Holding the Fort...

THE BANANA FACTORY

We seem to go everywhere, all the time. Our latest escapade took us to Norfolk. I drove Nic down there on Monday so she could stay at some crazy place and visit her friend. The bottom line is, she’s still down there and I’m back in Manchester looking after the fort. Then Jack and Nic’s mum went down to Norfolk yesterday as well. Jack is on holiday from school, so I guess it’s like a big adventure to him. Anyway, the other day when I drove down, we made a small diversion off the route to the Lincolnshire town of Spalding, where we stopped for a late lunch and what some Americans call a comfort break. On leaving the town we first passed a café called Joe’s, soon followed by a warehouse building that advertised the name of a banana importer. It reminded me of The Banana Factory near St Helens, that my mate pointed out to me many years ago when we were on the road. We were driving down some street and my mate said “Do you want to see the Banana Factory?” I thought he was joking of course, but to prove the point he stopped some local kids and asked them where the Banana Factory was. One of the kids replied “Go to the top of the road and turn left, you can’t miss it.”

EVERYBODY’S ACCENT!
With Nic and Jack being away for a few days, I actually managed to watch some television. I usually only ever manage to see Coronation Street and East Enders and sometimes Match of The Day and more often than not I miss at least some if not all of most of them. So it was nice to sit down in front of the box with a cup of coffee and to watch the Evening News programme all the way through followed by the local news bulletin after that. And then, some! Later, I even managed to watch a comedy show. Then a stupid thing I can’t remember the name of but there was a really annoying bloke with a bald head hosting the programme and two teams of two people. On one of the teams was Pam Ayres, which is the only reason I didn’t change channels, she had some younger bloke as her team mate. The other team had Nicholas Parsons on it with some young woman who looked and sounded like a Literary Agent. It was one of those really low budget BBC shows that should have been on the radio. But I watched it ‘cos I like Pam Ayres. On one part of the show they had a couple of film clips where the contestants had to guess the home town of a speaker by his accent. Great! I loved it, what a fantastic idea! Did I say boring show? Not now, this was cutting edge stuff! The only trouble is, when I suggested the idea to the BBC fifteen years ago, they returned my script entitled Everybody’s Accent. And I’ve still got the rejection slip to prove it. Funnily enough, it was only the other day when one of Nic’s helpers asked me why I bothered to keep rejection slips. Now, we all know why! Don’t we?