Owing to family circumstances, my mother Maymie left school at 14 and went to work in an office in Perth, Scotland. From her diary, here is the story of how she, with just one kidney, came to have three healthy children.
I was coming home for lunch in a tram with Clem Scott, one of my office friends. I was wearing a new dress which I had coveted for some weeks in a shop window and when I got off the tram it was raining. Instead of waiting for the tram to move on, I ran around the back of it to cross the road, right into the path of a Puller’s lorry. Pullers were the big cleaners and dyers in Perth. It hit me and I clutched at the radiator cap but it was hot, so I had to let go and fell under one of the front wheels, which went over my body, more or less at waist level. I crawled out and stood up. Someone came and held me and I was carried into a nearby garage and laid on a table. Miss Glass, who was Lady Superintendent of the GA was on the tram and she came and sent for the ambulance. Meanwhile, someone fetched Aunt Dodo, who has that was at home with a cold. She came running, still clutching in her hands the knives and forks which she had been laying on the table. The lorry driver was there, looking very white-faced and I remember telling him that it was my own fault and not his. His name was James Cameron and he sometimes came to the hospital while I was there, just sitting and turning his cap round and round on his knee. Later, for years, if I met him in the street he used to stop and hold my hand for a minute. While I lay in the garage waiting for the ambulance, I kept thinking that I didn’t want to die but I thought I might have bad spinal injuries and be in a wheelchair for life like my mother. All the same, I felt strangely calm. We went to the hospital, the Perth Royal Infirmary. It was Derby Day and I had a bob or two on a horse and that was on my mind too. I was also worried about the embarrassment of being undressed. The next bit is rather hazy but I never lost consciousness. I remember being on the trolley and being given some kind of anaesthetic. The first bit of luck was that it was the operating day of a noted surgeon from Dundee. He came to PRI one day a week. I came around quickly because it was found that no operation could take place until there was permission from my father who was next of kin, so they brought me back to consciousness. My father was not to be found and it turned that he was in Dundee at a cricket match. A board was quickly made up and carried round the pitch asking Mr Latto to go at once to the pavilion. He gave the necessary permission and I was taken to theatre. Professor Price did a wonderful rush job, removing my right kidney which was ruptured and bleeding and opening my tummy and doing the necessary joining up so that the other kidney could take over. Of course, I knew nothing of the details of this until some days later. I came round feeling rather sick but I was covered by a sort of large cage with an electric bulb inside, very pretty, which kept me warm and was an anti-shock device. The strange thing was that at no time was I in any pain. It became apparent that I had a tube draining out of my left side and a catheter in my bladder. The ward sister was tall, elderly and thin, Sister Scott, and she was kindness itself and so were all the nurses, especially Nurse Murray and Staff Nurse Rettie. It was decided by the doctors that I must not have anything to eat and only sips of water until they were sure that the other kidney had taken over, so I had to be fed by the bowel which meant another tube which had to be put in and out and I didn’t like that very much. It was rather trying to see people having meals, cups of tea, Ovaltine etc and the days weren’t broken up, but I enjoyed the life on the ward and the coming and going and of course I had visitors, but only family for quite some time This went on for three weeks until one day, the sister brought me a thin slice of bread and butter and a small cup of weak tea and said “Go on, have a go”. It tasted like absolute heaven and they decided that nothing dramatic was going wrong. I was presented a day or two later with a plate of tripe. It looked like stewed knitting and I was none to keen to try it, but there was a nice bland white sauce and it wasn’t too bad. Thereafter I was allowed food but it all had to be bland – white meat, tripe, fish, chicken, no eggs, beef etc. One night a new nurse asked me if I would like Bovril for my nightcap and I agreed joyously, but, poor girl, she got into trouble as that was definitely not on my menu. When I was able to sit up, nurse Rettie who was engaged to a doctor, was sewing her trousseau and asked me to hem some undies for her. In all, there were seven weeks in hospital, gradually getting up for short periods. It was a lovely summer and sometimes my bed was pushed out onto the balcony where I could see the visitors arriving. Four weeks exactly to the day I was admitted, blood was found on my sheet and there was a great deal of excitement and worry before they realised that, right on time, I was having my period. This was considered a wonderful thing and showed that that part at least was working properly.

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It isn’t much more than half a century ago that I grew up in Edge, but much has changed in the interim, while much has also stayed the same.

My father had been a humble insurance clerk in Scotland but after the end of the Second World War he boldly retrained as an archivist and was appointed as Gloucestershire County Archivist in 1949, living with his wife and three small children, of which I was the youngest, in a house in the centre of Newent, the other side of Gloucester. Having no experience or talent in such a field, he nonetheless took on the project of renovating a tumbledown barn on Back Edge Lane in Edge, near Painswick.

To help you identify the house, it is the first one on the right as you come down from the main Stroud Road. It’s a long thin building, reflecting its origins as a barn, and fronts directly onto the lane. When we moved there in 1953 I was only five, so in no way privy to the actual ins and outs, but from many stories told later, it appears the whole operation was pretty catastrophic and entailed two firms of architects and three firms of builders, all either going bust or doing runners. Financially I think the whole thing was a disaster but many laughs have been gained from reflecting that the actual bill at the end of the conversion was a grand nine thousand pounds. Because they had to borrow so much and decided to move away in 1969, at a time when house prices were at record lows, they actually made no profit at all, selling the house for an identical £9,000. Now I’m sure it must be worth well over a million, but of course I am not bitter, at least not very bitter.

Moving into a rented flat in London after retirement at the age of 65 seems an extraordinary thing for my parents to have done, considering the idyllic place in which they were living, and I suspect that they had failed to pay off the mortgage and thus were forced into it. Either that or Father feared that the garden would be too much of a challenge in old age. I will never know the true reason why they left. I had a distant relationship with my father but one thing I am sure of is that he gave me the greatest gift a parent could: a fantastic place to grow up. Even now, in my mid 70s, I think daily about Edge and all the adventures we had.

One thing I remember very clearly is that my parents were always short of money, which meant that I seldom received any treats and we never went on holiday. They had no car (neither of them could drive) and we had no television, not even a black and white one. We had no washing machine and for many years not even a fridge but the kitchen was equipped with a solid fuel Aga which kept that end of the house warm and was used for all the cooking and heating of water. The house had no central heating and I genuinely had to do that thing that people often reminisce about, which was scraping the ice off the inside of the window every morning in the winter. Thick blankets and hot water bottles were very much needed. In the main sitting room downstairs there was an open fire which was fuelled by coal and logs. A large coal bunker was next to the kitchen where coal was delivered in sacks and poured through a chute.

I am afraid that Keeping Up With The Joneses was very much part of my parents’ motivation in those days, although there were several very wealthy neighbours with whom they could never have kept up! I’m assuming that my father’s salary must have been okay but my mother never worked, although we had both a cleaner and a gardener, which seems extraordinary now. On top of that they somehow managed to send me to a private school, which they achieved by denying themselves almost everything in the mistaken belief that this would give me an enhanced education. In fact the school was terrible and left me scarred for life but we won’t go into that here.

My father christened the house The Gate House because, guess what, it had a gate, a large five-barred style farm wooden gate at the side of the house. There was no garage but next to the gate was a pile of sand left over from the building works. As I was still extremely young when we moved to The Gate House, I used this sand pit for making roads to drive my Dinky cars along. The bottom part of the garden was fairly wild and useful for a young boy to play fantasy jungle games.

My father was never much of a gardener but he did show willing, despite leaving the heavy digging mainly to the gardener Mr Jackson, who visited once a week. He was a rotten-toothed Mr McGregor style gardener but quite affable towards me. Things I remember from the garden include two separate tree houses, one in an apple tree and one, bizarrely, in a hedge separating us from the next door garden, which belonged to a family called, guess what, Jones. My father planted a fig tree which took years to start bearing fruit but when it did they were quite delicious. The tree is actually still there, as I noted on my recent visit.

The centrepiece of the garden was an enormous greenhouse. It was quite old so I don’t think Father had it built. I think it was left over from the garden of the next door house when they sold off some of their land for Father’s building project. My mother planted large numbers of tomato plants in the greenhouse each year and they flourished very successfully, largely because I was given the task of watering them every day. Mother meanwhile sat in her own little end portion of the greenhouse which she had repurposed as a sitting room. There she would read her books and do her knitting for hours on end. I absolutely loved that garden, which had numerous parts that were highly suitable for screaming round on my bicycle. Almost daily I would skid on some gravel, fall off and graze my knee, just like little boys ought to.

Our cleaner was called Mrs Berry, an extremely kind lady who lived in a quiet, modern house immediately next to the Rectory on the main road. She shared it with her husband Ben, who was the local builder. Ben was quite a character, whose doubtful building skills were legendary. Allegedly he once built a house and when the day came to hand it over to the new owner, they realised they didn’t have a staircase. Ben had been going up and down every day on the ladder and got so used to it that he forgot to replace it with an actual staircase. Mr and Mrs Berry were a childless couple and seemed to really welcome me visiting them on an almost daily basis for tea. There was a hole in the hedge allowing me to enter the bottom of their garden. Mrs Berry liked to tell me her troubles and was unwittingly instrumental in getting me involved in music because her nephew, who visited quite often from the Midlands, was a massive fan of Buddy Holly and introduced me to his music. Ben Berry had a nervous habit of saying “Agreed, agreed” whenever anything was being discussed so “Agreed, agreed” became one of our stock family phrases in conversation. Mrs Berry would hold séances on a weekly basis, to which she invited me Roger and Rob and I have to tell you that the way the wine glass scooted around the table was spooky and highly impressive. I decided not to pursue any interest in the occult.

One mod con that we actually had was a telephone. The number was Painswick 2188 and it was a party line which we shared with next door. Up by the bus shelter at the top of the lane was a red phone box which entailed a complicated sequence of pressing Button A or B but a friend told me of a good trick whereby you could tap out the numbers on the receiver cradle and thus be able to make a call for free. I have managed to live a remarkably uncriminal life and this is one of the few things that I’ve ever done that I probably legally speaking shouldn’t have.

As there was no parental transport, buses were an important part of life. The main road through the village was on the route of the 56 bus from Gloucester to Nailsworth via Stroud. These were green livery double-decker Bristol buses and frequently their radiators would boil over half way up Horsepools Hill, leading to the driver having to climb out and top up with the aid of a watering can. On rare occasions the bus would break down completely and we would have to complete the journey on foot. Going in the Gloucester direction, my pals and I learned how to ride bikes in the bus slipstream, which dragged you along without you having to make much effort by pedalling. Looking back, of course, this was fantastically dangerous and if the bus had suddenly braked we would have undoubtedly been killed, but of course we didn’t think about that at the time.

My two friends in the village were Roger and Robert, both of whom lived in much smarter houses than me but we had endless fun, mainly based around our love of bicycles and the fact that there was virtually no traffic and we could screech around the lanes at great speed with little danger of encountering anybody coming in the opposite direction. We used to do time trials starting from our house and going down Back Edge Lane to the intersection where it joins Edge Lane and then, with great difficulty, up the steep hill, past the two village greens, on to the main road and back down to our house.

On that route lay the houses of some of the “Joneses” that my parents were desperate to keep up with, some of the first wealthy people buying into the Cotswold countryside, which is now commonplace. On Edge Lane was the large mansion owned by Bernard Ashwell, who was the Gloucester Cathedral architect and drove a Bentley. He and his wife were friends of my parents and we would sometimes be invited there for sherry parties and the like. Bernard could be very bad-tempered but had a spectacularly huge and complicated model train set up in his attic, with which he would allow me to play.

His son Michael was also instrumental in getting me involved in music because he owned a record store in Stroud called the Stroud Music Centre, where I could go and listen to music in the booths for hours. Michael became a big cheese in the music industry but shocked the locals by being openly gay. He ended up being shot by his lover in London before he even reached the age of 50, which was of course seen as a scandal. Another rich family was the Hopcrafts, who owned a gorgeous house in the centre of the village on Edge Lane, where they would hold garden parties in their steeply lawned grounds. On what I called the little village green further up that road lived Reggie Cox and his wife Winnie, who were old-school proper villagers. Reggie was the most extraordinarily successful grower of soft fruit and had so much of it that he was perfectly happy to let me and my friends go into his garden daily and help ourselves to as many raspberries, strawberries and gooseberries as we could possibly consume.

Bernard Ashwell gave me my first ever part-time job as a teenager, working in the Stroud branch of his architecture firm. It was an unpleasant job, mainly involving using chemicals to make copies of plans and I got severely bullied by some of the other staff for my incompetence. A better job altogether was helping out with the delivery of post and newspapers twice a year, once at Christmas and once when the post lady Mrs Chiffney went on holiday in the summer. She would trot around the village at quite a pace with a leather bag slung around her shoulder, one compartment full of post and the other with newspapers. It was a frustrating job for me in some ways because you would have to walk long distances to remote farms in places like Harescombe, even though you were certain that the single letter you were carrying was of no importance and it was severely tempting just to chuck some of the post in the hedge. Of course I never did that.

One thing that might surprise current inhabitants was that Edge had a little shop. It was actually the Post Office and was situated at the bottom of the main village green, effectively a room in somebody’s house. It didn’t sell much but the things it did sell were of great interest to us teenagers, coming in the form of incredibly unhealthy items like gobstoppers, aniseed balls, Flying Saucers, Sherbet Dips, Refreshers and Fruit Salads. Oh my goodness they were fantastic, but of course contributed to my lifelong subsequent tooth problems.

Apart from the coal and the logs, there were certain other things that got delivered to the village regularly. Strange and Co, the grocer in Stroud, would deliver our groceries weekly and there was also a bread van and, much loved by us youngsters, a Corona van that delivered fizzy pop every two weeks. Of course there was a milk float as well and one day our Siamese cat Lucifer climbed aboard and was transported to Painswick, where the milk came from, before being delivered back to our house the following morning.

At the very bottom of the green was the Institute, as we called it, which was a fairly nondescript Village Hall. It played host mainly to the Women’s Institute, of which my mother was a prominent member. They did all the things you’d expect a WI to do, such as baking cakes, making jam and having guest speakers talking about needlework and such.

On Thursdays there was the village Youth Club, which Roger and Robert and I would attend because there was the facility to play table tennis. We were viewed, with some justification I guess, as the posh boys and the village lads would look threateningly at us, especially if we spoke to any of the local teenage girls. I was never much good at table tennis but one year I was taken along as a reserve to a game against Paganhill Youth Club because someone had dropped out. To my great pleasure, I was photographed as part of the team and featured in the Stroud News and Journal, even though I actually didn’t play a single game because I wasn’t required to. One time a dispute over something or other at the youth club escalated badly, as a local yob called Eric Wright decided to challenge me to a fight. He turned up at the Gate House with a friend and dared me to emerge on to the road to be punched. Naturally I stayed firmly behind the gate until they got bored and went away.

A more justified feature in the local paper came when they reported on what they called a “rival publication”, which was the newspaper that I created for the village, the Edge Gazette. It was handwritten and distributed round all the houses for a penny a read. I suppose, looking back on it, it was an unwittingly good ecological approach because it was effectively recycling. The money raised went to help restore the church roof and I still have copies of this remarkable publication in a drawer at home.

I suppose the vibe of the village back then was not a million miles away from that of Cider With Rosie. The village setting in the Cotswolds was remarkably similar and Edge was not unlike Slad, where the classic book is set. When we arrived there were no housing developments in the village and all around was farmland and abandoned wool mills which made thrilling places for young lads like us to explore.

The first thing that happened in the way of development was that the field opposite our house, which up until then had contained sheep, was bought and turned into a small estate with three bungalows. In one of them lived my aforementioned friend Robert. His family had moved down from the Midlands. Directly opposite us was a family called the Prettys who had a daughter called Susan who lived up to her surname. The final bungalow was occupied by a middle-aged couple, of whom the male partner was a very quiet, respectable gentleman who travelled daily, very well-dressed, into Gloucester for obviously some responsible job. Imagine our shock when one day the Gloucester Citizen had him as the main news story because he had attacked and knocked unconscious some innocent bystander in the bus station. From then on we knew him as “Basher” and I gave his house a wide berth.

Shortly after that, the large derelict army camp stretched along the main road was sold for redevelopment too. They built that strange long low dry stone wall with a concrete top that still exists today, although parts of it have crumbled slightly. It was fun and easy to run along it and we would occasionally even try and conquer it on a bike, which mainly led to falling off into nettle beds. Among the smart houses built on what we always called just “the camp” was one belonging to the Moreland family, who had two delightful daughters called Sally and Susan, whom we tried to inveigle into our gang but they didn’t show much interest, although Roger ended up going out with Sally for a couple of years.

Similarly, I had a village romance. Down at the bottom of the valley, just before the steep bit running down to the stream, were two bungalows, one of which went by the twee name The Dellkin. It’s now called something else, thankfully. Here lived Rosamund Havard, a beautiful sixties chick in the style of Marianne Faithfull, whom I admired from afar at the bus stop for many years. She would be on the other side of the road heading for Stroud, where she went to school. Eventually I plucked up courage to ask her out and we ended up in a relationship that lasted for over five years.

Some of the characters I remember from Edge included a very old lady called Mrs Kolisko, who lived in a red brick house almost opposite us, which has now been developed into a futuristic, very swish-looking building. Up on the main road adjacent to the church lived another lady whose name escapes me but who sadly was in the early stages of dementia, which we didn’t recognize and just thought she was mad. She used to complain about people who lived behind the walls of her house and were arguing in the night. This was suitably scary so we didn’t visit that often.

The Reverend Dicky Bird was the vicar and although my mother wasn’t religious, she did think it was the correct thing to do to attend services once a week. After I was confirmed there was a brief period when I would accompany her and take communion from Dicky Bird. I must say the wine was quite likely responsible for my lifelong interest in alcohol. Dicky would intone the words of the Communion process in a very strange accent which I can’t communicate in print very well: “Dew thissss, in remembraaaaance orf meeee”.

In a shed attached to the Rectory, old newspapers were collected to be recycled in aid of the church roof restoration fund. Some villager had a penchant for girly mags with names like Parade and Revue, so I would particularly enjoy delivering our newspapers up there and spending a few extra minutes thumbing through the mags.

Roger’s father was a property developer and stood out in Edge because he owned an Aston Martin in which he would zoom around noisily, occasionally giving us a lift if we missed the bus. Susan Boyle was a local lady who lived alone and had a whiff of scandal about her that I can’t remember the details of. She lived in a little cottage at the top of the hill on the other side of the main road. Here also was a fantastic steep hill which we could use for rather dangerous and thrilling sledging. During one big freeze, snow drifts were several feet deep and indeed on our lane the snow reached the tops of the hedges and we couldn’t even open the front door to get out of the house. We enjoyed a few blissful days off school as no public transport could get up the hill.

Further up the road towards Haresfield Beacon was what we called The Common, the National Trust protected area which featured a disused quarry, another good area for adventures. In 1963 my parents led a campaign to try and prevent it being reopened, which would have desecrated the countryside. My father was on battle stations against the local Lord Of The Manor, a toff called Jonathan Blow, who my father disliked intensely. For a series of weekends groups of villagers, including me, staged protests waving banners saying “Hands Off Rudge Common”. It was one of the many contradictions in my father’s character that, despite him being intensely conservative, he could throw himself behind causes and get things done, especially in the field of conservation. Not only did we defeat the Rudge Common vandals but Father famously almost single-handedly rescued the Dutch Water Gardens in Westbury on Severn.

For us teenagers, the Common had a couple of other useful purposes (as well as for courting, of course). We found a stash of car tyres that had been dumped there in the bushes and discovered that, if we set them off rolling down the hill, they would gather their own momentum and roll all the way down to the main road at the bottom, and indeed across it. Once again, this was an extraordinarily stupid and dangerous thing to do, as if any cars were coming we could have caused a serious accident. Luckily, as I said before, there was very little traffic. Just on the edge of the village at the bottom of that very same hill was Edge’s only pub, which was called the Halfway House. When we were still well under 18, we would nonetheless get sold cider as an off-sale through a little hatch off the public bar. We would then go up to the Common, drink a few flagons of this highly potent beverage and then roly-poly down the hill in a competition to who could roll to the bottom fastest. The resulting dizziness was a combo of the roly-poly and the alcohol and invariably resulted in lengthy puking sessions in the bathroom on returning home.

Edge is an unusual name for a village, and has no connection with Wotton-under-Edge, which is miles away. Father was a stickler for correctness and insisted that the village should be called The Edge, because it was the edge of the Cotswold escarpment. All map references and signposts said Edge but he was insistent, and knowing his depth of historical knowledge, probably was justified.

Thank you for the indulgence. Whenever I return to Edge, I reflect that, while physically surprisingly little has changed, our lifestyles most certainly have.

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In November 2022, I was walking down the road in the village where I live and it struck me that something had changed. It was a relatively minor thing. What had happened was that the road sign for St Mary’s Terrace, a quiet side street, had been removed and replaced by a new one.

Nothing unusual in that, I supposed, but as an ex-English teacher and a writer of grammar textbooks, I spotted immediately that there was no apostrophe on the new sign and that it said St Marys Terrace. I pointed this out to a friend of mine who lives in the street and that was where my involvement in the subsequent developments ended. My friend, who is called John, got together with some of his neighbours in the street and they agreed that they didn’t approve of the new sign. Apart from the missing apostrophe, they also objected to the change of style from a rather pretty cast-iron sign to a much blander and less attractive modern version.

After some discussion, they decided to get in touch with our two local city councillors, who set about righting this wrong with a certain amount of alacrity. The campaign eventually reached the dizzy heights of a full Winchester City Council meeting, where various unexpected aspects appeared during the discussion. One of these, according to the leader of the council, was that there was in fact a newly-introduced national policy to avoid punctuation on road signs. The slightly implausible reason for this is allegedly that it might cause confusion to the drivers of emergency vehicles and delivery or postal vans. Another completely unexpected comment pointed out that local author Jane Austen herself was reputedly prone to playing fast and loose with punctuation.

Meanwhile, because I have an “in” with the local newspaper, I sent in a small paragraph to their jokey feature at the back of the paper that identifies quirky little stories. The paragraph, accompanied by the necessary photos of the contrasting signs, pointed out that omitting the apostrophe was not only incorrect grammatically but was also incompatible with both the Land Registry and the Ordnance Survey, in which the road name does indeed contain the vital item. There was no response to or interest in the small article and I forgot about the whole thing.

Then, last month, I received an excited email from John, in which he enthused about the fact that the original sign had now been returned and reinstalled by the council. I had had no idea that any of this was going on, but of course was delighted to receive all the details. Our extremely resourceful and energetic local councillor had taken it upon herself to visit the council dump, plunge head first into a skip and emerge triumphantly clutching the original artefact. The City Council had agreed that it should be reinstated and arranged for a renovation to be undertaken. This involved shot-blasting the cast iron sign, which was then handed over to John’s young daughter, who painted it with specialist metallic paint, but not including the errant apostrophe.

In John’s email, he invited me, as the original person to spot the problem, to take on the privileged task of filling in the missing punctuation mark. As I did so, my wife kindly took a photo of the event. At this stage, I thought it might be fun for the Hampshire Chronicle to print the “after” photo as a demonstration of a bit of people power. I duly sent in a brief update, which again was printed in the back pages.

Then something even stranger happened. I received an email from something called the Solent News and Photo Agency, saying that they had spotted this item and wondering if they could come and interview me and take a photograph. Because we have a local BBC radio station called Solent, I assumed it was something to do with them and that what could be expected might be some brief coverage of the story by them. I had no idea of what was about to happen.

Within two days, my photo and a not completely accurate series of articles implying that I was some crusty old retired colonel-type with bigoted attitudes to traditional grammar were to be found gracing the pages of all the national UK newspapers apart from The Sun. My inbox was pinging every few seconds with amused emails from friends spotting the online versions of these articles in far-flung places like America, Canada, Australia and various European countries. Before I knew it, I was being interviewed on the phone by the Canadian national broadcaster for a programme that turned out to be syndicated across the US as well.

“My god, you’ve just been on the six o’clock news!” exclaimed a neighbour. I found myself at one stage turning down a live interview with BBC Radio 5 live because I would be in charge of my grandchildren that morning, which would have made for quite a chaotic and interesting bit of audio.

One particularly interesting aspect was the different angles taken by the various papers. The first one I saw was a very long piece taking up most of a page in The Guardian. The writer had done his homework and everything in it was accurate and fair, also largely supportive and uncritical. The i newspaper also covered it accurately. The Express, meanwhile, tried to turn it into a council-bashing exercise, which actually was the complete opposite of the truth, because the council had been pleasantly supportive. The Mail, of course, homed in on house prices in the village, while the local paper in Southampton somehow dredged up an author who wanted to turn it into a culture wars item, calling me, whom of course he had never met, a “hectoring ignoramus”.

A friend in Ireland called to tell me that there were over 300 comments on The Times webpage, but it was behind a paywall and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give money to Rupert Murdoch. I tentatively asked if I was being trolled and was relieved to hear that nearly all the comments were supportive of correct apostrophe usage.

A quirk of Facebook is that messages can sometimes not appear immediately, so it was a few days later that I discovered a whole raft of communications from various publications and broadcasters around the world, all wishing to me to share my words of punctuation wisdom with them. Among them was, oh god, an invitation to appear on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s programme on GB News. Instead of replying that I would rather cut off my own head then be in the same room as that worm, I merely deleted the message and blocked the sender.

Anyway, all that stuff about lining budgies’ cages  and being today’s chip paper is absolutely true, because within 48 hours the entire thing had calmed down and blown away. The only reason I had been featured in the photographs in the first place was simply that the reporters arrived on a weekday, when everybody else was out at work. One thing I will say is that they did their job extremely well. They were exactly as you might expect reporters to be, young, slightly unfashionably-dressed guys, one with a spiral notebook and pen and the other contorting himself into various positions in order to get different angles on his camera. They certainly did a brilliant job in elevating an extremely small and mundane event into an international news story.

Me, I’m just happy that it turns out that Andy Warhol was right. Yes, even after fifteen minutes, people do stop me in the street and say “Oh, you’re that apostrophe guy”. 

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