Lost in Words

  Every writer is told, sooner or later, to find their authentic voice . That we should try to write true to the person that we are. For me,...

I was reading an article recently about the average life span. It informed me that, on average, we have about 4000 weeks of life . From birt...

  It was New Year’s Day, sometime back in the late 1960s, and my school football shirt was dirty and needed cleaning. I had a big game comin...

  “See-through clothes!” promised the ads in Whizzer and Chips , The Beano , and just about every comic a kid could get their hands on. Enti...

    So yes, did you know that until 1987 , you needed a licence to own a dog  — and it cost 7 shillings ? Another small detail from a time...

  So yes, did you know that flared trousers were once so wide they regularly got caught in people’s bike chains? It’s one of those silly ...

  So yes, did you know that for most UK households , central heating didn’t become the norm until the late 1970s? Many of us grew up in c...

Just one of the dumb things that I did at school, when I was a lad. From Son of My Father. I remember the headmaster because of the one tim...

In 2022, I wrote a book called Son of My Father. I remember the moment the title came to me. I was pacing around my home, thinking — search...

When I began writing Son of My Father , I realised how much of my dad’s story I never really knew. So much of who he was existed quietly in ...

An extract from my memoir, Son of My Father.       A very different time. My Brother wrote the service for mam's funeral. He wrote the...

  1)  A cost of living crisis would happen every few years.  Money was tight, inflation was often high, and austerity was the norm for man...

  1) We would often have sugar sandwiches for tea, usually because we had run out of jam — or money to buy jam. White bread, margarine, an...

The big box in the corner. That’s what our first television was called. It's the early 1960s , and I have a memory of a rather big box t...

        Money was different when I was a boy. It really was different.  It actually changed when decimalisation was introduced in the UK on ...

When I was a young boy, my mother set me a challenge. It was during the long school holiday one year, and she was hoping to keep me busy and...

When I was a young lad, if ever I got a little too ambitious, my mother would say to me. “You need to come back down to earth.” Sometimes, w...

As I have been thinking about changing the cover of my book, I asked ChatGPT to come up with something that was more upbeat and colourful th...

The memories of a sixties’ child. Everyone has a story to tell. Here’s mine in twenty chapter headings. Chapter One — Just a Small Funeral. ...

When I was at school, there were two sporting events each year that I dreaded. The first was the annual school swimming festival. We were ex...