You will please imagine me sitting on a reserved seat in a first class compartment of a British Rail train on its way to Blackpool. The train rocks from side to side which explains my spidery style. No! No! The plastic beaker full of Scotch and American has nothing to do with it--you're imagining too many details.

It is, I suppose, a kind of luxury to be travelling across England in a British Rail train on a Summer's afternoon. John Arlott has written an article in today's Guardian about the summer of 1948 in which he describes how "Morris, one of the nicest men ever to set foot on a cricket field made 138... in the next match against Leicestershire, Bradman was bowled for a mere 83 by a young seam bowler from the Lord's staff named Etherington. It was his first wicket in the first class game and he should cherish it, for he took only two more before illness ended his county career."

That is England.

[A man in a baggy blue suit just came by and said "say yer tecuts pleys" in a ringing, chanting sort of way.]

Yet this England is not what it was, perhaps. This summer has been so ghastly that the popular newspapers have taken to giving away money instead of performing their proper function of informing the public that they had just experienced "a scorcher". All the popular newspapers now use their front pages to reveal how much money they intend to give away that day. Whatever happened to the Thomsons and Beaverbrooks who used to give the money to their journalists?

Anyway back to the plot. I am on a train going to Blackpool for Building Trades Journal. I have worked for this magazine for some two years now. So I got the Blackpool trip while my boss is in Atlanta, Georgia.

We have just passed Bletchley and I think that it is about time I told you that my son Arthur is now nearly a month old and I am glad to be able to tell you that he looks a good deal less like Winston Churchill than he did when he was born.

England also appears to be brightening up as I proceed northwards.

Arthur weighed 8 pounds 2 ounces and was born on Wednesday May 20 to our great relief as he had been due since April 30.

I am also very likely to be elected a councillor in May 1982 in Waltham Forest. I attended a strange interview at a near derelict house opposite the old Connaught Hospital in Walthamstow and was immediately placed on the A list of candidates. That means they will try to find somewhere relatively safe for me to sit.

I just passed a barge on the grand union canal.

The slum, as I have dubbed 3 St Heliers Rd, continues to deteriorate. Saturday , a brilliant blue sun bright day--one of only two so far this year--I spent perched on top of a ladder at roof height. What I was doing was replacing the leaking guttering on the back extension. The major difficulty was that it was impossible to put up a ladder to our roof from our garden. The foot of the ladder had to rest in the garden opposite. This meant jumping over a 7 feet high wall to collect or dump anything--which was not helped by the fact that I stabbed my hand at an early stage of the proceedings with a carpet knife.

Watford Gap coming up.

The last time I saw Chris Hill he showed me a letter from you which said some sacrilegious (from an Australian standpoint) things about the Sydney Opera House.

Rugby. That is we are stopped in Rugby Station.

Santus uncle joe's mint balls keep you all aglow: of course we're in Wigan.