Wednesday recently, the mystery to explore was specifically monumental as well as being somewhat perplexing. I then, again figuratively, donned this time, a bowler hat and posed one hand on cane and one touching dodgy moustache (such that Hercule Poirot would have).. Ah oui, certainment.

I was ready to delve into the mystery of what happened to Joe Cocker’s monument. Where is it? Not in Sheffield perhaps?

I have admired the Women of Steel monument in Barker’s Pool and I have stood on Pond Street and looked across Midland Station to the spire of the Cholera Monument on the hill opposite.

Endcliffe Park entrance at Hunters Bar boasts a discreet Queen Victoria in stone, enthroned, that I often note in passing.

Hello mam! Oh but ‘unchain my heart’ please, I want to ‘get high with a little help from my friends’ and loiter near a statue of our man Joe Cocker.

Yes, a singing Joe Cocker statue is in order for Sheffield and the enhancement here of flanery! Is it not?