Sophie Gee

OK, I love a toilet, as you know, so I could talk about this for hours, but we must move on to the novel.

So, Jonty, let's fill in the picture of who Barry Hines is, because I was so completely blown away by reading this novel.

that I've now been relentlessly discussing it with everyone who I run into, many of whom are extremely literary, no one's heard of it.

So it's not famous at all outside the UK, although I know that it's a household staple in Britain.

But Barry Hines was prolific.

He was very famous.

He wrote many novels and he actually did several adaptation projects with Ken Loach, the great British novelist.

film director.

So let's back up and talk about Barry Hines.

He was born in 1939.

So he's born at the beginning of the Second World War.

And he's brought up in the South Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common, which is near Barnsley.

He was from a mining family.

So his grandfather and his father were both coal miners.

And his grandfather had actually been killed in a mining accident.

And I was trying to kind of

work out which of the many colliery, the coal mine, disasters his grandfather would have been killed in.

It might have been the Oaks Colliery disaster in the 19th century when hundreds of people were killed.

I think something like 350 people were killed when a coal mine totally exploded.

After that, there was a coal mining act in 1872, and that brought in some sort of health and safety regulations.