When people come together to drink there is a change in them, a loss of inhibition, some call it ‘Dutch courage’. Conversation thrives, offering sympathy, empathy, and a good deal of humour. Ideas abound - art is conceived, businesses spawned, romance blossoms. But sadly, only misfortunes are considered newsworthy. The Warrington Hotel (1857) , an opulently decorated Victorian palace in Maida Vale, often used as a location for television and films, has endured many such misfo

Things that helped me remember. A Mass of Contradictions As a child, I adored motor cars and everything associated with them - garages, road signs, tax disks. I had quite an impressive selection of Dinky and Corgi diecast toy cars. I may have had James Bond’s golden Aston Martin, complete with bullet-proof shield and ejector seat, but most of the models were replicas of the saloons, estates and convertibles one saw on the roads at the time. If anyone in our family bought a ne

Old snaps in a St Bruno tin. Apart from the the odd school shots of their children, my parents did not have photographs of relatives dotted all over the place. My mother would doubtless have considered them clutter that she'd have had to dust around. Throughout my childhood, there was a large, framed, baby photograph of my naked father hanging on the kitchen wall, but with hindsight it was very out of character. I’ve come to assume that it must have amused my mother to have i

1965 - Magic on a Shoestring Whenever I’d done something naughty, my mother would tell me ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ and I knew I was in trouble. If she were to say instead that she wanted ‘a word’ with me, then I knew it would be bad news, but that whatever it was, it was unlikely to have been my fault. She took me aside a few weeks before Christmas in 1965 and gently explained that our decorations had become far too shabby and tattered to hang, but we couldn’t affo

‘I’m sorry about it Christopher - but there we are,’ was my mother’s unconvincing explanation as to why I had to survive on ready meals. She often told me tales of the wonderful things she used to cook and bake when my older brothers were children - crusty bread, sumptuous cakes and delicious savouries - but after my father died I had Heinz, Findus and Bird’s Eye to thank for most of my meals. Findus French Bread Pizza (Evening Standard 1979 courtesy of the British Newspape

In 1961/62, when I was a few years old, my father was always busy and my mother was often rather poorly. I couldn't be left unsupervised, so I would be sent ‘on my holidays’ to the Parkers, the older couple across the street. Uncle Charles and Auntie Tootie I called them, even though we were in no way related. Lleyn Street was full of unofficial uncles and aunties. Uncle Charles was a rather taciturn Mancunian with a pencil moustache that made him look a bit like Clark Gable.

On Monday October 15 1984, I realised one of my ambitions by leaving Pwllheli, the town I grew up in, for London and a career in the Civil Service. I worked in Wood Green, King’s Cross, Hornsey, Holloway, at Southwark Bridge and finally Westminster, for three government departments. I consider London a friend. It celebrates with me when I'm happy and comforts me when I'm sad, and it would take something extraordinary for me to ever leave. But, even though I no longer have fa

My father was a teacher, a headmaster and a Sunday school teacher, so I assumed he knew pretty much everything. His answers to my...

The booklet welcoming new staff. As a porter/linesman for Butlin's Staff Accommodation I'd had to clear up pigswill and donkey debris, but worse was to come. Phantoms and Flatulence   The bathroom block cleaners and I were terrorised by a villain who became known to all as ‘The Phantom Crapper’. At first the culprit would poo into a polystyrene chip carton, stick a wooden fork into it at a jaunty angle and leave it on the chalet line like a piece of art - which he may well ha

A collection of Butlin's Pwllheli badges, all from before my time. Butlinland One gloomy November day in 1982, I found myself in a most unusual situation. In the East Annex of the Pwllheli Butlin's camp, I was balancing precariously on the roof of a trailer normally hauled around the site by a tractor. A manager in a suit was laboriously pulling it along the deserted chalet lines with me on top of it, clutching an eighteen-foot pole and looking for all the world like the Grea

In the summer of 1968, drawn by stickers exchanged in the school playground, I suddenly became interested in football. My father was...

When I moved to London in the mid 1980’s I was introduced by housemates and colleagues to many pubs in North London. The Island Queen was...

When a house becomes a home, it becomes something greater than bricks and mortar. Estate agents often use the word 'space' - and that is all a house is, a space that needs filling with love and anger, laughter and drama, comfort and mistakes, the smell of cooking and the sound of music. 2 Llyn Crescent Ferndale c.1912 Despite my suffering badly from car sickness, I loved visiting my Auntie Eva’s home in the Rhondda Valleys. From 1957 she lived there alone, but it always fel

[I posted a series of childhood and youth reminiscences on Facebook a while back, and although they mostly relate to the 1960's-1980's, I thought I'd re-visit some of them here. This one covers a rather sinister episode.] In Wales the sheep are always there, always munching, and always watching. You could be forgiven for believing that they are all the same - but they are not. There are different breeds of course, but it’s more than that. In North Wales they are timid and wil

'Nothing of the Sort' On Wednesday, October 24th 1934 at the Old Bailey, Carmen Fernandez stood in front of the dock, where she was to...

In November 1984, within a month of moving to London, I attended a music and film show at the Barbican Hall, marking seventy years of the...

Thinking of one of the other officers in the Italian camp in which they were prisoners of war, novelist Dan Billany wrote:  "He is...

1930's issues of Health and Strength magazine. Physical Culture In Until the Real Thing Comes Along , Malcolm Trevelyan, a young man...

Cigarette Cards In the 1930's they had their ‘celebrities’ just as we have today, but to a modern eye, most of their household names seem...

Between the wars, aviation became a national obsession. Besides the thrill of it, its potential for drawing the rest of the empire closer was increasingly appreciated - and unfortunately the Great War had also proven how effective it could be in attacking an enemy. Not that aviators were much safer in peacetime, in rickety wooden planes and gas filled dirigibles. R101 at its Cardington mooring tower (British Newspaper Archive) In November 2024, I caught a train to Bedford to