Do they still sell tripe by the yard?

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It sounds like Kabul out there tonight: bonfire night, a peculiarly English festival, when we celebrate Guy Fawkes almost succeeding in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. If he really had succeeded we would probably celebrate for a whole week.

I have told Gwen to keep Miles indoors. Not that she needs telling – he almost never goes out. And when she takes him for a walk he has to be muzzled: he’ll go for anything that moves. I suggested she donate him to a zoo. But she wouldn’t hear of it.

Talking of fireworks: I think the kids round here must have a supplier in the SAS: what I can hear, as I type this, are not bangs but explosions. Of course they have too much money (the kids, not the SAS). When I was a lad things were different. If our dad was in work – and he mostly wasn’t – our mam would say: you can have a firework this year. And she would take me down to the local grocer and allow me to choose one firework out of a big tub. I usually chose a rocket – because I dreamt of going to the moon one day. The other kids would laugh at me, and say: don’t be daft, the moon is made of green cheese. But how wrong they were. I hated Grammar School.

Our grocer’s was called Nevins, and I used to pass it every day as I walked to school (no school-runs in 4x4s in them days). The door was always open in the summer, and I loved the smell of the sawdust on the wooden floor. And they had a huge ginger cat that was always sitting on the counter, next to the bacon-slicer.

I was thinking – in fact I said to Gwen – that this country, this nation of ours, started going downhill when they began making shirts that buttoned all the way down the front. The shirts that I grew up in, you had to pull them over your head because you only had about four buttons – the rest was all shirt.

Of course we had no central heating. Just a coal fire in one room. And when it was time for bed you had to psyche yourself up and then dash up the stairs and jump straight into bed. The bedroom was an ice-box. In fact, Gwen’s fridge is a few degrees warmer than the room I used to sleep in throughout the winter.

In the summer the bedroom was so stuffy that I couldn’t sleep. I should have said ‘we’ couldn’t sleep, because fifteen people in a ‘two up – two down’ meant some sharing was necessary.

There was another reason I couldn’t sleep – but I don’t want to dwell on my childhood. In any case that is covered in my autobiography. Gwen suggested serialising it, here on this blog, but I don’t think that is a good idea.

Anyway, I have enough going on in the present. My brother, Hector (well, he's not really my brother) has been arrested again.