In my Facebook outline it asks where you are from. I put Wigan, but I could have put in three places in Wigan : Lower Ince, Ashton in Makerfield and Standish. My father was a policeman and on each promotion, of which he had a lot, he was moved to a different location. My parents did not own a house until after his retirement, all of our houses were police properties. They got progressively smarter as he rose up the greasy pole.

Ashton in Makerfield was in the middle, a detached house on a relatively new estate, so he’d been promoted from a semi detached! My mother could make the houses into homes within just a few days.

The Ashton years were not particularly long and were WAY BACK when I was leaving school and first going to art school in Manchester. I recall buying a Honda 50 in my final years at college and riding it all the way home along the East LancS Road for Christmas at home. I nearly froze to death. Only did it once.

My brother and I were of an age when one could get a job with the post office for the Christmas period, delivering all the mail. I was given a particular route and a bike. The bag of mail so full that to ride the bike I needed to be at a 45-degree angle. One of the addresses I delivered to was pleasantly named Sewage Farm. I was warned by the regular postie to be careful of the dogs there, which ‘are ‘’are usually chained up”. The place had a long driveway and a cluster of dark buildings. The barking started as soon as I got on the driveway. On my first visit, I manoeuvred between the dogs’ bared teeth and slaver and the brick wall of the barn, successfully delivering what seemed to be a pile of final demands through the letterbox.

You could pick up a decent haircut in Ashton. The young bloke who ran it was personable and chatty with fine ambitions. He told me he was planning to open a club in Skemersdale ( a bit of a rough place on the edge of Liverpool and known locally as Skem ). He knew I was doing a graphic design course and asked me to design some stuff for his club, which he called ‘Clappers’ , possibly not a great name, especially if shortened to Clap in Skem. It was to have a film studio theme, lots of lights and light shows. He already drove an E-Type Jag, so hair cutting had been good to him. I did some bits and pieces for him, but lost touch in the miasma of leaving to go south for work and my parents moving yet again. I wonder what happened to him. Bill Kenyon became instrumental in the rebuilding of Wigan Athletic FC and is a big name in the area. My memory of him is telling a young lad who came to him one Friday in his barber shop near Ashton Marketplace, saying in a stage whisper, ‘ …sorry son , we only sell them in packets of three’. Depart, stage left, one embarrassed young man.

England won the World Cup when we lived in Ashon; we never called it Makerfield, which seems to be the new constituency name for it. The place is also very close to Haydock Park Racecourse, where John and I got summer jobs as part of the groundstaff. That too was an education. Many of our days were spent cleaning up the stables, ready for the next racing day. Wire brushing the pedigree horse muck off the walls before repainting them with another lime wash. By the time we’d finished, you could eat your dinner off one of those walls. If not doing that, we were busy rebuilding fences for the jumps. The whole bunch of ground staff, generally we thought of them as old blokes, but in reality, they were probably all in their forties. Between them, they had a fine collection of gabardine macs. We would be taken down the East Lancs Road to Lord Derby’s estate to cut young birch woods in swampy, mosquito-infested, damp ground. Those mozzies had a field day, except with George Willy, who used to spray himself every morning with ‘Flit’, a powerful insecticide. ( banned even for proper use these days ) This made an exclusion zone around him so powerful that it doomed any mozzie that came within a yard of his head.

On race days, the Racecourse was invaded by many more gabardine older blokes who were employed around the course to ‘tread in’ the divots of the horses that had just thundered past. 5 or 6 ‘gabbers’ for each fence. I recall being stationed with one group when a huge bunch of jumbling horses and tiny riders bumped past us, and one jockey went into the air and landed just a few yards from us. He was groaning with pain as he’d just been ridden over by at least ten horses. I wanted to go and help but was held back by a gabardine hand, ‘leave im lad, they’ll sort him out’ as the ambulance made its way to the scene, one of the other gabbers trod in right around him.

Meanwhile back at Sewage Farm. On my next visit as I turned my wobbly bike into the driveway, the barking was coming towards me, with the dogs loose. I turned that regulation Post Office bike like a Ferrari and peddled as fast as my legs could go.

When I got back to the sorting office, I told the regular postie that I would not be revisiting Sewage Farm. ‘Don’t worry lad’, he said, ‘ we’ll send them a letter telling them to come and collect their post’.

I breathed a sigh of relief but asked ‘Who’s going to deliver that?’