The Griper's Times

IT is 75 years ago this month that healthcare free at the point of use - to each and every one of our citizens - became a universal right in this country. As Tony Benn once told me when I asked him about the often quoted claim that Britain is, at its heart, an instinctively Conservative nation, the NHS was perhaps "the most socialist thing any government has ever done" and - more tellingly - "the most popular". Nye Bevan, the father of perhaps the most famous three letters in these isles, oversaw the seemingly impossible; he built a whole new framework for healthcare within three years of Labour taking power. All this in a country which newly vanquished PM Winston Churchill admitted was bankrupt, with city roads reduced to rubble and everything from meat to bread on the ration. The transformation should be seen as a symbol of what is possible against even the bleakest backdrop. What Bevan and his fellow ministers realised was that a nation that was battered and wear...

IT'S a shot that we're all familiar with; a small band of angry residents all pointing in the direction of a particularly murderous-looking pothole. Sometimes they're squatted on their haunches for a tarmac-level view of the carnage, a pose that - when paired with the strained looking expression on their faces - has been dubbed "Done a poo" by popular Facebook group Angry People in Local Newspapers. The page has become a formidable round-up of staple stories from the regional press, with all the classic phrases and facial expressions which suggest someone somewhere in a council highway's department is in for a rough afternoon.   It's easy enough to shrug off such concerns as parochial but I probably prefer to think of them as local. They very much matter to somebody, even if they live in a village you can't pronounce or a town you couldn't place on a map. There is a danger, I think, of left-wingers dismissing local campaigners as having "somet...

THERE'S a wonderful line in Matt Smith's first episode of Doctor Who when a youngster who has suddenly found a ragged stranger at the bottom of her garden asks who he is. "I don't know yet," says the newly-regenerated Time Lord. "I'm still cooking." It sort of sums up how I find myself at the minute, as I cross the half-way point of the three score year and ten. I've always understood this is supposed to be your "settling down" decade, it's when you start to lay roots or reap the fruit or some other slightly muddled gardening metaphor. Instead my early middle age increasingly seems dominated by things most people are wrestling with in their late teens - essays, driving lessons and visits to career websites. Throughout what has been a chronic chronological jumble - which certainly feels like it owes a fair amount to a Steven Moffat script -  I've tried to hold on to the idea that my occupation won't be a question mark indefin...

The view from Stormy Point at Alderley Edge FIVE or six summers ago I was on the trail of wizards, goblin men and the forces of darkness in the North West of England. It was my love of the fantasy writer Alan Garner which brought me to the author's old stomping ground of Alderley Edge, in Cheshire. It's not just that this landscape inspired his works, it is at the very centre of them; so much so that you can actually walk you way through entire chapters of books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. In an interview last year the author, now 88, stressed how pivotal places he'd first walked as a child were to his stories. The heritage training I've recently been running through with Historic England has got me thinking all the more about Garner's relationship with place and how perhaps all of us could benefit from the way he's rooted himself in the tales and features of a particular area. On one hand it is easy to think that the writer was inordinately lucky growin...