A retired bobby, copper, if you’re from Lancashire, sits in his shed and has his say. Honest, Northern, and occasionally interrupted by Mrs C with a brew.
On cinema trips, cosplay fascists, and a very good dog Back after a few weeks away, and there's a fair bit to catch up on. First, the story behind the title: a Greek-American scientist I used to work for, an old friend of his called James Coburn, and one unforgettable trip to the cinema that had the whole row in stitches. Then it's what I missed while the kettle was off. A stand-off on the south coast that achieved next to nothing, except making the RNLI more popular than ever. And the World ...
23 Aug 2026
Hurling, Not Throwing — "The world spent a fortnight arguing about black puddings. Ramsbottom carried on."
Stanley's back from the school holidays to find the country arguing about black puddings. Every second Sunday in September, Ramsbottom holds the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships — twelve Yorkshires on a twenty-foot plinth, three puddings each, underarm only, and all the money to charity. This year an animal rights outfit wants the puddings vegan, the papers have decided five hundred years of tradition is under attack, and the organisers have said something quietly interesting. Also ...
25 Jul 2026
The Safari Bus: A Monkey, a Memory, and Sixty Years of Tandle Hill
The Safari Bus Grandad's taxi gets a summer upgrade — and the maiden voyage does not go entirely to plan. Stanley takes the great-grandchildren to Knowsley, meets a monkey with strong opinions about wing mirrors, and lives to tell the tale. Then it's somewhere gentler: a hill outside Royton called Tandle, a wood he last stood in as a boy, and a memory that took him sixty years and a cathedral in Germany to make sense of. Stanley Common is a retired community police officer from Heywood, Lanca...
18 Jul 2026
The Rise and Fall of Captain Obvious
Two empty fields in one fortnight, three thousand miles apart, and the same fella stood in the middle of both with a megaphone. This week Stanley gives him a name. From the shed: the President's birthday party that hardly anybody went to, the pollsters up a stepladder at Nigel Farage's own do, and the march through our town that the town answered by going shopping. Plus the writing on the wall, why an echo can only ever tell you what you just said, and Stanley's mother on lugs, gobs, and the ...
11 Jul 2026
The Battle of Bamber Bridge — Forty Minutes Up the Road
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 landlords, and a night the American army spent fighting itself down a village street three miles from Preston. It do...
8 Jul 2026
Farage v Binface: A Man and a Bin
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 who call themselves the voice of the people. Kettle's on. Sit yourself down. Read the piece at Views from th...
4 Jul 2026
Their Day — Lincoln in Manchester, and what time the Americans should arrive.
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 middle of Manchester. None of them knew why. It's quite a story. It involves cotton, a blockade, a hall fu...
29 Jun 2026
He Told Them, Out Loud, To a Microphone
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 Labour conference in Manchester, a case of mistaken identity involving a former party leader, an ...
21 Jun 2026
Did You Ever See a UFO, Stanley?
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 officer on night shifts on the moors above Ramsbottom saw two things he never filed a report on....
15 Jun 2026
Kettle’s On, Sit Yerself Down
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 nobody at FIFA seems willing to answer: when you turn the world away at the door, can you really ...
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