Quite a long time ago, when we lived in the big old house that has since been on the telly because someone who was on the telly rents it, Pa kept an ornate cabinet against the wall on one side of his office. It was opposite a big metal-enamelled thing that was called 'The Potez' and which emitted warmth and a pong of burning oil ( Read more... )

One one day or another during the week, I returned home to discover that the street smelled faintly of coal fires and rather more strongly of fish and chip shops. Since there was also an overlay of salt air from the Bristol Channel, it all worked rather nicely. It also reminded me of visiting The Aunts. They weren't my aunts, they were mum's, which ( Read more... )

I could probably go and find out, via the magic of looking for the relevant LJ entry, when I first found the Berkeley Arms. However it was probably a disturbingly long time ago and I would be left wondering what the hell I was thinking in the interim years. Whatever it was, it didn't add up to 'We should totally visit that pub on a warm evening and ( Read more... )

I am not a natural camper. I'm probably an unnatural camper because the sight of middle-aged blokes in shorts, long socks and brogues clambering out of a caravan at 8AM leads me to question my life choices, rather than nod in an English way and go polish the Caravan Club badge on the front of the car ( Read more... )

Container drivers! Kraftwerk soundtrack! Pre-Schengen Agreement freight transport!

(part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms6rKgt3seg
(Part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUM93-hChto

An article in ( Read more... )

There's been the remains of a greenhouse piled down one side of the garage at the bottom of the garden since we moved in. Last autumn some time, those remains were joined by bits of a concrete trough, some wall and an amount of broken soil-pipe ( Read more... )

Today's discovery was that through careful idleness I had managed to accrete a complete set of credit-card statements from November 1989 to the present day ( Read more... )

In the seventies, when Upper Hill Farm was still grandfather's (Rented land. From the old days when a labouring type who wanted to make a go of farming could actually do that, rather than having to piss off to the city to earn £neg+bonus as some wideboy spiv forex trader. Well, I say 'earn'. It would now appear that I mean 'steal, with the alleged ( Read more... )

I have an odd memory of what I think was a tabletop semaphore machine that lived in the attic of Holt Farm, which was where we lived until 1976 ( Read more... )

Earlier this arvo I was outside Ma's, pretending to be a bicycle repair-person, when a strange man hove into view in command of a vintage Fordson Major. Strange man turned out to be Uncle Will, showing off his most recently restored tractor ( Read more... )