OneGuyFromBarlick

Your Dad was in good company, he shared his medication with Winston Churchill who was saved from pneumonia in 1942 by M&B 693, which is the drug sulphapyridine, one of the sulphonamide class of antibacterial drugs. And both men owe their thanks to Mr May and Mr Baker who set up May & Baker in London in 1851. Sulphonamides often caused allergic reactions which might account for your Dad thinking it worse than flu alone. But they saved millions of people from an early death due to bacterial infection.
May & Baker
Sulphapyridine

If I remember rightly, dusting open wounds with sulphonamide powder was the standard first aid treatment before antibiotics. We've come a long way in the last 75 years and I saw it all happen. I remember when I was first treated with antibiotics. I had a wound on my shin around 1958 that wasn't healing as it should and Arthur Morrison dressed it with a gauze pad filled with antibiotic gel, I think it was penicillin. It was a miracle! It healed within a week....

Modern packaging and take away food have a lot to answer for. I surveyed the amount of rubbish laid round in the streets this morning and reflected that 99% of it was from these sources. When I was a lad there was comparatively little to litter with.... (And if you took your pop bottles back you could claim the deposit....)

While we've got the main road diversion going down our lane it's littered with fag packets, drinks cans etc...even more than usual. You wouldn't believe how much people throw out of the windows of their cars and vans. I'll bet the same people would create a big fuss if someone threw waste into their garden or drive! I think it's time we put more responsibility for dealing with waste packaging onto the retailers and manufacturers. I know the cost would eventually come back to us, the customers, but at least it would make them try harder Somehow we have to pay for the waste that's generated by our excessive consumption.

Didn't someone propose a sales tax on chewing gum to be ring fenced to finance removing it from pavements? That went down like a lead balloon...

I've mentioned this before but at one time the police were very hot on anyone who parked on a pavement. This seems to be the norm now, people trying to protect their vehicles from passing traffic I suppose. Surprising how annoying I find this. There has been a van parked on Wellhouse Street recently that was so close to the wall that anyone with a pram or wheelchair would have to leave the pavement and go on the road. Am I just an Old Fart or is this gross bad manners and lack of thought?

Have you ever wondered how blind people get on with the increasing amount of street furniture these days?

I'm following the long overdue clean out of the stables at FIFA.... (Sep Blatter issues one of his famous 'we will clean football up' statements but the FBI spikes his guns by saying that his elections are under investigation as well....) and I'm reflecting on how this all came about. I have come to the conclusion that it is in a way, just like the Credit Crunch of 2008. Shed loads of money swilling round the system and greedy and corrupt men (they are all men as far as I can see) skimming as much off as they can.
I know that greed and corruption was around when I was a lad but the difference today is the scale of it. The perpetrators have taken their lesson from the banks and financial system and realised that you can't be too greedy because the sums involved are common place. This permeates the whole of the game from players up to the highest levels. The fans eventually pay for it all one way or the other. So, to 'succeed' today the easiest route is to get your nose into a big enough trough. Meanwhile, common honest folks are left floundering in the wake......
I must be a masochist because I'd rather be floundering in the water than joining them..... I sleep well at night.

My mind is still running in the same track as yesterday. I think back to the days when we were living hand to mouth, 'cutting our coat to suit the cloth' and rearing three kids as well as paying off the loan on the farm. This during periods when the interest rate rose as high as 20%. The funny thing is that these were hard but very happy days, totally stable because we were doing all the right things. What strikes me is that we were totally secure, something that is notably absent these days. Young families in the same position today have a much rougher ride and I feel sorry for them. How did we get to this after all those years of 'progress'? My conclusion is that we live in a much more unfair society today. A pendulum has swung and the system today is devoted to protecting and nurturing the rich. The poor are regarded as feckless and victims of their own character flaws. Is it any wonder that I get more 'left wing' the older I get?

Does the weather in our youth get better as we grow older? Or is it simply that we erase the bad weather and only remember the good. I say this because it seems to me we are having an unreasonably cold wet Spring.... Or is it because my memory is bad and I get softer as I get older... A bit of a puzzle.

"having an unreasonably cold wet Spring"

We were told in the press recently that April was the sunniest on record. No - I didn't believe it either. Now I read yesterday, that a heat wave is on the way, and it will soon be 28 degrees C. Does that mean I can safely put the electric blanket away, and not have the central heating on the occasional evening? I do hope so.

PS - Good to see someone 'cutting their coat according to their cloth'. It has become almost standard to do it the other way round, and sometimes even abbreviated to 'cut your cloth'

I put it in the same category as 'tarnished with the same brush' which is quite common.

Or even 'tarred' David..... Cutting your coat.... is still in full operation in this house. I can manage OK on my pension but if I started pubbing or ran a car again I'd soon be in trouble..... As for the obligatory annual holiday, forget it!

Before the days of supermarkets, the better off used to send a shopping list to a large grocer in Skipton and the town carrier delivered on his regular trip. I came across this when I was doing the interviews for the LTP and it was cheaper to get non perishable goods in bulk this way even after the advent of the railway line. I suspect the carrier was cheaper. I suspect this has been replaced today by a weekly trip to one of the big out of town supermarkets by car. When I was open all hours at Sough I still got weekly orders from farmers and delivered to their door and this was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In my hearkening back to days gone by I have often referred to the street traders who used to go round selling their services or goods. One of these was the chimney sweep. They always had a bicycle with their rods and brushes strapped to the crossbar and a saddlebag filled with tools. Always back from soot they were common and did a good trade in the days when everyone had an inefficient open coal fire. Chimney fires were not uncommon and the plume of smoke from the chimney advertised the event to everyone in the area including those who had just hung their washing out! Everyone seemed to do the weekly wash on a Monday in those days and a chimney fire nearby was a disaster if you had just hung the washing out on the line. Their were 'cures' for a chimney fire, one was to put copious amounts of salt on the fire but in truth there wasn't a lot you could do except send for the fire brigade if it was really bad. Usually it didn't get to this, the main damage was often a badly cracked chimney pot.
There are still some older people about who remember chimney fires. I had evidence of this a few weeks ago when a lady knocked on my door to tell me I had definitely got a chimney fire! I thanked her, shot into the front room and immediately realised what was wrong. I'd opened the bottom damper on the stove after firing it up to waken the fire up and forgotten it. The stainless steel liner had got hot enough to burn what little soot off that there was, in fact it had done a good job of cleaning the flue! The cure was simple, shut the bottom damper to cut the air off and let the stove settle down but it just goes to show, some of the old enemies are still with us!

Probably the two things about dress that strike me most forcibly are the changes in footwear and the fact that 'proper' hats have gone out of fashion. When I was a ad blokes wore clogs and flat caps or, if they were a bit more affluent, a bowler and beaver boots. I doubt if anyone could tell the difference today between beavers, kip leather and fell boots.... It's all progress I suppose.....

When a pair of boots started to fail, usually at the joint between the welt and the sole, you took them to a clogger and he 'clogged' them. Cutting the sole off and using the upper on a wooden sole to make what was in effect a new pair of clogs. Proper recycling!

Types of boot.... Fell Boots were a boot with a rigid construction made on a hinged last. Once you got used to rolling your foot as you moved they were very comfortable and long wearing boots. Very popular with shepherd's on the fells. 'Kip' was a type of very strong supple leather which didn't need as much breaking in as a normal boot. 'Beaver boots' were a specific brand renowned for excellent quality. They usually started as Sunday Boots but were later relegated to everyday wear when a new pair was bought.

Talking about boots reminded me of a surprising fact I came across during my research into Barlick. There used to be a clogger called Bob Hartley who had his shop next to what used to be the Ivory Hall Club in Brook Street. He later moved to larger premises on the site in King Street now occupied by the Legion Club. He had a forge and made his own clog irons. He sold clogs by post and exported some. He was noted for making light clogs for athletes. That's the bit that surprised me, I had never thought about what athletes wore! There was a report of his death in the Craven Herald in 1932 and it was there I saw this information.

When my mother and father decided to move in together they bought a new semi detached house and the developer went bankrupt before he had installed the metalled roads to for the first nine years of my life I grew up with an unmade road outside the front door. Funny thing is that this never seemed out of the ordinary even though all the other roads in the district were made up. I think there were more unadopted roads in those days and so it wasn't all that strange.....

Butts before it was adopted.

When I was a lad the main road through Stockport, Wellington Road which was the old A6 was still paved with granite setts and we used to love watching the Corporation workers repairing the road especially when the tram lines were taken up. Not the smoothest surface in the world but definitely durable! There was a piece of road from Didsbury Road towards the shops at Heaton Moor top that was reputed to have been the first concrete paving in the town and was covered with Trinidad Lake Asphalt shortly afterwards.

The setts in Barlick were all from the Tubber Hill quarries and were hard gritstone. The only exception to this was the small granite setts used in the first paving in the town, on Newtown, Rainhall Road and Station Road. That was about 1900 and I have been told that the paviors were French.

Interesting that the remainder of Hill Street is paved with concrete. I can't immediately think of anywhere else in the town where they used this option. A similar thing happened in Stockport at probably about the same time. Moorside Road was paved with concrete but again, I can't think of another. There used to be a stretch of the M6 near Birmingham which was concrete paving but I think it was covered later with tarmac.

The Manxman Road area of Blackburn had a lot of concrete road surface and that was laid by Italian PoWs during WW2. It was OK to drive on except for the unintended `steps' between the big slabs - perhaps they had poor foundations and had sunk.

Lots of concrete slabs used in the US for roads and pavements. In Minnesota where they have frost penetrating the ground over 3ft during winter, frost 'heave' is a problem with paths on light foundations. They have a simple remedy. When they get too bad they come in Spring, drill holes in the slab and pump grout in to level them. Dead simple and very effective.



Original pavement on part of the old Route 66 in Kansas in 1998.

When they built the M6 near Kendal they had problems with an over-bridge to the South of the town, it settled after construction. They did the same thing there, drilled under it and injected grout until it was level.