Amongst a sea of dross, synthesised crap and the introduction of the ethos that it doesn’t matter what they sound like as long as they look pretty, the 1980s occasionally coughed up the odd hairball of quality. Joe Eposito by the way, no I’ve never heard of him before or since either.

Tufty’s Farm, acrylic on canvas, 30cm x 30cm Its a farm just down the road from our house, the very last building in this suburb and then you’re in the countryside, these days they seem to keep cows and horses but back in the day it was a pig farm and the farmer and his [...]

So we got a plasterer around to give us a quote for boarding and plastering the 2 x three foot strips of brick wall that were once in the outside porch but now were in the inside porch and he said something like “You buy all the materials and give me £150 and I’ll do [...]

So it was down to B&Q and a hefty bill for some of their pine and stainless steel staircase balustrade construction-things, the fitting of which was a bit of a ball-ache because our staircase was not like the ones in their “Instructions on how to fit one of our nice pine and stainless steel balustrades [...]

“We should knock down the staircase wall” she said. She definitely said “We”, as in “More than one of us”, if she had meant “You should knock down the staircase wall on your own” then she would not have said “We”, she definitely said “We”. Let me explain… Our house was built in 1955, its [...]

Just as an afterthought to the story of the 1973 Ber-nards Bar, twenty years later Ned and I went on a cycling/camping holiday, this bit just here, in which we roamed the coastline of Northern Brittany in an aimless fashion with no plans to go anywhere in particular and nothing pre-booked, we simple packed up [...]

One week into our three week summer camping holiday to France circa 1973 and all was well in the world, hot summer day followed hot summer day, the scousers had built an impressive golf course which wound its way in, around and through the tents on the site and walking to the toilet block in [...]

The 1973 three week holiday spent camping in Brittany in a hired tent with a borrowed rooftop wardrobe was one long August sojourn of hot days spent burning in the sun and long nights spent in Bern-ards Bar singing French sing-along songs and talking about the war. Ber-nard (pronounced as two distinct syllables) was the [...]