“... binding, ivory it was said, a baptism gift to ‘Jeremy’ and signed by the composer Haydn Wood – a friend of Colin’s parents, I suppose – who’d written the popular tune ‘Roses of Picardy’ in 1916. Above his signature, he’d copied out a few bars from the refrain, along with the words by Fred Weatherly. Maureen always kept a beady eye on ...”

“... talk in Northumberland of bringing back the coal mines. ‘There is still coal in the ground,’ Dennis Fancett, the chairman of a campaign group that has helped to get local railway stations reopened, said to me. ‘We never ran out of coal; it just became too expensive to mine. But now, with the price of energy having gone up so much, we’d be better off ...”