Graham C. Marshall wrote:Patricia was originally from Kingston upon Hull, my neck of the woods. She now lives in Canada and occasionally makes it into the Hull Daily Mail.
Ahh, Hull. City of Culture 2017. I went there once, by mistake. Sounds like a line from Withnail & I, but it’s true.
OK, I was living on the other side of the river at the time, in Hull’s ‘poor relation’, and a friend and myself were trying to get to, I think, Goxhill. We missed the turning and found ourselves on the Humber Bridge and unable to turn round. An evening in Hull ensued. Sadly, I think it must have been a Tuesday as the place seemed dead. This must have been in the mid 1990s.
But seriously, in the days before the bridge opened, the family used to make regular trips across on the ferry (either the Tattershall Castle or the Lincoln Castle) to go shopping somewhere that had decent shops! Most of my Shadows records came from Sidney Scarborough’s in the city centre. I saw the Shads there in 1981 (at the City Hall) and, a decade or so later, saw Hank and Brian at the same venue on their first post-Shads tour. I remember going to see Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwick in ‘The Secret of Sherlock Holmes’ at the New Theatre in 1990 and, the previous year, courtesy of Viking Radio, did my first ever live radio interview. Later still, whilst drumming in one band or another, I played in a few clubs and pubs (probably all closed now) in the city and in Barton on Humber. Good times. And slightly later still, whilst at college, made a promo video for the Hull Daily Mail, which, at the time, was just starting up an interactive TV service. I saw it a few weeks ago for the first time in years and there I was, barely recognisable, rushing into a phone box and then walking, rather languidly, into the newspaper’s offices. It made no sense, but it all cut together quite nicely. And then there was Lucy, who I think lived on Blenheim Street. A short but interesting dalliance. And my dear old friend Andy, who for a while lived in a flat on Spring Bank, with whom I breakfasted early one morning on a huge slab of Cherry Genoa.
Come to think of it, I bought my first ever drum kit, second hand, from a guy living on the Bransholme Estate. It was a Pearl DLX, black, 7-piece with Zyldjian cymbals. The kit of my dreams.
Ahh, Hull. What memories…