YOU might not think that Altrincham on the southern outskirts of Manchester would have much to teach York, but you’d be wrong.

To be fair, until yesterday I would have been wrong about that, too. But a visit to Altrincham’s now acclaimed food market put me right. It also made my mind up in favour of the Spark:York plan for Piccadilly in York, where the aim is to use old shipping containers to house a collection of shops and food outlets on the old Reynolds Garage site.

We drove to Salford to visit our middle boy and his girlfriend, then hopped on Manchester’s top tram system for the trip to Altrincham, where nearly four year ago the old covered market was turned into a foodie hub.

You enter the market to see different franchises arranged around the four sides – a pizza parlour, a burger stall, cakes and coffee and so on, with a pub in one stall and a wine-bar in the next – and tightly packed tables lined up in the middle.

I first heard about this place in October 2015 when it cleaned up in the Observer Monthly Food Awards. Our boy thought we would like it, and boy was he right. This is a fantastic place, with the only downside being its heaving popularity.

All the franchises are one-off and local, so there are no chains, and next to the main food area there is a larger covered market, filled with stalls offering everything from crafty things to antiques to tea and coffee and bread, with more food franchises around the far edge.

Further stalls and more permanent shops, bars and cafes are arranged around the market, including an area where a row of basic wooden cabins house more food outlets. All the stalls are run by enterprising young people and the place was buzzing.

We had a coffee there first, then later ate there, too. The coffee was truly good, as was the food. You choose a table and then buy from different stalls: something veggie for the non-meat eater among us, and two big sandwiches from a meat stall for me and the boy, plus a dish of roast potatoes for his girlfriend.

The sandwiches were greater than that word sometimes suggests, about half a locally made baguette – beautifully charred and crusty on the outside, and properly tangy and bready in the middle – filled with pulled chicken, pickled red onion and tarragon mayo. Just about the perfect meal for me, although low on the veg count (that’s for the veg counting one in my life).

Anyway, we left with a positive impression of Altrincham and its market, which is well worth a visit, and has turned the town into an unlikely foodie destination. Yes, it’s trendy – but so what? Trendies usually help revive places. And this was place rammed with mostly young people working hard and producing street food worthy of more established restaurants; and it’s fun and vibrant.

Not everyone likes trendies, but we should embrace them. Yes, areas can change but they are going to do that anyway, and not always in a good way. Altrincham wasn’t much of a destination until the trendies took over the old market, and now it’s a place well worth travelling to.

As we ate outside those wooden cabins, I thought of what Spark:York wish to do. At first I wasn’t sure about this idea, perhaps put off – as others have been – by the thought of shipping containers. But no more. If they can pull off something like we saw in Altrincham, then it would be a boost for York, as our middle boy, who lives in York, has been saying on Facebook for a while now.

So, let’s not grumble. I may be too old to be a trendy but don’t count me yet with the grumblies.

York has tried to do something similar with the makeover of what is now called Shambles Market. A few foot outlets are huddled together at the cold end of the market. A lot of money was spent on smartening up the market, sadly to mostly underwhelming effect.

I know that York doesn’t need to attract visitors, while Altrincham did. But if they’ve not been already, I suggest that whoever looks after such things on City of York Council should have a day out to south Manchester. They certainly won’t go hungry.

THERE’S a man asleep some feet above where I am sitting at my laptop. I’ve not met him yet as I was working when he arrived in the afternoon.

Another man left in the morning, but I did meet him. He was a Canadian musician who was playing in a show at York Theatre Royal. He kept mysterious hours and looked the part of the touring musician, artistic and rumpled, but he was pleasant and chatty, and he stayed four nights without ever wanting breakfast.

From what I could see, he lived off frothy instant coffee and cigarettes (although not smoked in the house).

As for the unmet guest, I just heard him go into the shower, and now I can hear the purr of the boiler and the plashing of water. One guest cancelled after I told him about the old boiler, which clanked rather than purred. It went on the blink and I thought I should warn him.

We keep having to shed old possessions: estate car, boiler, fridge-freezer. That car was made to last until it didn’t; same with the boiler, too, although the fridge-freezer was only a few years old, a stripling by comparison.

The man in the shower doesn’t know it but he is helping to pay for the boiler, as that’s how we are using our Airbnb money until the credit card cools down.

This house has been full of strangers for nearly two years now. The Airbnb thing fitted the jarring moment when I lost my job, and although the moment has moved on, we are not yet bedding down on used £20 notes or anything. Besides, we still enjoy the passing company.

Most guests are pleasant and interesting, and any who aren’t are gone soon enough – not that we’re had many horrid guests. One or two eccentrics or weirdos you feel relieved to see out of the door, but hardly anything for two years.

This month we have 79% five-star reviews from guests, and although I have no idea whether that is good, it seems okay.

This modern habit of having to rate everything you buy, use or consume is odd. I have reviewed plays, CDs, books and concerts in my time, but the other day a strange request arrived from John Lewis. An email asked me to review a lampshade; yes, a lampshade. Well, it’s a very nice thing, so nice we have two, but it was chosen by my wife, who takes all those decisions with an all-important nod from me. Where we would be without that nod just doesn’t bear thinking about.

Anyway, the man I haven’t met yet will be down soon for his breakfast. Unlike the bass player, he wants something to eat.

IF this is a snap election, where is the crackle and pop?

The best reaction to the news that Theresa May had called a surprise election came from Brenda from Bristol when she was interviewed by the BBC’s Jon Kay. The clip of her saying: “You’re joking? Not another one. Oh, for God’s sake” has gone viral, partly because of the Bristol twang to her incredulity, and partly because her exasperation speaks for many people.

Brenda, who is 75, is said to be enjoying her accidental moment in the spotlight, even though she doesn’t understand social media or the ways in which her words have bounced around the internet.

Elections, even unnecessary ones, have their slogans and memes, so perhaps this election should belong to Brenda. Maybe we could even vote for Brenda instead, as the alternatives are not that enticing.

It is even possible that Brenda could turn people against Mrs May. We had an election in 2015, the referendum vote last year and another election this year: we are in danger of being all politicked out by a prime minister who pretends she doesn’t play political games.

But this is an election, even if we didn’t need one, so I suppose we should look at the politics. Jeremy from Islington was also in the news the other day after he gave his first speech of the election. To be fair, the Labour leader gave a good account of himself and looked less  of an electoral liability than usual.

The trouble is, his attacks on the establishment and the ‘cosy cartel of politics’ still seem aimed more at his supporters than a wider audience. He certainly spoke well and some of his beliefs are ones that anyone who leans to the left ought to embrace. But if he doesn’t convince all lefties, how in a short election campaign will he attract floating voters?

To those of us who have been around a while, Jeremy Corbyn has similarities to Michael Foot, whose manifesto for the 1983 election was described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history” – a view which turned out to be spot on.

From the same era, the Labour MP John Golding – the sort of centrist who would be booed by the disciples of Jeremy – despaired of Foot’s chances as Labour were doing so badly in the polls. He told his leader this and Foot is said to have countered: “You’re wrong. There were a thousand people at my meeting last night and they all cheered.” To which Golding said: “There were 122,00 outside who think you’re crackers.”

The danger is that Corbyn is replicating that pattern, and that like Foot – a good and decent man, but a man who had no hope of winning – he will continue to woo his fans and followers, while others are turned off by him.

One problem with Corbyn’s attacks on the establishment and the media is that this can sound like getting in his excuses first; it’s almost as if he is laying the ground for his defeat by saying that the system is stacked against him.

And, yes, there is the Citizen Smith difficulty, too. Even if some of what Corbyn says is true, and even if he hits the mark occasionally, he can sound like a caricature leftie. And that observation comes from someone who has been a bit of a caricature leftie down the years too, although without joining any party

As a leftie who has always worked in the media, Corbyn’s constant moaning about the media grates, too. He has a point but it’s always been that way. Instead of regarding the newspapers and the BBC as his enemy, he should learn to play the game a little better, shouldn’t he?

Anyway, that’s enough politics for now. I’m off to run that clip of Brenda from Bristol again. I like her style.

“YOU should write a blog about this,” says my cycling companion. And since Nick is kind enough to read these jottings most days, I will and here it is.

Two men in their sixties are heading for a ride, but we get off to a shaky start as I misunderstand the pick-up arrangements. I wait in the wrong place and amuse myself by watching my legs shiver. What’s April doing being this cold?

Eventually a spot of emailing, Nick in his car, me just around the wrong corner, sorts everything out and we put the bikes on the back for the boring miles out of York. It’s still cold when we unload the bikes and those shivers start chasing each other around my body. It takes a while for the chattering to stop as we start to cycle, chatting side-by-side where we can, and sometimes earning a disgruntled toot from a passing car.

The first hill of the day is the one out of Crayke. Nick is a keen cyclist who’d done 25 miles the day before. I only occasionally venture out of the city for a longer ride, so that hill makes me nervous. I give it a go anyway and pedal away.

Somehow, I stay ahead as we mount that hill. “God, you’ve got an ordinary bike, you don’t go out cycling much and I go out all the time – and look at you,” grumbles Nick from behind.

His bike is built for distance; it’s also new and shiny. Mine is built for this-and-that forays into York and was, until an hour or so earlier, shamefully dirty. I did a quick clean before leaving home and now you can see the scratches and rusty bits even more clearly. But I love that bike, or at least until I can afford another, when money might make an unfaithful man of me.

It is good to be out cycling and chatting and catching up. We usually talk about ordinary life stuff: grown-up children (four between us), wives (the expected number between us), politics, television programmes, books and the ups and downs of life.

As we chat, or sometimes fail to thanks to the wheezing, the hills come and go. Those that go up then go down, and Nick speeds off, more confident on the descents that I am, head down and whizzing, while I follow on the old Marin hybrid, head up and fingers flexing on the brakes. I know it’s best not to bother, best to surrender to gravity and go with it, but that takes the sort of courage I don’t seem to have

At the bottom of the hills, I catch up for a bit of free-wheeling, until someone puts another hill in the way.

We cycle to the café in Kilburn, have coffee and sandwiches, then do the journey in reverse, so the friendly hills turn nasty on us and the unkind ones welcome us with a shrug and point out the view.

It’s good to be out on a bicycle ride, good to be outside doing anything, cycling, walking and even, as I surprised myself to discover twice last weekend, gardening. I like being indoors with music on, a newspaper or book to read, or some cooking or baking to do. But you can see why the outdoors is called great.

Two men in their sixties out for a cycle ride. A ride and a chat, and a grumble about the snap general election, but that talk can wait for another day. Back at the car, we put the bikes on the back and drive home to York.

“How long does it take to write your blog,” Nick asks. This one took an hour and it’s for you, although others are of course welcome to read about two sweaty ageing men if they wish.

Talking of which, one of my squash partners in five years older than me, and he has a squash partner who is five years older than him. I have decided to approach turning 60 the same way I approached all those other anniversaries: just keeping on keeping on.

THERESA MAY has just loomed large on my laptop screen to announce a general election on June 8. That’s the general election she has promised many times she will not hold, but once again her words – as resolute as they sound – are written on the wind blowing out of the puncture in her party’s loony Brexit balloon.

Considering all those now-banished occasions on which she swore blindly that she would not call an election, instead serving a proper full term, this is a brazen bit of politicking – but ruthless too, as with a 20-point lead in the opinion polls, she is likely to win (although polls aren’t dependable, as we now know.

As ever with Mrs May, the phrasing is all. She has, she says with a brisk sigh, been forced into making this decision because the opposition parties in Parliament oppose her. In her version of events, the country is all for a hard Brexit, almost everyone is behind her, but those bothersome types on the opposing benches just won’t accept her sovereign right to do exactly as she wishes.

She even dredges up a complaint about the “unelected House of Lords” threatening to drag down the progress of her chosen form of Brexit. A Conservative prime minister complains about the obstructive ways of the Lords – gosh, she’ll be saying the Queen isn’t fully on side next.

Of course, Mrs May does not say that, but she does say plenty of other specious things, boasting about her strong leadership and saying that despite the Brexit doomsayers, everything in the country is going swimmingly, consumer confidence is high, rainbows will soon be appearing above every street – and we should all bend to kiss her shoes (or something like that)

Rumours that this speech was written by the editor of the Brexit-besotted Daily Express can be dismissed, not least because I just started that rumour. But it sure sounds that way.

If, as seems likely, Mrs May pushes through and wins, she will feel under no obligation to represent the 48% who opposed Brexit, and their voice will be lost amid the chanting chorus of tattered patriotism. Her claims to speak for all of us will be reduced to the rubble and dust they always were. We’ll all be trampled in the rush to embrace a proud new Britain – a hopeful amalgamation of all our yesterdays, with the bad pages torn out and discarded.

Hair lifting in the Downing Street breeze, Mrs May tells us that this is in the “national interest” and whenever you hear a politician call on those words, you should dip your fingers in the scepticism bowl, especially when it’s a Tory leader on the make.

Mrs May is doing what you expect a political leader to do by grabbing the advantage in a ruthless manner. But trying to pretend that it’s in the national interest is a monumental slab of cheek.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn gets a mention in her list of those standing in her way, which seems odd as he doesn’t do much in the way of opposing. Indeed, instead of throwing her words back at her and recalling all the times she has said that calling a snap general election wasn’t in the national interest, Corbyn says he will place no obstacle to an early election.

In other words, he has seen the gangplank she has laid down for him and he is happy to walk along it, and never mind the shark-filled oblivion at the other end.

Oh, and you might have thought that the Fixed Term Parliament Act was brought in precisely to deal with opportunistic premiers calling snap elections – and that’s because it was – but Mrs May seems prepared to blow away that obstacle, much as she is having it put about that she won’t do anything so bothersome as to take part in election TV debates.

Heaven forbid that anyone should be allowed to ask her a difficult question, for she’s too busy cynically arranging an election the country doesn’t need – purely for her own purposes and while sanctimoniously claiming the higher moral ground.

Theresa May stops speaking and I press ‘escape’ to make her frozen image go small again. Never have I more wanted to hit that escape button.

I THINK I’d like to talk television today. The news is too depressing and bizarre sometimes, even for a mainline headline addict.

We have hit peak TV lately. Everything will soon roll into early summer decline, but what goodies have been and still are on offer.

It’s not much of a start to say, ‘stop reading now’: but if you haven’t watched the last episode of Broadchurch, here is your spoiler alert. Find something else to do or skip the next few paragraphs.

This third and final series of Broadchurch has been almost note-perfect and removes unhappy memories of the disappointing second series. Not that the memories here are exactly happy: the last helping of Chris Chibnall’s Dorset-based crime trilogy has been drenched in misogyny and misery from the off, and the presiding image has been of DS Ellie Miller’s facial expressions: for an actor who started out in comedy, Olivia Colman has taken to disgust, anger and misery like a duck to an empty swimming pool. Her face really has said it all at times.

There was, it turned out, not one rapist but two. After eight weeks of tripping over red herrings, the culprit was almost certainly the taxi-driving creep; but this was a bit of misdirection, as he was in fact covering for his teenage stepson, who had been groomed as an accomplice by ‘twine boy’ Leo Humphries – the one of whom Miller snapped in episode one: “I am never in the mood for swaggery young shits.”

Whodunit? Ah, the swaggery young shit, sort of. And he had raped the other women.

I do have a question about the grooming: would a nervous young lad been pressured by a supposed mate really manage to rape a woman? It’s just a thought, but everything else made sense – apart from the defenestrated newspaper old editor saying that she was going to start a vlog on YouTube, which sounded tin-ear trendy.

A seam of bruised humanity has run throughout this drama, which started in the first series with the murder of Danny Latimer, and as his sundered parents, Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan were stunning throughout, with Buchan being almost too pained to watch in this last series. They had a resolution of sorts, but no happy ending.

Talking of endings, the last scene worked perfectly: Hardy and Miller sitting on a bench while being upstaged by those cliffs, and Miller suggesting a drink down the pub – “We’ve never done,” she says brightly. Hardy (that frown on legs in the shape of David Tennant) was having none of it, ending with one of his elongated: “Naaahs”.

Chris Chibnall is off to mastermind Doctor Who, so the long-running saga should be in safe hands. A new series began on Saturday, the last to feature Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, and the first to introduce his new companion, Bill Potts. Pearl Mackie was instantly intriguing and lovable in the role, being fantastic to watch and smart, too.

Like Broadchurch, Doctor Who is on once a week – the old, traditional pre-Netflix way of watching TV. An estimated 12 million viewers sat down to a hardly cheery Easter Monday treat last night with the last Broadchurch. I still like that way of watching TV – having to wait a whole week to catch the next panicky swerve in Line Of Duty on BBC1, which is as brilliantly compelling as ever this time round.

The episode before last ended with a jaw-dropping moment in which one of the main characters appeared to have died (he hadn’t, but he wasn’t in a good way). The mood changed this week for a tense and brilliant bit of cat-and-mouse writing in which the never less than cocky Ted Hastings called Roz Huntley back in for questioning, certain that he had his bent cop nailed.

Instead, she turned the tables on him after wheedling some help from the horrid ACC Hilton – who thought his reward lay in a tumble between rented silk sheets, but Huntley was too smart to fall for that. Is she smart enough to really be the evil eye at the heart of everything; and who is the man in the balaclava?

You must wait to find out, and waiting is good, rather than bingeing or – as one of my students told me last term – “marathoning”, an expression new to me.

I do binge sometimes, but Netflix cuts out on our rubbish BT TV box, so House of Cards has been left unwatched for weeks now. I don’t really mind as the old way is better.

THERESA May’s Easter message is a puzzle, and one that raises a question: has she mistaken herself for the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Mrs Maybe’s three-minute recorded message recalled her childhood growing up in a vicarage. Where Mrs Thatcher could summon up the corner shop run by her father, Alfred Roberts, her successor likes to talk about life in the vicarage of the Rev Hubert Brasier.

No offence to either man, but Reverend Hubert and Alderman Roberts – Margaret Thatcher often mentioned that civic honour – have little relevance beyond the personal. Although it does seem that Theresa May seems keen to remind people that she is the daughter of a vicar – implying, oddly, in her Easter message that the country now must come together and that – more oddly still – God would probably have voted for Brexit.

That last interpretation was offered by Alistair Campbell, onetime spin doctor to Tony Blair and now editor-at-large of the pro-European weekly newspaper, the New European. More spin, perhaps, but he does have a point.

Here is part of what Theresa May said in her message: “This year, after a period of intense debate over the right future for our country, there is a sense that people are coming together and uniting behind the opportunities that lie ahead. For at heart, this country is one great union of people and nations with a proud history and a bright future. And as we face the opportunities ahead – the opportunities that stem from our decision to leave the EU, and embrace the world – our shared interests, our shared ambitions and, above all, our shared values can and must bring us together.”

Hope you managed to struggle through that paragraph without succumbing to queasiness thanks to Mrs May’s condescension. Is it just me or does the prime minister always sound like she is talking down to us as if she were standing on something elevated – a pulpit, perhaps? Only the other day, she felt moved to join in the great non-story about Easter being banished by an unholy alliance of Cadbury and the National Trust.

I don’t wish to be unkind about religion. Although I have no religion myself, plenty of people do – and many of them are inspired by their faith to work for the wider social good. It’s that mix of religion and politics that makes me uneasy, along in this instance with the prime minister’s repeated references to the vicarage of her youth – as if somehow what the country needs is to become the parish her father once tended to.

And her attempts to present the still divisive EU vote as a national coming together should not be allowed to pass without a heckle or two; and this is mine.

Mind you, the ins and outs of Britain’s place in Europe pale next to the referendum in Turkey which Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won by a similarly narrow margin to our own vote last June. Erdogan held what was in effect a “make me a dictator” vote and this morning he has sneaked a victory, even if his opponents are crying foul and saying that the vote was rigged.

As if the world wasn’t scary enough, now Turkey has elected an all-powerful president, who declares that he will roll away all opposition and assume what is in effect total power (a bit like Putin in Russian, but fortunately not yet Trump in the US).

Perhaps – and that sound you can hear is the gritting of teeth – a vicar’s daughter who sneaked into 10 Downing Street when no one was paying full attention isn’t such a terrible thing after all.

SOME days you can name your controversy. Today the choice is between Donald Trump bombing the shit out of things; or microwaved tea tasting better than any other tea.

I realise these two matters of contention are not connected, although having said that, you’d like to think that someone who made tea the proper way, loose leaves, warmed teapot and all, would be less likely to resort to dropping big bombs. Ah, that’s better. I’ll just sit here for a while…

After raining missiles down on Syria, an act for which the US president earned much acclaim, even from liberal types, now Trump has dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used, this time on Afghanistan. The lack of a nuclear warhead is a blessing of sorts, although a military analyst quoted in The Sun says that the 30ft bomb would have felt like a nuclear blast.

The bomb fell on a series of tunnels said to have been used by Islamic State terrorists. Whether any passing innocents were also blasted to flesh-wasted smithereens, is not known.

Those military-minded types in the Daily Telegraph reckon the bomb was a signal to US enemies, including Syria, North Korea and Iran, that the White House was now prepared to “take action from which previous administrations refrained”.

By that reading, this is a massive display of dick-swinging by the world’s scariest man (other scary men, and indeed women, are available).

Too many headlines this morning follow a depressing furrow, glorying in the “Mother of all bombs” – and isn’t it strange the way ‘mother’ is used in such contexts, especially when referencing non-maternal ability to blast the world to bits.

I don’t know about you, but I worry about those headlines. Are we really that keen to jump aboard Trump’s Armageddon Express and join in the whopping chorus on the journey to God knows where? Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for military adventures of the type he previously cautioned against seems to be his most alarming U-turn yet, and we should worry where what his mercurial, twitching gaze will fall next.

And isn’t there a danger that this inconstant man will get a taste for flexing his muscles in this way; and if so, isn’t that an addiction to alarm the world? It’s easy to boast that you are using such power for good, but lines are soon crossed – that’s if they haven’t been blown up already.

Now for tea. According to a report in the Guardian, an Australian scientist backs up DI Hardy’s belief that the best way to make tea is in the microwave. Hardy, the irascible scowl on legs portrayed by David Tennant in the excellent Broadchurch, caused mass outrage when he suggested this brewing method last month. Now scientist Dr Quan Vuong, of the University of Newcastle, tells ABC news that the microwave produces the best-tasting and healthiest tea.

His method is as follows: Put hot water in the cup with the teabag; heat in the microwave for 30 seconds on half power; let it sit for a minute (and, if I may add: throw this tannic blasphemy in the bin and start again and do it properly this time).

To be fair, I haven’t tried Dr Vuong’s method for two reasons: one, we don’t own a microwave; two, I am not a barbarian. I shall stick to leaf tea placed in a warmed pot; sometimes I will be lazy and use a teabag; both types of tea will be made using freshly drawn water boiled in the kettle.

A small controversy, but somethings you need those to keep your mind off darker matters. The mother of all bombs and the father of all ways to make a proper cup of tea…

WRITING about grammar schools always gives me a headache. I’ve just been listening to the education secretary on the radio and that only thickened the pain.

You see, Justine Greening is going to give a speech today about grammar schools. With distant memories of my own school days, I’d like to throw some chalk at the education secretary, or possibly even one of those heavy blackboard rubbers. We had a maths teacher who did that called, if  memory can be relied on, Mr Simms.

What Greening will say that Theresa May’s new grammars must give priority to “ordinary working class families” rather than just children from poorer families eligible for free school meals and so on.

I don’t have this from the education secretary first hand or anything, as we aren’t that close, but her speech has been trailed all over the place. Which is a bit like those overblown cinema trailers you get nowadays: by the time you’ve sat through the promo, there is hardly any need to bother with the film.

Anyway, the trailers for Grammar School: The Movie place great emphasis on that word ‘ordinary’. Politicians often use ‘ordinary’ as a catch-all label to smooth over the creases and to give the appearance of being fair-minded and reasonable.

Yet the seemingly plain-speaking words in Justine Greening’s trailer prove surprisingly slippery when you try to grasp them. ‘Ordinary’ in this carefully arranged context leaves out the very poor but draws in children more likely to live in Conservative constituencies rather than Labour-voting inner cities (that, of course, is assuming anywhere will be Labour-voting next time round).

The Government has massaged a few figures to come up with a definition for those “just about managing families” whose existence is such a political touchstone for Mrs Maybe. This is retrospective number crunching: think of a social concept, bang on about it for a while, then later attempt to come up with an official definition that justifies what you want to believe.

Now if you ask me, the government is cooking the books when it comes to grammar schools. There is little evidence that grammar schools improve social mobility; most education experts believe that grammar schools are not socially improving; and many teachers think the same, too.

Grammar schools are as much about ideology as anything else. The very words scratch an old Conservative itch and summon up the rosy glow of a caned hand. And the evidence suggests that they benefit the better off because they rely on entrance exams such as the 11-plus as a means of selecting pupils – and wealthier parents can afford to pay for private tuition.

But then I went to a grammar school and according to this government’s logic, that makes me one of those people who want to pull up the ladder behind them – a silly criticism that was made of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another ex-grammar boy – after we have benefited from whatever it was grammar schools were meant to have given us.

The trouble is, it was all such a long time ago, and yet here we still are, trapped in the same old gluey arguments about grammar schools. You could just as easily make a perfectly good case for schools that accepted pupils from all backgrounds, mixed them up and benefited from the strength of a wide and deep social pool. Oh, you could even call them ‘comprehensives’ – after all, it’s just another word. Sadly, words carry a lot of baggage.

Thirty years is half a lifetime, precisely so in my case, but that’s how long we have been married today.

An undeniable accumulation of time has passed since that cold April day. The bride had vodka for breakfast and she rarely drank anything then and drinks even less now. Nerves dealt with, on the way into the register office in Leeds she had to cover her wedding dress with a coat borrowed from her dad. It was sleeting at the time.

Anyway, we had a lovely day, with 70 or so guests, and our faces ached from smiling for the photographer. It was cold and wet outside, so the pictures had to be hurried and many didn’t come out, due to a fault with the film or something.

Quite a few of the guests are no longer around, including our best man, John, who was my best friend from university. He died nearly 20 years ago in his early forties, and even typing those words raises a tear now, but that’s life for you.

The next day the sun shone and it kept shining for our honeymoon in Shropshire, but the details are mostly only of interest to the participants. In 30 years, we have been through thick and thin, then even thinner, then thicker again. We lived in London at the time but moved to York the following year – and that turned out to be a wise move, even if I did spend the first few years looking for jobs in other cities.

Once I had an interview on the Scotsman for a role as arts editor, but that job went to someone Scottish, or so I heard later (a clear case of discrimination if you ask me, but what ancient history it all is). So, we remained in York and I ended up working on the Yorkshire Evening Press, as it was originally, for 27 years – also half a lifetime, until that job was swept away (that’s the thin part). After that came the reinvention test, and nearly two years on that experiment continues, but with more going on now.

Last October, we went to Glasgow for my 60th, and for our anniversary we are in Edinburgh. We love both cities and I’ll leave the locals to their squabble – after I blogged about Glasgow a friend from Edinburgh joked that “the only good thing to come out of Glasgow was the train for Edinburgh”.

Edinburgh is certainly a beautiful place with views to beat almost any city, especially from the castle terrace. I shall avoid going into tourist brochure mode, but will say that yesterday the sun shone and we walked to the Botanics, which were lovely and pleased my gardening-mad wife (the gardens I have seen these past three decades…). On the way there we discovered Stockbridge, which is where we should have lived if I’d got that job. It’s full of foodie shops and lovely streets – like Bishopthorpe Road in York magnified many times.

We’d been to the Botanics once before when our eldest was a baby. He’s 28 and a teacher now, so it’s been a while.

The sun isn’t shining today and the sky is as dark as a Scotsman’s hangover. We’re off to climb Arthur’s Seat after breakfast, wearing clothes packed for the warm weather we left (schoolboy error, that)

As this blog is a public place, I won’t say anything personal about being married for 30 years. I don’t want to embarrass anyone, least of all me. But here we are, still together, parents to three grown-up children, one presently far away in Australia, the other two closer to hand.

But happy anniversary to the gardening-mad one in my life – and, yes, I will try and get out there to help more. So long, of course, as there isn’t anything interesting to read in the newspaper.