UKC

I've just read this while I was on holiday in (ironically?) Oxford. It was a cracking read, and full of stuff I instantly recognised from my own childhood, in the same sort of school on the other side of Manchester, seven years after Paul Morley, of whom I used to read quite a lot when he was writing for the NME in the early eighties, alongside other hip young gunslingers (as they were then) like Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe (who was at the same school as me; his brother's married to one of my childhood crushes).

Here's a review of it (a rather po-faced and patronising one) by Terry Eagleton.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/13/north-almost-everything-morley...

In reply to Tim Chappell:

Our local Spar has pot noodles down at 50p each...

In reply to Clauso:
Is your local Spar in The North, though? Cheshire doesn't count, remember.

In reply to Tim Chappell:

I, like Morley, grew up in Reddish. We used to have a Mace, instead of a Spar. They didn't sell pot noodles back then.

In reply to Tim Chappell:

"Pies and Prejudice," by Stuart Maconie is a good read.

In reply to Tim Chappell:

Wheres about in Bolton are you from Tim? Both my cousins went to Bolton School, I got bounced about all over the country so went to a half decent comp (twice).

D

In reply to Dauphin:
I am--of course!--a member of the Lostockracy. 499 Chorley New Rd mean anything to you? Hurst Bank West? Big ugly white house on the left just before Beaumont Rd?

Mind you, I resist 'from'. I lived in Bolton from 7 to 19 because I had to, and I never really stopped hating it. Bolton is not, God forbid, where I'm *from*. I'm from Hawkshaw, half way between Bolton and Haslingden, where I lived from 0 to 7, and where my aunt still lives. Cracking place. Failing that, I'm from Grange over Sands, where my family had a house long before they had anything in Bolton, and still do. But NOT from Bolton. Even though I'd now admit that Bolton has some brilliant cycling and climbing right next to it (but then, so do Hawkshaw and Grange).

When my father said we had to move to Bolton when I was six and a half--for reasons I didn't understand at all at the time but have more sympathy with now--I threatened to run away from home. My father laughed at me but I was completely serious. And he should have known that, because he was a runner-away too; three weeks after my grandpa sent him to some horrible boarding prep school in Barbon or somewhere, the Carnforth police discovered my dad and Chris Bonington up an apple tree, on the run. (No, really, they did.) I would have run away too, if I could just have worked out how to get hold of food once I'd gone.

In reply to Tim Chappell:

Down by the Ambulance training centre? I'm from the other end, Bromley Cross. The Jumbles, Wayoh & Entwistle & Turton heights were my playgrounds.

D

In reply to Dauphin:


Mine too. Love those places. Bloody love 'em. And would have done if I'd stayed in Hawkshaw, too.

The childhood crush in question lived in Turton Heights...

In a later phase of my life (1996-8) I lived in Rammy and worked at the U in Manchester. My regular road-bike route, when I had time for nothing bigger, was Rammy to Hawkshaw to Edgworth to Haslingden Grane to Helmshore to Holcombe to Rammy. WHAT a fabulous little round that is. Western Pennines at their very finest.