Last night the wife and I immersed ourselves in the local community by attending an exhibition of local photographs at the village church hall. It was very interesting. We learnt that once Brierley had a butchers (run by Michael Parkinson’s Great Grandfather), two pubs, a blacksmith, a coal mine and was once home to not one but two MP’s. We also learnt that Mrs Turton’s ghost isn’t Mrs Turton; it’s Mrs Edson (Mrs Turton is the daughter and she is very much alive). We learnt that Mrs Edson was a “lovely old lady” who’s husband, Laurie, was a popular independent local councillor. By reading a few news articles I could see he was a man with similar values to mine (ie keep party politics out of local councils). None the less, a very pleasant and interesting evening. You can read more about Brierley, its people and its pictures at this website.

In other news, our euphoria became a wrinkled balloon last night upon the discovery of several hundred bad reviews about Moben Kitchens. I’ve got fed up with the kitchen lark now so I might have to take control and insist “Local is best” and get a small company in. I find that the smaller the company the better job they do because they’re more likely to be relying on word of mouth recommendations. Moben are a huge company with a huge list of complaints about them for bodged jobs, they also called chasing up whether we had made up our minds when we asked them not to bother us until the weekend. So stuff them….