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

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

'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...

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

Some of the many books I bought from Gay's The Word over the years. Growing up in a Saucy Postcard World The occasional sex scenes in my...

My second novel When Summer is Gone is published tomorrow, being the second part of The Likes of Us series covering the experiences of...