This is from a series of essays if you are to give it a posh description, about people who no longer exist, or are endangered in some way. I contributed to a book some years ago with my late good friend Gordon, who wrote most of the words. I republished the book on Amazon about a year ago and renamed it “Spotted!”, which I thought was a good idea. I’d like to say I’ve been overwhelmed with Amazon sales since, but that’s not the case, more like underwhelmed. This is one of about four additional people that I was going to add to the hardback version, and wrote myself, with the ghost of Gordon on my shoulder, but the round of celebrity book signings and TV appearances just got the better of me.

I came across this today as the series has featured in that worthy publication: Cotswold Life. How posh can you get? So my work now rubs shoulders with people sharing a joke at a cocktail party in Stow on the Wold. I doubt that any of them read it.

If you want to buy the paperback it’s here

Must rush, I think Front Row from Radio 4 are about to call me for an interview about my secret working methods. I best get myself ready for Desert Island Discs too.

The Coalman

From an age when one heated one’s home from a fire, and the words ‘nutty slack’ was in common parlance and understood.

There was a time when houses were heated by fires. These generally were sited in the room where the TV resided. To fuel the fire it required a constant supply of coal and this was brought each week by the Coalman. Generally short in stature and wearing what appeared to be a rubberised carpet mat around his shoulders he would bring the coal to the coal ‘place’.Some older houses had holes in the pavement where in even earlier days the coal could be dropped into the basement for future use. Bags of the black stuff in sacks was transported on his back from his flat bed truck. Soot and coal dust generally covered him and one could quite easily detect the number of remaining teeth, if any, a Coalman had when he smiled, which he did rarely as he tried to keep his cigarette gripped firmly in his mouth.

The Coal Merchants offered a range of types of coal to choose from, some which would burn hotter than others and some cheaper cuts would leave small rocks in the fireplace. Anyone with a well banked coal fire had no use for an electric toaster as a simple toasting fork in front of the glowing furnace would suffice taking a nano second to turn the bread brown.

There may be some surviving species in Northumberland but elsewhere they have become extinct with the onset of central heating. The recent resurgence of wood burning stoves for the middle classes have given the populace a feeling of what it may have been like to heat a  house, which, unless one keeps the central heating on, is an ‘oven-like’ temperatures in one room and tundra temperatures elsewhere. It gives real meaning to the phrase, a cold front, a bit of a misnomer in this instance as it was one’s back that got cold.