PLAYING THE GENERATION GAME

My mother as a child with my grandmother in Oldham, Lancashire

'Nearly ninety and her first selfie...' said the  caption on my daughter's facebook page last week. The photo showed my mother with three  generations of her family - the youngest just two years old.

A few days after that photo was taken I returned to Leicester to meet writers' group The Belmont Belles, before  sneaking off to look at my old grammar school, Newarke Girls',  now a community college.  From a distance it looked exactly the same - an elegant building, with a central clock tower, surrounded by an acre  of green grass, with a long pathway leading down to the main road.

It was along that path that I walked for the very last time one sunny Friday afternoon in  the  late 1960s. Three days later I was a trainee reporter on the Lytham St Annes Express in Lancashire.   It felt a long way from my Guernsey home.

Meanwhile my two daughters have done their own bit of moving around - one has worked in Australia and the United States, the other travels Europe with her work. She is also a dedicated Derby County Football Club supporter who was born in Lancashire and lives in Yorkshire!

Not to be outdone, my two  granddaughters support  Leeds United most of the time and Derby County when their father's not looking.

Which brings me back to my mother, who was  born in Lancashire in 1926 and went on to marry a Guernseyman when she was just nineteen.  She wants to keep the selfie - well - to herself. But here she is ten years ago on her 80th birthday. Happily she's still got plenty to smile about.

Happy Birthday Mum

The old Newarke Girls' School, Leicester, as it is today

Antique books in old Bridlington - the very best of medicine!

An antique bookshop in an original Victorian Chemist, a 1920s typewriter and a tearoom groaning with antiques. Sounds like the centre of Chester or Bath? No, this is Bridlington! 

Burlington Books in Old Bridlington
situated in an original Victorian chemist shop



In the 1960's an original Georgian street in the old quarter of Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast was earmarked for demolition by the local authority. The new town was at the height of its popularity as a holiday resort whilst the old high street no longer seemed to have a purpose. But the council reckoned without the tenacityof the local businesses who were determined to keep the history of the town alive. Last week I discovered the restored High Street for myself and it is far, far better than any museum,  crammed with antique shops, arts and crafts shops and, most of all, with people who are proud of their heritage. Old photographs from the 1950s show this wonderful street with its Georgian bow windows and adverts for Capstans cigarettes and 'Players Please' with a solitary  Morris  Oxford wending its way past the shops. It could almost be the same place today

The bookshop's owners, Mr and Mrs Stephen Reynolds, gave me a particularly old fashioned  welcome, finding me books from World War Two, an era that has always fascinated me, and even producing a paperback about Guernsey as soon as I mentioned where I was born.

We spent most of  the week in York, taking in many historic sites including the Castle Museum with its 'real life' Victorian Street, and the splendid York Minster, both of which attract visitors from all over the world.  Yet it was old Bridlington, once almost lost forever, that really transported me to the past.

  

A 1920s Underwood typewriter at the
Georgian Rooms, Old Bridlington

 

Say 'No' to white lines

Anyone for an argument?

There's nothing tourists like better than an English seaside town, and Whitby, in North  Yorkshire is quirkier than most. Here you can taste some of the freshest fish in the county, (second only to Guernsey mackerel) and  have an argument while you're at it...

I've always had a fiery temper - it must be the French blood in me - so I couldn't resist taking this photograph whilst doing some research across the border recently.

Could it be that quarelling  was a Yorkshire pastime? The truth, it seems, is a little more mundane. Yard is the ancient word for an alleyway, and this  one was built by a certain Thomas Argument who, naturally, named it after himself. He built five cottages off the yard, most of which still stand today.

Sounds like Mr Argument had a fair bit of wealth - as well as a sense of humour. And who could quarrel with that?