Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom

the committee that this was going to be the decision, so he wasn’t shocked, and he’d already spoken to his partners, to Bob Savory and to the people who needed to know, and he had instructed his solicitor, Martin Phillips, to begin preparing the appeal, but on Christmas Eve, as Mr Donelly knelt up from his prayers and Mrs Donelly got into her Austin Allegro and looked up into the sky, and thanked her lucky stars, it felt to her, for a moment, like victory, if not a miracle.

      It would have been nice if I could tell you now that there’d been some snow, just to finish things off, but I cannot tell a lie, and God and the weather are not always answerable to our needs and desires, and I’m afraid sometimes sleet is as good as it gets. There was sleet.

* Bobbie Dylan at the People’s Fellowship has been encouraging Francie McGinn to do some discussions with Can Teen, the young people’s group, on the question of whether texting can be Christian – a question that has troubled thinkers, in one way or another, as Barry McClean would be able to tell you, for many years. Plato addresses a similar problem, for example, in his Phaedrus, in the story of wise King Thamus of Egypt and the inventions of the god Theuth. Francie, however, has not read widely outside the Bible and devotional literature, so he is not familiar with what Barry in Philosophy for Beginners (Lecture 6: ‘Epistemology’) calls the ‘obvious connection between Phaedrus, commodity fetishism, and our symbolic lives and psychic habits’. Francie simply calls his discussions ‘FDFX?’ (Fully Devoted Followers of Christ), and is encouraging more prayerful texting.

* See Bob Savory’s Speedy Bap!, chapter 12, ‘Sandwiches à la Turque’.

* Victor Russell, a supercilious man with a Hitler moustache, who was the owner-manager of the Troxy and who wore a white tuxedo every day of his working life, was convicted in 1989 of arson and fraud: he’d torched the Troxy, trying to cash in on a £25,000 insurance policy. He died in disgrace, in prison up in the city, his moustache intact but his tuxedo long since gone. His wife, Doreen, and daughter, Olivia, now live abroad, near Nîmes, in France, where Olivia is a dealer in art deco antiques. Doreen tells her story in a moving interview with Minnie Mitchell in the Impartial Recorder, 22 August 2001.

* She missed musicals, though – musicals seemed to have gone out of fashion. Hello, Dolly! she’d enjoyed, back in the old days, with Barbra Streisand, and Sweet Charity even, with Shirley MacLaine, although that was a bit weird. And Liza Minnelli, Cabaret, of course. They were classics. But you couldn’t get to see a good musical in our town these days for love nor money, unless you counted Colette Bradley’s amateur youth theatre productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Oliver! at the Good Templar Hall, which are OK but which are lacking in a certain something – lavish sets, for example, and costumes, lighting, full orchestras, Topol, Ron Moody; pretty much everything, in fact, that makes a good musical a good musical.

* For a full account of the ongoing dog-fouling controversy, see the Impartial Recorder, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 1982–Present.

* This, of course, seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible: there are happy endings, even for fish and the proverbial tin soldier. On 19 May 1991 the Impartial Recorder ran a story about Monica Hawkins (née Williams), from the Longfields Estate, who went on holiday to the Isle of Man in 1971, aged twenty-one. While swimming in the sea she lost a solid-silver locket which had been a gift to her from her mother, and which contained a small gold tooth, her father’s only mortal remains after he’d been cremated at what was then the town’s newly opened crematorium on Prospect Road. Twenty years later, at a car boot sale in the car park at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, not half a mile from the crematorium on Prospect Road, Mrs Hawkins, by that time twice married and twice widowed, happened to be going through a pile of costume jewellery in an old Quality Street tin when something caught her eye – a locket just like the one she’d lost all those years ago. And on opening the locket she found and yes, the gold tooth. The stallholder could offer no explanation of how she had acquired the locket – she bought bags of stuff from men in pubs – and after Mrs Hawkins’s death her daughter Joanne bequeathed the tooth to P. W. Grieve, the dentist who as a young man had made the gold tooth for Mr Williams in the first place, back in the 1960s, and who now has the tooth proudly on display in his waiting room, along with a bible open at the passage, ‘The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver’ (Psalms 119:72).

* The Woolly Hat for Seamen Scheme has long since been abandoned: the Mission now seeks instead to provide every sailor of every nation with a small, waterproof, shockproof CD player and an evangelistic CD containing hymns, sermons and prayers. The original knitting patterns and accompanying pamphlets can, however, be consulted in the Mission to Seamen Special Collection at the library – contact Divisional Librarian Philomena Rocks for details. A typical 1952 pattern and outline reads thus:

      WOOLLY HAT FOR SEAMEN

      Ladies, keep up the good work! Not only do these colourful hats provide much needed protection from the harsh sea winds, but also a cover for many a bible smuggled on board ship bound for pagan lands. Every one of us can share in God’s ministry to the needy simply by picking up our knitting needles! So don’t hesitate, ladies, get knitting today, to advance the kingdom of God!

      Pattern for Hat:

      3 balls 20g d.k. wool.

      Using No. 10 needles cast on 132 sts.

      1st and every K.2 P.2.

      Continue until work measures 2½ inches.

      Change to size 8 needles and continue to double rib until work measures 9½ inches.

      Shape top:

      1st row *K.3 tog. K.9 repeat from * to end (110 sts).

      2nd and every alt. row Purl.

      3rd row *K.3 tog. K.7 repeat from * to end (88 sts).

      5th row *K.3 tog. K.5 repeat from * to end (66 sts).

      7th row *K.3 tog. K.3 repeat from * to end (44 sts).

      9th row *K.3 tog. K.1 repeat from * to end (22 sts).

      11th row *K.2 tog to end (11 sts).

      Thread wool through sts, draw up and fasten. Sew seam.

* An unorthodox view of the Virgin Birth which Mr Donelly happens to share with Barry McClean, the Gnostics, David Hume, Friedrich Schleiermacher, certain twentieth-century German theologians and the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins.

       4 The Dump

      Describing an auspicious occasion – a party in a pub – which demonstrates the wholesomeness of life amidst the usual waste and humiliation

      You wouldn’t have thought so, but the range of temperatures here in town can be pretty extreme. It can get all the way up to the seventies on occasion in July and even on a winter’s afternoon, when the sun’s out, you sometimes see young men sitting outside pubs in their shirtsleeves. In February, on a good day, on a bright day, outside the Castle Arms it’s like a playground: little groups, little huddles, jackets off, joking and having fun. In our town such an opportunity is not to be missed: the sun here always tends to go to our heads.

      But, alas, the unseasonably warm weather has not been good for my old friend Billy Nibbs: in the heat, the smell