WELL, here we are, well into September and the field behind our house is still bathed in sunshine.

Now I really would love to relate to you all the wild and exciting things that I have been doing this past week, but sad to say it has been a most uneventful and slightly boring one.

Can you believe it – as I can’t – but up to this moment, not one person has rushed up to me saying ‘Quick Margo, pack a bag I am going to sweep you off your feet and take you away to a sun-kissed island in the Caribbean’.

If I am to be perfectly honest, though, after living in Tobago, many years ago, it would be great for week or two or maybe three years, but for a lifetime – no, I really don’t think so.

But then I’m a Blackburnian. I was just going to say born and bred, but that would not be true, as I have only lived here since I was six months old.

I was born in Bury, so really I am a Bury black pudding!

When I was little, Boxing Day was known in the family as ‘invasion day’, for that was when all my mum’s brothers and sisters would arrive en masse at East Street, Feniscowles, from Bury, via Ribble buses.

Out would come the best china and green baize cloth to cover the seldom-used table in the seldom-used front room which, of course, then was always referred to as the parlour.

It’s rather difficult to think that at the time, in a small, two up, two down, there were four adults and three children – my mum and dad, grandma Young, and uncle John.

He was with us because of the then economic recession, but he’d just managed to get a job at the Star Paper Mill where my dad worked.

Many years later I also got a job there in the mill, sorting and counting paper into reams – that’s when I found that paper is sharp and that cuts are quite painful.