Social History

History is my subject, I love it. I particularly love modern history and reading or listening to peoples' accounts of their lives, be it friends and aquaintances, who are much older I must add, or wonderful oral history projects such as that at the Manchester Jewish Museum, where hundreds of Jewish migrants were interviewed about their lives in Manchester and Salford in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A friend in my writing group has recently published her mother-in-law's memoirs about life for a working classe family in 1920s agricultural Britain. I have read excerpts and am looking forward to reading the whole, it is such a change from the usual work about poor people in the industrial heartlands.

The book is entitled My Life in Cottage Homes in the 1920s. Click on the link to find out more and to buy on Amazon Kindle..

Christmas Books

Two friends in my writing group in North Lancashire have books out on Amazon Kindle. They are both debut books and well worth a read.

Lynne Freeman's book is Out In The Sticks.

Sara is a young girl straight from High School with a passion for animals. She goes to work at a boarding kennels in Cumbria with a menagerie of creatures in her care.

This funny, sometimes moving book is full of lively anecdotes about country life among the animals, some sad, some surprising and some just plain silly. All of them are true.

Buy It Here

Lynne Whelon's book is The Chicken Run.

Kate Potter has kept her secrets from the past but they keep coming back to haunt her. She is now living on an estate in East London with her husband Alfie and son Jimmy.

The kids and the adults on the estate lead almost separate lives. But then the colourful imagination of the kids clashes with the monotonous reality of adulthood in post-war London and events begin to take a sinister turn.


Buy It Here

Times are hard and both of these books would make ideal, affordable and highly entertaining stocking fillers for friends, family and colleagues. As well you will be supporting new writers who are driven by their love of writing.

Shortworks at the Contact Theatre, Manchester

Contact's partner writing group Scriptworks will host a mix of performance and script in hand readings by four inspiring new playwrights. Shortworks is a showcase of 10 minute extracts of new pieces created by Matthew Duffy, Lee Thompson, Lily Dong and Sarah Speak.

Each performance will be followed by Q&A sessions with the writers, directors and cast

Suitable for 18+.

Full details about this event and other events visit the Contact Theatre website.

For The Fallen-Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Twitter Poem

Gordon Brown is finished
That does sound good
Might have to try that for breakfast this week
Back from the launderette, still raining
Read about the demise of the UK
Political tribes
Set your goals high, and don't stop till you get there
Good morning world
Still raining in Lancashire
Why does it always rain on bank holidays?
Is the UK dying?
Eric Cantona-Genius!
History never looks like history when you are living through it
London is great but good to be back in Carnforth
Back from London
Sister married, great time
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation
It's raining again!
Sister's wedding tomorrow
They've only been together 30 years. A bit rash!
Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure

A Book To Plug-The Man Who Turned Down The Beatles!

Yesterday I was working with a fella who had me in stitches. Hilarious jokes and we spent lots of time reminiscing about old clubs and curry houses in Manchester. I'm well into my music but Pete is a mine of information about music from the 1960s onwards and was the founder member of The Dakotas. So, unlike me, he was actually in the music scene and was in the first Manchester band to play the Cavern Club in Liverpool.

Pete's now written a book with some fantastic photos of bands, albums and memorabilia. It's a fascinating trip down memory lane from somebody who was part of the music scene of the '60s not just a bystander. What I particularly like about the book is that it is written in verse, highly entertaining as well as beautifully written.

The book is a must for anybody interested in the 1960s and can be purchased by clicking on this link. Or you can buy it if you go to see Pete's band Pete Maclaine and The Clan at the Nursey Inn, Heaton Norris, Stockport on the first Sunday night of each month.

Jeffrey Bernard-Low Life

Last night I finished the excellent Inspector van Veeteren novel The Return by Hakan Nesser, reviewed here. An excellent book so I went on the hunt downstairs, looking for something other than a detective book. I'm a recent convert to this genre, tempted into it by Henning Mankell's Wallander books about five or six years ago, and now have to pull myself away sometimes and read other things.

So while searching through our shelves of books I was absolutely overjoyed to find Jeffrey Bernard's Low Life. It is the collected Low Life columns that Bernard wrote for The Spectatator magazine. For years Bernard was the overwehelming reason I subscribed to The Spectator. His style and humour, not to mention his acceptance of his addictions and resultant disabilities made his columns hilarious without ever being mawkish or self-pitying, and his put downs of helpers and lefties alike were legend.

I thought I'd either lost or loaned this book out years ago, and was never to see it again. I was overjoyed to find it again and it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up this morning.

A quote on the back of the book from a Times review sums him up:

'Bernard's unswerving dedication to booze, fags, the horses, unsuitable women, overspending and the law courts, have made him the archetypal Terrible Object Lesson, a Knight in Shining Black Armour who spends his life tilting at Windmill Girls on soft going, missing and landing up in bed with the Inland Revenue and a shoe full of Chinese takeaway.'

Treat yourself, it's the perfect book to dip into and, unless political correctness has deprived you of every last drop of your sense of humour, you will love Bernard and his Low Life as much as I and millions of others have over the years.