The "I LOVE YOU" Bridge

I am just about to leave the house to help take my brother to the hospice for a week of respite care. It's 8.40 am and I need more coffee as I have just got off from another night shift. My work days are just like the old crosville buses from the 1970's...they all seem to some at once!
Yesterday I caught a fascinating documentary on Radio 4 where filmmaker and Opera director Penny Woolcock discussed a piece of graffitti on a Sheffield tower block walkway which seems to have taken on a rather magical and indeed mystical life of its own, since it was written a few years back.

High up on the grade II listed Hyde Park Flats, sprayed in an unsteady childish scrawl is the message
"Will you marry me Claire Middleton?"


Was it Destructive? (yeap just a little) 
Is it Romantic? (well... we all love a love story)
But it is the myth around the whole message that has caught the imagination of the bog standard Sheffielders as well as  the "artists" of the city........photographs of the graffiti circulated in the press; the developers of the flats comissioned a neon lighting up of the "Will you marry me?" part of the message saying rather whimsically that it was ;
""an iconic symbol of hope and romance central to the heritage of the flats"
Humm....even romantic old me can feel the bile rising somewhat, at this rather cloying statement......

so I was intrigued when Penny Woolcock started to delve into the real history of Claire and her "beau" Jason who as it turned out "penned" the proposal! 
The reality of the message is a sad one. 
Apparently Claire died in 2007.....there was talk that drugs and a chaotic lifestyle took their toll.....the proposal, it was said, distanced Claire from Jason....and today Claire's family seem to hate the perceived fairy tale reminder of a painful reality even though her name is now allowed ( as Woolcock sadly concluded in her moving programme) "To fade into the concrete"


The whole thing is a example of imagination clouding reality