Well, it’s howling a gale out there so it’s an indoor day. We haven’t lost anything or had anything damaged, however the storm called Dudley rearranged our garden furniture for us, which was nice. From what we hear and read, Storm Eunice is going to be a whole lot worse and that is due later today and tomorrow. What fun, not!
Max Hastings said that to make a book readable, every page has to have a name, a place or a date on it. I agree fully.
I have had a few interesting recollections recently, kind of reflections that I remember vividly that are mainly consigned into the history bucket. The past was in Sheffield but the future is in Heino.
The Welsh woman lorry driver who used to ask if she could use the “toelet” was and nobody understood her. Nobody else told her so I told her to go to the offices and not to ask, just to go. It’s a basic human right.
The day out to Wembley to see Wednesday beat United with the ex boxer called Brian Wildgoose with the crooked and badly repaired nose. We won 2-1 but it could have been a whole lot more.
The French lad Lionel who we accepted happily into our circle of friends in the pub, who spoke with a wonderful and sometimes bizarre Yorkshire accent.
The guy called Rupert Castledine with the two shelties I met whilst walking. I used to work with him when I was a trainee so he didn’t remember me, whom I later found out lived in our house before we did. His daughter’s date of birth and initials were etched into a small piece of cement in the front garden.
The man called Pat Strafford who we took to Ireland, who lost his thumb in the Normandy landings, the bullet went in through his thumb and came out of his elbow. He struck up a conversation with an Irish gardener at Killykeen Forest Park who introduced him to his mate as a ‘very brave man’.
There was the Ulster pentecostal minister from Belfast’s Shankhill Road called Dave McKeown with his Finnish wife Outi whom we could understand way better than her husband.
There was the best guitarist in the world in my opinion, Jan Akkerman whom we always had a beer and a roll up with after concerts. I swapped a cigarette light with Deventer on it, for the plectrum he’d just used to play Sylvia right under my nose an hour or so before.
I met 1950s comedian Johnny Hackett sharing a dressing room with Jimmy Edmondson, father of Ade Edmondson at The Pavilion at Bridlington because my Mum knew them.
Now I’m in another world, meeting other people some I know, others I didn’t until I did.
From Yorkshire to Overijssel 