I remember, from about the age of 9, setting out from our tall Georgian
terraced house with the green door and the brass lion knocker to walk
the mile or so to choir practice. Through the park in the middle of the
square, past the Gaumont Cinema (the last of its chain to bear the name
– it became the Odeon only when the headed paper ran out) and on down
Hall Gate past Barker & Wigfall with its bewildering window display of
bicycles, televisions and furniture. Past the godawful concrete arcade
that still contained the Pilgrim Bookshop, Doncaster’s only specialist
bookshop. Past the Odeon arcade and right into Silver Street passing the
High Class Butchers and Dad’s tailor, then through Bowers Fold, the
little pedestrianized snicket that leads through to the market place
with a little toy shop in the middle.
According to a quick search of groups.google.com, I’ve been using the
same email address for almost exactly 9 years now and in that time I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to monkey with my mail headers and start hiding my obscured email address down in my sigfile beneath a sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’.
You probably don’t know this yet, but I’m in the process of preparing a
course on Test Driven Development & Refactoring with Perl which I hope
will find me some favour and income.
One of my earliest memories is of standing on a low stool, stirring a
teaspoonful of sugar into fresh yeast to wake it up while mum heated a
pan of milk to blood heat before everything all got mixed together to
make a lovely, enriched bread dough that, now I think about it, I could
probably make tomorrow without recourse to a recipe book.
Once upon a time, when the world was still enormously old but I was a
good deal younger, a friend with whom I played D&D
pressed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic on me, telling me it was the best thing ever. So off I went and read it and it was indeed the best thing ever.
