Flight relief on the tram

It’s pick’n’mix time at The Lizard Lounge. Pick’n’mix with a difference. Tim Cavanagh, in his baseball cap, opens the fridge under the counter and pulls out half a dozen plastic bags. “I’ll have a couple of chicks,” says a track-suited customer. Tim eases two frozen chicks out of one of the bags. They look shrunken, tight, but still reassuringly yellow.

“And five small mice,” adds Mr Tracksuit. Tim empties them out and they clatter hard on the counter. “Any jumbo mice?” he asks. The man takes five. Tim parcels them all up and off the man goes to prepare dinner for his pet snake.

I’ve discovered The Lizard Lounge – a “reptile store” – early on my tram tour of Sheffield, in response to the now-notorious comments allegedly made by Oliver Letwin, the millionaire Cabinet Office minister.

“We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays,” he’s reported to have told London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was pushing the Government to build new airports. Letwin neither admitted nor denied saying it, but Boris, never lost for a fine turn of phrase, described the comment as “a bourgeois repression of people’s ability to take a holiday”.

So what are “people from Sheffield” – perhaps a coded way of saying “Northern working class” – to do for their holidays?

Shortly after reading the story, I picked up a leaflet from Stagecoach Supertram, the Sheffield tram company. “Enjoy Super Days Out,” it urged. “Let Stagecoach take you to all the best places!”

Well, why not? Even if they can’t afford budget holiday flights to the Costa del Boy, Sheffielders can surely afford a Dayrider ticket: £3.70 for a day’s unlimited travel around the city on Supertram and Stagecoach buses. That’s less than the £4 fare for one stop on the London tube between King’s Cross and Euston, and less than the equivalent day ticket (£6) on Sheffield, where I live. It’s a tramorak’s day out, criss-crossing the city, exploring areas I rarely visit, most of them way off regular tourist routes. I go all the way to Halfway, revisit a Full Monty location and help a woman from Barnsley find a nano geocache. All may be explained.

But first, feeling like a foreign tourist in my own city, I take the Blue Route to Malin Bridge, in the Hillsborough area, gliding past Victorian cutlery works reborn as apartments. Near the terminus we pass a sign in a shop window: “Tortoise Full Kit: £195. Includes tortoise.”

It’s The Lizard Lounge, which also offers a Crested Gecko Kit for £135 and a Bearded Dragon Kit for £200. The geckos and dragons, and the odd Albino Horned Frog, are kept in tanks around the walls. Some paw the sides of the tanks, others eye customers with beady inscrutability. They don’t look guys to mess with.

Co-owner Tim opened the shop four years ago, “turning a hobby into work, rather than working in a supermarket and doing this as a hobby”. Bearded dragons, he says, are the bestsellers: “one of the most docile”. Bearded dragons: the cuddly pussy cats of the lizard world.

Back to Supertram, whose three legs cover all but the Peak District side of the city. I join the Yellow Route to Meadowhall shopping centre.

The tram is full of young people absorbed by their phones and iPods, texting, tweeting, Facebooking. I’m travelling through the city’s old industrial heartland; they’re travelling through that distracting suburb of Cyberspace called Elsewhere.

The tram weaves through a strange post-industrial landscape of retail warehouses, industrial estates, arenas, stadia, offices, car parks and unexpected woodland. Crowds surge across the bridge from the terminus into Meadowhall, like they surged into the steelworks that used to be here. Inside, people sit on benches silently eating plastic-packed sandwiches. I realise I’m practically the only person wearing a coat; this is a place for leisure-wear consumerism.

Back to the tram. I get off before the city centre to wander around Attercliffe, once densely packed with terraces. They, and most of the buildings I used to know, have long gone (including the cafe that proclaimed “Last Fish and Chips Before M1”). But the 17th century Attercliffe Chapel is still here, looking more Skipton than Sheffield.

Just along is a cemetery, many of its gravestones tilting back as though trying to catch the sun. It’s one access to the Five Weirs Walk, a five-mile trail along the banks of the River Don.

A great deal more appealing than it sounds, the Walk is a celebration of urban nature, complete with kingfishers and cormorants.

There’s a remarkable, rather wistful, stillness and, dotted around surviving factories and scrap yards, some curious signs. “This Yard is Mandatory,” says one. “Cylinders in Scrap Kill,” says another.

I wander up a quiet street to a memorial to the 29 victims of a First World War German air-raid and discover Susan Harrison from Worsbrough, near Barnsley, searching the walls and pavement. “There’s a magnetic nano geocache here somewhere,” she says. A what?

She explains geocaching, a hobby whose enthusiasts go on treasure hunts, looking for hidden containers purely for the joy of finding them. “It takes you places you wouldn’t normally go,” she says. “And here it is...” On the pavement is a capsule little bigger than an electric fuse. Susan unscrews it. Inside is a strip of paper half-an-inch wide that has been signed by two-dozen previous geocachers to prove they’ve found it. She too signs it, rolls it up and replaces the capsule.

“Whenever we go on holiday we do this,” she says.

“We found a couple of geocaches in the Valley of the Kings and we went skiing a month ago and found one on top of a mountain. And I’ve found 11 today.”

Up the road is the canal bridge where the car in The Full Monty was filmed sinking. A young fisherlad has caught four roach and perch. I walk along the canal and eventually join Supertram’s Blue Route to the suburb of Halfway.

The tram is packed. Two women sitting five rows apart are shouting their conversation over the heads of fellow passengers: “He said, you can keep your microwave...” Sweeping hilly views of Sheffield, green fields, new estates, and a shopping centre called Crystal Peaks (surely a minor character in Dallas?).

I have a cup of tea next to a butcher’s stall advertising “Cow Heal, just in, nice’n’fresh. Fresh Pig Bag. Good old-fashioned food.”

Oliver Letwin, you would love it.