StephenFord

A friend went to college in Huddersfield. He took a while to learn the language - whenever he ordered fish and chips they always said (and the tone of the voice suggested it was a question) - "Wibbits?"

So I guess all savvy Leicester dwellers who live on the wrong side are going to insist on renumbering their houses 2A, 4A, 6A etc?

It might be better appreciated by the public if the police gave the same "prioritising" explanation to all of those trendies who want them to spend their time on so-called hate crimes - which usually means intimidating folk who have expressed politically incorrect but perfectly lawful opinions with a visit from the constabulary.

57 Kinglake Street is an address that appear in one of my mum's sister's old school books. I guess she would have been about 5 at the time, so late 1920s. The family seemed to move frequently - about every 6 months. My maternal granddad (who I never knew - he died in 1942) drove a lorry for Buxton & Attewell, and he would mention rented houses about to come vacant. He and grandma would go and have a look, and if they liked the look of the place, they would be all signed up before it was advertised "to let". Granddad would then borrow the firm's lorry to do the flit.

...and who wanted curly hair anyway?!

Apologies folks - you know what sort of sound mine will be. Here you go - an AEC Regent with sliding mesh gearbox (the later pre-selector, and synchromesh gearboxes gave a completely different sound). Sorry, I can't seem to paste at the moment, but look up "York Pullman AEC Regent III - JDN668" on youtube and watch/listen.

Had our Skoda Fabia for just 6 months and very pleased with it. It replaced a Citroen Xsara that we had for 13 years from new - 142,000 on the clock when we got rid of it. The old received wisdom was to replace after 3 years, but even "cheap" cars (well, comparatively!) are sufficiently reliable to last a lot longer than that these days. I took the line that if I got 3 of those 3-year lives out of a car, it would have virtually depreciated to zero value - and then I wasn't losing anything by keeping it for as long as it would go on passing the MOT.

Yes, in those days I was commuting by train from Sleaford to Derby. Posers thought it was such a novelty to be telephoning from the train that they would always begin their conversation by saying "I'm on a train" - at which point we would all cheer loudly. An occasional travelling companion told us about a trip he had made down to London a couple of days earlier. He was in the first class, and a bloke was sat just across the aisle from him, holding forth in a loud stentorian voice, one call after another. After 20 minutes or so of this piercing racket, an elderly and respectable looking chap

Yes, I remember the concentrated orange juice - little medicine bottle with a bright blue cap. The cod liver oil came in the same shaped bottle but with a navy blue cap. With regard to Kia Ora orange drink, in the early to mid 50s it came in a waxed cardboard carton with a perforated hole in the top that you pushed out with your thumb (huge scope to splash the stuff all over the place, and mainly down your clothes!) It was not only sold in cinemas, but also at railway stations - often from barrows perambulating along the platform. I remember coming home from holiday in Weymouth about 1955 - sc

Sorry - I'm not a curmudgeon on this one! It should have happened 20 years ago, and since it didn't it should happen now. What is more, the money that was wasted trying to prop up the West Coast Main Line should have been spent on this. The French have high speed railways. The Italians, the Germans, the Spanish, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Turks for goodness sake, the Koreans, and soon the Moroccans.

Re #35 : Ah - the days when people were taught to write properly !

Pole Street was between Lily Street and Bloomfield Street. Like them it ran from south west to north east between Dame Agnes Street and Sycamore Road. There is a 1950 photo on Picture the Past.

In the first years of the 20th century my grandmother lived successively at a number of different houses on Lily Street off Dame Agnes Street. In the same complex of terraced houses there were also other flower or tree-related names : Rose Street, Lupin Street, Lavender Street, Lilac Street, Laburnum Street, Linden Street, Dahlia Street and Laurel Street, also Sycamore Road, and arguably Broad Oak Terrace and Bloomfield Street too. Strangely there was one "odd man out" - Pole Street.

When my grandparents lived on Pilkington Road in the 1950s there was one woman who owned a pressure cooker. It was widely lent and borrowed up and down the road. By all accounts it was a rather intimidating device, known by everyone as "the bomb". One day it did ! The safety valve got bunged up, and pressure continued to build up until eventually the whole thing exploded driving shards of metal into the walls and ceiling of the kitchen. Fortunately no-one was in there with it at the time - but it did serious and costly damage to the room and most of its contents.

A lady I knew was suffering from tennis elbow. Her GP said he would give her a cortisone injection. She said to him, "We were planning to be at a party tonight. Any problem with drinking alcohol?" "My dear," he replied, "With the pain the injection will bring on, I would advise you to be totally legless by nine o' clock tonight!"

I only laugh because I know you're the best part of 400 miles away ! But look on the bright side - it could have been carrots.

And...ummm...a town of that name around 15 miles south west ? !

I used to like the cry of the seagulls - until we lived at the seaside, and watched them nicking folks' cakes, sandwiches, ice cream cornets, fish and chips, Cornish pasties etc. when we concluded that they are really flying rats !

In our village we have a reasonable bus service - 17 a day to and from Shrewsbury. BUT - five of those are "Twerly" (!) - before the half past nine deadline. It certainly isn't a regular interval service - one or two long gaps, two or three occasions when two buses run within half an hour or so of each other, and in the afternoon two buses coming back are scheduled at the same time (leaving Shrewsbury by different routes, and going to different final destinations). But the last bus home is at five past six, and there are no buses at all on Sundays. Some are operated "commercially" but others a

Going back to the previous comments (2 years ago!) Why the name "Paddy" - I haven't a clue. But what was it? Not just the last bus on the route, but the staff bus, that took the other bus crews (those who had no personal transport) to somewhere not too far from their home. It (or they) didn't necessarily follow the normal routes. Typically they started about midnight after all the rest of the buses had been safely tucked up in Parliament Street (or the other) depots.

Love it ! Yes, there were plenty of superannuated wrecks running round as contractors' transport. When I worked in Derby in the early 1970s, General Industrial Cleaners (GIC) of Borrowash had an ex-Crosville lowbridge Bristol KSW. It passed along London Road about the time I was heading for the train home, and I used to loiter near Midland Road traffic lights, hoping it would be stopped there so that I could listen to it pulling away in second gear.

Good grief - you were all being robbed - unless we got meals on the cheap in Derbyshire! I can remember the teacher in what would now be called Year 3 telling us that the price (for a week) was going up from 3/9d to 4/2d. That would be about 1956 - and I think it was 1959 or 60 before it reached 5 bob.

Don't want to split hairs, but "known as" is slightly different! Officially the Tillings Group ceased to exist when it was nationalised. From that time it became correctly the BTC Group, although it is certainly true that many people continued to use the old name as a handy title - and indeed still do. Basically at the time of nationalisation it made no sense to include a bus company in the electricity industry - not its core business and all that - so it was put into the newly nationalised transport organisation instead, where it was probably regarded as a bit of an ugly duckling - its fleet

#2847 - I can confirm that the chocolate was OK. I used those machines many times - until one occasion when I put sixpence in and got only half a bar of chocolate.

Somebody doesn't know the difference between a trolleybus and a tram !