RIP indeed, he was a nice bloke. H&M is right next door to Bury North, on the other side of the M66. To say that it's a bit down on its luck is no great overstatement. Middleton is where Avro used to have a plant pumping out Lancasters, and Middleton itself (as well as Heywood) is covered by Rochdale MBC. That council's now Labour but for some years was a FibDem hold, until the Rochdale Fibs imploded spectacularly. Middleton returns a mix of councillors mostly Labour (now) but a smattering of Tories. The same cannot be said under any circumstances about Heywood, where people greet you with "gimme six". It's a weird little place - you can buy Confederate regalia and flags in a shop on the high street - and the pubs are something to behold.AnatolyKasparov wrote:Where is it? North of Manchester, south of Rochdale basically.
He was in the HoC just two days ago voting against the "bedroom tax" - this has come right out of the blue despite his age
RIP.
A few years back Ms.Remarx and her lecturer mate Sue met up in the Dunne's store in Heywood (why it's there,I'll never know; even M&S would look less out of place), and I tagged along. When they'd gutted the stock (10 mins, tops), Sue, the niave that she is, suggested we drop into one of the local pubs for a quick drink. Walking past the relative sanity of Wetherspoon's (bouncers on the door), her eye alighted on a pub further down the pavement and in she went.
Inside it was rather like of scene out of Dante's Inferno, except with grubbier decor and a disco ball on the ceiling. It was also full of extremely pissed septuagenarian and octogenarian blokes - this is about 6.30pm on a Thursday - and their dodgy looking, equally aged and equally pissed 'girls', as they referred to them. At least the beer was cheap, however even that wasn't an inducement to stay (as an anthropologist, there's always that urge), and when one particularly repulsive woman in her mid 70s (estimate) started to dance in a comically unsexy way, to a slow handclap accompaniment from the men (and I swear I could hear top and bottom sets also rattling away in the mix), I decided it was time to sup up and go.
That's Heywood.