Category: That Reminds Me . . .

IF the names Les Kellett, Jackie Pallo, Mick McManus and Kendo Nagasaki mean anything to you, it’s a fair bet that you used to spend your late Saturday afternoons plonked … Continue readingGreetings, grapple fans

LIKE most of us born in the mid-20th century, I was weaned largely on cigarette smoke. My parents and grandparents were partial to a regular gasper and it seemed that everywhere … Continue readingConfessions of a smoker

ONE of the Monty Python sketches that I used to find terribly amusing involves Terry Jones’s character Mr Chigger turning up for a flying lesson and finding the instructor Mr … Continue readingMy wife the pilot

MY lifelong fondness for licensed premises possibly derives from the fact that my home town was named after a pub. Nelson, Lancashire, did not exist until the mid-19th century. The area … Continue readingDown at the club

MEMOIRS of a grim childhood in working-class Dundee are hardly my normal reading matter. However a raft of enthusiastic reviews led me to invest in Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson. … Continue readingThere was a young man from Dundee . . .

IN my early years on the Daily Mail in Manchester I sometimes had to do the late shift, from 7.45pm to 3.45am. Everyone else went home by 2am leaving me and a … Continue readingThe Bolton Slumberer

DOMINIC Sandbrook in the Mail on Sunday draws attention to BBC Radio 4 Extra and its latest repeat of an adaptation of P G Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City. It is preceded by an … Continue readingPsmith and the BBC psilly asses

EVERY time I spend 90p or so on a fresh pineapple from Lidl, I ask myself: ‘How the hell do they do it for the price?’ On a trip to … Continue readingThe pineapple puzzle

WHEN Liz Truss was Foreign Secretary before her calamitous spell as Prime Minister, the Whitehall gossip was that senior civil servants compared their problems in briefing her on overseas policy … Continue readingIn Ted we trust

IN THE mid-1980s, when I did Saturday shifts for the News of the World in Manchester, production was disrupted as a result of the Wapping dispute. With the offices in Withy Grove, near Victoria … Continue readingHammer blow