A wet walk through the city centre

I drove over to Josh and Ruth's after breakfast, to drop off my car: theirs is being repaired, and so they're borrowing mine for a trip to Norfolk for these final few days of the holiday.  Richard and I still run a car each at the moment, partly to allow for times like these.
Then I caught the bus into the city centre, and walked from the lower end - by the indoor market - to the pedestrian area near the cathedral.
It was very quiet. And very wet.
Workers were taking down bits of Christmas kit: a big wheel, the incongruous 'alpine' refreshments cabin in the Peace Gardens and a dripping Santa figure here and there.
I went into the one remaining department store - Atkinsons, a surviving family-run firm.  We need a couple of small kitchen things, which I hoped to find there (no luck though, the kitchen section wasn't well-stocked). There are a lot of unoccupied shops, big and small.  Sheffield city centre's going through one of its periodic upheavals: there are half-finished redevelopment projects all over the place, adding to the rather forlorn effect created by the empty shops.
It may all look better in a few months' time, when more of these projects may be finished. We'll see.
Meanwhile the fast food delivery bikers swoop and skim around the place, finding shelter and brief break times where they can.