View from the shed

Forty minutes from my shed, just off the M6, there's a pub that's been pulling pints since 1616. In June 1943, it also took four hundred bullets. This week I got in the car and went to find out why. It's the story of the 1511th Quartermaster Truck Regiment — Black American soldiers stationed in Lancashire during the war — a colour bar that didn't survive contact with Lancashire...

I wasn't planning a midweek episode. But a man has resigned from Parliament on purpose, so there can be a by-election, so he can stand in it — and the only candidate who's stepped up to face him wears a bin on his head. Ten minutes on Boaty McBoatface, Mr Blobby, five Christmas number ones about sausage rolls, a gritter called David Plowie, and what all of it should have taught the men w...

Nobody in Heywood has noticed it's the fourth of July. The bins went out as normal. But Stanley has reason to think about America. After leaving the force, he spent some years as security advisor to an American scientist — which meant collecting his colleagues from Manchester Airport and explaining England to them on the way. None of them knew there was a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the midd...

Andy Burnham is the man who ran Greater Manchester for nine years — which means, among other things, that he was the man at the top of the organisation that pays Stanley’s pension. So Stanley has been paying attention. This week, somebody asked the man across the water what he made of the lad from Leigh. The answer involved the word “town.” It was not meant as a compliment. In this episode: a Labo...

Three pensioners walk into a pub. The conversation starts with JD Vance’s chicken coop, moves through the Epstein files and the Prince Formerly Known As Andrew, takes a detour via the Pentagon’s UFO releases, and ends with Kath the barmaid asking Stanley a question he’s been sitting on for thirty years. It turns out South Lancashire has a reputation. UFO Valley, they call it. And a retired police...

Kettle’s on. Sit yerself down. This is the first episode from the shed. Stanley Common — a retired bobby from Lancashire, many years on the doorstep, now retired and saying his piece — introduces himself, and then turns his attention to the World Cup. Forty-eight nations, three host countries, and players being detained at the airport before a ball is kicked. Stanley asks a simple question that no...