Lost in Words

  Ashtrays, blue haze, and the smell of cigarette smoke were woven into everyday life. In the 1960s and 70s, smoking was a common activity i...

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...

  Caravans, B&Bs, and seaside towns — before travel overseas became routine. In the sixties and seventies, for the majority of ‘Brits’, ...

  A writer rarely enters a room without quietly taking notes. Not with pen and paper; that would be too obvious, but with something far more...

  I recently caught a winter cold , which turned into an infection ,  or it came with it, just before Christmas. It was just a cold, or so I...

No repeats, no recording — and the pain of missing an episode. In 1960s and 70s Britain , television was often an event, but it was also unf...

Pop bottle returns and the excitement of reclaiming a few pennies. Long before plastic bottles, ring-pull cans and multipack deals, fizzy ...

  For many, Christmas ends on 25 December, or the day after Boxing Day . The decorations come down, television schedules return to normal, a...

  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...

  The Marx Brothers used to be on television over Christmas all the time when I was growing up. Their films, A Night at the Opera, A Day at ...