Author: Alan Ashworth

ALMOST three years to the day since my first weekly column of reminiscences, I have finally come to acknowledge that the cupboard is bare and it is time to draw proceedings … Continue readingThank you and toodle-pip

IT was late November in 1966 and I was in my first year at grammar school. I was shooting the breeze at lunchtime with some male classmates in the quadrangle … Continue readingThe age of innocence

ONE of PG Wodehouse’s most likeable characters is the raffish Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham. He appears first in the short story Uncle Fred Flits By, included in … Continue readingBeyond Jeeves and Wooster: Uncle Fred

BETWEEN the ages of 16 and 18 when girlfriendless – which was the usual state of affairs since we were unattractive, self-opinionated spotty herberts – my school chums and I … Continue readingThe Friday-night chip shop crawl

ONE of the most quintessentially English children’s programmes is, one would think, Tales of the Riverbank, featuring the adventures of Hammy the hamster, Roderick the water rat and GP the guinea … Continue readingOn the riverbank with Hammy and Roderick

A FEW months ago I wrote about my time as a young reporter in a district office of the Burnley Evening Star. For most of the time there were only two of us … Continue readingDrunk in charge of a newspaper office

FOR the final part of this short series, whose predecessors can be read here and here, I am revisiting books three and four in the Molesworth oeuvre, Whizz for Atomms (1956) and Back in the Jug Agane, which … Continue readingThe Molesworth Cronickles Part 3

ONE of our favourite places in the world is the island of Sa Dragonera, so called because its shape resembles a sleeping dragon, off the west coast of Mallorca. It … Continue readingThe lizards of Dragon Island

PAGE Seven of last Friday’s Times was dominated by a story headed: ‘Human remains left in suitcases’. What followed horrified me – for journalistic reasons. It began: ‘Police have launched a manhunt … Continue readingDial 5224180010 for Murder

WE left Nigel Molesworth at the end of the first St Custard’s book, Down With Skool, a brilliant and sardonic evocation of life as a prep school boarder and an instant best-seller … Continue readingThe Molesworth Cronickles: Part 2