Wednesday 30th November.

 Great news, our cafe can open on Thursday, I will be glad to see evryone again.  I got a box of free mince pie's yesterday on my Tesco voucher, so I gave them to the womens refuge in Sainsbury's as they play havoc withj my innards.

The government says the pandemic is back under control, but for how long with idiots breaking the law?  People are getting into a silly panic about buying christmas trees, perhaps they should brance out and grow their own.  Apparently all of Debenhams and Top shop are going to get the chop, our ex Debenham will be taken over by a firm from romsey; I hear they are expensive.  lewis hamilton the racing driver has caught Covid, but he's only showing mild syptoms; for now.

There's heartbreak stories all over the world where familie's are being wiped out by the Chinise virus left right and center.  China should be brought to book with all the crap they've caused.

Now for a bit more history of my tedius life. This is Gas Lane, it was how I remembered it as a child in 1979.  The huge building at the end was part of the gasworks, it was there when we moved in 1981 but it's now gone with modern houses built all over it.  I used to see the burn out rafters from our dining room, I remember the pigeons perching on the roof beams.  I used to think strange men with cloth caps roamed about it at night, I thought they were ghosts.  It's like looking into a window from the past, the house on the right was known as Gas House and was pulled own a couple of years ago.  

This is the entrance into the gasworks, this is also now long gone, another example of why photography is so important.  

I used to play in these streets with a girl called Tina Northover, she had blond hair and lived up the road from us.  She had two brothers called Simon and Nigel who used to do disco's at their house at weekends.  Her father was a milkman and her mother worked somewhere on the Churchfields estate; she could be tempremental sometimes her mother.  

This is what people saw when going up the road to the left, There's now a housing estate all over the yard.  Everytime the gasworks were in operation the drum would slowly go up and down sometimes accoppanied by a horrid tinny smell.

This is the view from the top of Devises Road.  You can see the drum on the left side of the picture.  Apparently the Luftwaffa tried to machine gun it from their planes during the war, thank God it didn't go up.  

Taken from Salisbury cattle market. Note the bigger building with smoke stack.

This is how I remember it.  This is where myself and my parents used to go for our newspapers etc, it was called Lees and the shop is now a private house.  When it was a shop, the doorway had red tiles and there's a book dedicated to this shop called shop on the corner.  The shop began in 1900 something, but it's all gone now into the past, the old gasworks can still be seen.  The outline of the old shop doorway can still be seen, people could buy green stamps here and blue parrafin; when this photo was taken it was a different world where many of my beloved reletives were still alive.  May they rest in peace.