BLUEMOMENT

It occurred to me, after noticing Lady Stormrider's profile, how pleasant pre-1974 Lancashire can be. We have an affinity with it, what with "Shard" having been fitted out, pre-1974 in a muddy tributary of the Wyre, near Shard Bridge. I believe a certain forumite of this parish may not be totally unacquainted with the adjacent Shard Hotel, but that's another matter.

Pre-1974 Lancashire has its own unique feel to it. We recently drove up the M6 in sub zero conditions, to have the cockles of our hearts fairly warmed by the sight of the motorway bridges lined with rosy cheeked children, the tears frozen to their little faces, stamping in their clogs to stay warm and waving their bonnets to the traffic below.

Such simple innocent pleasures for very friendly people; a wonderful place.

I feel myself lucky that my wench raid over the border was so sucessful, she didn't kick and scream half as much as I expected as I dragged her back to civilisation.

Happen it's only Yorkshire lasses that play hard to get!!

The next time you drive through Westmorland or Cumbria as they now call it - and you get to the Tebay gorge, understand that you are viewing the efforts of my own fair handiwork when you get onto the bit of carriageway with the big bank separating North from South.

John Laing - September 1967 to June 1968


Looking at the previous post I must advise that there are now several camels at Blackpool Airport. I'm not sure they are all the product of Sopwith but it is an entirely disprespectful way to be referencing the check in staff and I think we should stop.

claymore wrote:The next time you drive through Westmorland or Cumbria as they now call it - and you get to the Tebay gorge, understand that you are viewing the efforts of my own fair handiwork when you get onto the bit of carriageway with the big bank separating North from South.

John Laing - September 1967 to June 1968
(snip)

I'm impressed, I didn't think he had ever lifted a shovel for himself. That's a lot of dirt he's moved personnally. But I wouldn't call that wide open glacial valley a "Gorge" tho'. Gorge is a word used for collapsed caves & cataclysmically split rock faces.

Cumberland Gap ain't nowhere, sixteen miles from Middlesburg.

It was built in Westmorland not Cumberland

1974 changed all that to Cumbria.

Cumberland Gap is somewhere Lonnie Donegan used to hang out.

I hadn't realised that Lancashire had reached 1974 yet

Pre-1974 on a "Motorway"? Wow. I was thousands of miles away, in Yorkshire, and motorways didn't feature much if at all. It was always dodgy going on a motorway since it would start and finish in the middle of nowhere, and would take longer to get there overall than just using the ordinary roads. My mum did once drive on the M62 but only at 35mph and never again. She also drove without headlights in the blackouts, to save electricity.

The main aspects of pre-1974 northern recreational life were potted meat sandwiches in Tupperware boxes, hardboiled eggs, and Thermos flasks, usually smashed ones, and erm er .... nope, I think that about covers it. I can't really see how they made a luxury pleasure boat before 1974 (*all* pleasure boats at the time were "luxury", same as having actual posh tartan rugs in a car instead of burning/freezing on the vinyl seats), because few if any northerners would have seen one, so they must have just made it all up. I mean oop. Around this time there was the Austin Maxi, with a key feature being its fold-flat seating so you could sleep in it, and even that was pretty posh becos of course, it was New. Yes, New as in "not used by anyone else", not new as in just arrived here in the house.

It is gratifying to note that your piratical activities on the high seas have not blunted your keen observational skills and that the passage of time has done little to dim your memory.
I notice that in referencing tupperware and potted meat as cornerstones of Bratfud life, there are no mentions of sexual activity. Is this because it was not done in Yorkshire, or merely that you had not made a start by 1974?

I must have been about 9 or 10 when one day I remarked that my very pretty elder sister "looked like a tampon advert". Well, tampon adverts were (and still are, usually) fairly abstract - just a nice picture of a pretty girl. I was immediately hauled off by Mum to a separate room and "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU"VE JUST SAID!!!? DO YOU??" and very red-faced I said erm yes, sorry, sorry sorry. And thus started (and terminated) pre-1974 sex education.

Philip Larkin claims sex as being invented sometime in the sixties, but that was in Hull.

Hull is where the M62 stops and you fall off the edge of the world.

Anyway I think he was just 'Larkin' about!