h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here I am at work, on my own, the machine's been running since 10am, and it's loud enough that you can't really listen to speech radio so it's been music until now, but now it's off for a while so I thought I'd listen to some BBC programmes on Radio 4 Extra. One of them was a Ken Dodd Show from 1964, which I believe used to be be broadcast around Sunday dinnertime (nearly said lunchtime there, but it was definitely dinnertime in the middle of the day back then).

Now, Marcel Proust had a rush of childhood memories when he smelled a cake, but it was the other way round for me just now. As I was listening I realised that I could smell roast beef, Yorkshire pud, roast spuds, gravy

It made me full of plumptiousness How tickled I am What a beautiful day missus, what a beautiful day for for filling your tights full of sand, standing on your head, and saying "how's that for an egg timer!". Let's all go down the jam butty mines

Thoughts of very wide brown kipper ties and the smell of beer and fags at the Empire!

sorry to insist: Lunchtime.

but now you've mentioned a sunday roast, I can smell it too. Here in my office on a rainy, grey Monday in the office.

Have another tickling stick

Ooh ta

Sorry Sho, it was definitely dinnertime then. I continued having the main meal of the day in the middle of the day, and tea at teatime, at least until the early 80s, by which time I was living on my own, and in a job with no staff canteen and only a half hour dinner break, so no time to go home and cook or find a nearby caff.

it's still lunch though

It can't be - you don't have pudding after lunch, you have it after dinner

And besides...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqMS9XUyfA#t=2m0s (jump to 2m 0s if the link doesn't take you there).

Nah, I'm with Gosho, its was dinnertime back then in Manc. Heck I was even a Dinner 'lady' for while - although I do call it lunch now.

We still have tea, mind even though it's usually around 8 o'clock

it is a sore trial to me, mixing with the great unwashed.

it's not the meal that counts, but the time of day...

Oooh, 'ark at Lady Muck

I have actually been to Knotty Ash, you know. Or through it, at least. If you're on a certain part of Queens Drive, which is Liverpool's equivalent of the North Circular Road, you'll go through the far west reaches of it. We always used to look out for the sign when I was a kid and we were on the way to visit the folks.

I've been through Knotty Ash. It was a hole (I was staying in Hyton at the time which is more of a hole)

and you already know that I am Posh.

Huyton and Knotty Ash holes? Even a mouse calls hole home! Tsk tsk.

I don't think I'd call Knotty Ash a hole. It's very suburban, with plenty of open spaces and streets lined with the standard semi-detached two-bedrooms-and-a-box-room type house with back and front gardens, although as is so often the case these days, it looks like most of the front gardens have been paved over to make room for car parking There really ought to be a law against that.

If it's the suburban aspect of it that's causing you to dislike it, well there we'll have to agree to differ. I'm very fond of that kind of thing - between-the-wars suburbs with their semis and their gardens and tree-lined avenues and a general feeling of space and openness It would be nice if more of them could have been built with garages though.

Oh, I've just realised what we all did there Knotty Ash, hole, knothole... geddit?

Speaking of Doddy, he turned up on Great Lives last week, a programme that rarely fails to entrance me http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mdf0d2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mdf0d

That will be the right link... probably

the part of Knotty Ash I went through had tatty run-down houses with the odd wreck of a car in the front "garden" some were ok but most were definitely the worst for wear.

Huyton was so much worse though. I remarked that it was a shame that all the shops had gone out of business - every single shop on the high-street was borded up. But they said "oh no, they are open, they just can't have glass windows..." I then went into the newsagents to buy some sweets and a paper, and it was like a post office, the newspapers were on an open shelf as is usual, but all the sweets etc were behind thick glass with the cashier. horrible.

(we had to dismantle my b-i-l's garden fence and put our little Mazda MX-5 in the garden with 2 guard dogs and then build up the fence again. And even then my b-i-l didn't get a wink of sleep worrying about it.

this will have been in 1994 or 1995

How about some perspective. I'll show you a "hole".

Check out some of my neighbors' properties.

http://www.google.com/maps/@29.502236,-94.994595,3a,75y,261.43h,73.7t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sWZvYLw1AylVhy_v4x8ubyg!2e0

http://www.google.com/maps/@29.502164,-94.984839,3a,75y,186.82h,83.1t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sMcajHMgQbK6Jp_bYn6-ppw!2e0

http://www.google.com/maps/@29.509415,-94.981485,3a,75y,329.14h,85.26t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sWSVYVL3YKdTBMhoxBNjI7Q!2e0


I was thinking about going around town with my camera and documenting some of the "decay" in my town, but the Google Maps car did it for me and this way I don't risk getting shot by meth-heads.