These essays and poems are loosely connected by the location of many in the North of England. They were written over ten years by someone who, though not a Northerner, has come to love the countryside of the North, to lament the decline of its towns and to view with ironic amusement the concept of a specifically Northern character. The writing is mostly tinged with humour, but also with a certain elegiac sadness, particularly when addressing the profoundly important topic of cricket. The writer spent much of his life in education and deals, from his Northern vantage point with such disparate topics as the formation of Ofsted, education in Bahrain and the myth of independent school superiority.
