Martin ThomassonI don’t mean to say I’ve lost count, or that I was found, as a babe, at Victoria Station. What I mean to say is that I have not yet found how to be the age I am. I often don’t feel right, ‘in myself,’ as the saying goes. There are, of course...
An older friend regularly liked to recite the following: “Never assume. To assume is to make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” She did this for two reasons. Firstly, she was aware that I find such modern homilies twee and irri-tating. Secondly, she...
Sometime in the mid-1970s I, and about 90% of a fair-sized crowd, got to our feet to applaud and then cheer, not a football match or a ‘live’ show, but a film. What’s more, this wasn’t Hollywood or a West End premiere. This was a matinee at the...
For every small child, the world is like a pile of jigsaw pieces without a picture showing you how the finished job is meant to look. Worse, than that, whenever you think you’re starting to fit a bit of it together, make sense of it, some adult...
A friend of mine once ruined his parents’ Christmas morning by throwing a blue strop because the tricycle they’d saved for months to buy him didn’t have the boot that he’d so clearly explained to them was essential. The boot was the bit where he was...
The second time I was stopped in the street for questioning by the police, was not an ordeal. It was a bright spring morning. I was walking away from Bolton town centre, on my way to teach a class at the Chadwick campus of Bolton Institute of Higher...
“Hi-yo, Silver, away!” the Lone Ranger used to cry at the end of each episode. Silver, as the name suggests was a magnificent grey horse, the trusty steed of one of the most popular heroes of children’s TV in the 1950s and early 60s. I imagine this...
My mum’s Auntie Nora and her husband, Uncle Ben, really, really loved each other. However, their deep and enduring mutual affection might not have been immediately obvious to anyone just listening in. I called round once, unexpectedly, just after...
The first place we lived in after I was born was an ancient stone cottage, with walls four feet thick, property of the printing and dyeing factory in Bradshaw, where my dad worked at the time. I was not quite three-years-old when the factory closed...
There was a time when every bus ride was a job for two people. The driver had his own separate cabin and his own personal door to climb in through, with a single inset step (almost like a stirrup) to help him mount his steed. The other member of the...