My brother and I were swapping stories about the past at my eighty-eighth birthday celebration. Here’s one of them. When me and my brother were young and living in Woodhouse a neighbour on the other side of the street was a coal miner. His wife was a bit short tongued shall we say. She was telling me how she’d looked up at the ceiling dinner time and said “this ceiling could do with a whitewash our Tommy and right there he got his white wash out and did it while we were eating our bloody tea.”