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Small town, big lives
Snow has etched white lines into the wet, dark furrows in the fields. Spring is shivering underground, hiding under bark, cowering inside buds, slowed almost to a halt by the bitter winds from the east...
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HP Sauce, pipe tobacco, betting slips – and standing room only at ‘our local’
A bank holiday. A beautiful sunny day, the spring-blue sky marked only by a very few fragile clouds. A relief after all that glowering gloom and incessant snow. Sparse incessant snow. Enough to remind...
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Travelling through time and space – with a crache
I watched Doctor Who last night. ‘I don’t know where I am!’ Such a familiar feeling. So now it’s Sunday morning and the wretched clocks have gone forward – depriving me of yet another hour’s sleep....
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The Grand Local
Girls coiffed in big rollers read magazines. Sitting in hairdressers’ all around town. Waiting for lash extensions, manicures, make-up. Outside, bitter gusts blow rubbish down the street. Men wearing...
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Two dog night, no dog morning
Saturday. Under clear blue skies we set sail for Manchester. (I lie. We drive.) The hotel’s grand. Victoriana at its best. Come six o-clock we head out, past the old town hall, accessorised for fun...
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Slacks, golf – and George
When, in 2004, we moved up north to Liverpool, we bought a house in complete ignorance of the district’s main attraction: ten minutes’ walk from our front door was a long, sandy beach. I knew the land...
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The Ides of March
Beware, cried the soothsayer. Or was it the East wind? As I sit down to write this post – amid boxes of tiles, plaster dust and paint – I calculate that it’s XIII days before the Kalends of April. I...
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