Scratching Shed Publishing

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By Peg Alexander

The rucksacks are packed again. Radio and TV personality Peg Alexander embarks on a journey to Asia and the Middle East with husband Jim, another seminal moment in their lately-troubled relationship.

Travel – and the fortunes of Leeds United – bind the couple together as they come to terms with Jim’s mental health issues, and an adoption process that seems to thwart them at every turn. This ‘rewind trip’ is a partial repeat of their ‘Global Adventure’ ten years earlier, when travel had again been their saviour, part of a healing process that allowed them to learn about themselves, the lives of others, and cultures different to their own.

Amid the anxiety, Peg’s Yorkshire wit and innate positivity shine through. We learn about her upbringing, the duo’s time together and countries they have visited, past and present, plus how those places have since changed too. It’s a different kind of insight into human fragility and fallibility, with an understanding of alternative horizons at its heart – and also an enjoyable travel guide to those places en route.

Sometimes you have to travel halfway around the world before you can see what’s right in front you.

by Ally Shepherd

After a decade overseas, Ally Shepherd got stuck in the Northwest of England amid 2020’s pandemic chaos. She promptly became a born-again Northerner and, probably annoyingly, wanted to tell the world.

Documenting her journey to understand herself through the region in which she grew up, she explores its pressing questions, such as:  Is there still a North/South divide?  Was she descended from a Pendle witch?  Why does Liverpool have a slavery museum?  What’s with Scouse and Geordie accents?  Where are Northern women’s stories in TV, film, and literature?  And is it okay to eat chips, cheese and gravy? (Spoiler: The answer to the last question is ‘yes’).

Drawing on history, politics, pop culture, and folklore – as well as a childhood in Cheshire, family stories from Lancashire, and an education in Yorkshire – Back Up North explores the region’s diverse legacy of food, music, literature, dialect, social change and superstition. Give it a read, pet. Tha might learn summat.

by Andy Bull

Just saying the name conjures up the golden age of motoring: a time when the open road spelled freedom and adventure, and when driving was fun.
Once, The Great North Road was spoken of as the UK’s own version of America’s Route 66: the Mother Road, threading its way across this green and pleasant land, linking the capitals of London and Edinburgh, taking in the great cities of York and Newcastle, numerous market towns and villages whose old coaching inns now catered for a new, romantic breed: the motorist. But all of that has long gone. Hasn’t it?
Isn’t the Great North Road now dead: buried by the A1, with its motorway-grade stretches and ubiquitous town by-passes?
Not a bit of it. Because the A1 is not the Great North Road. Realignment, renumbering, re-routing and extensive upgrading have meant that it bears little relation to the original highway. No more than a quarter of the modern A1 follows the route of the true Great North Road.
So, has that evocatively-named highway been wiped off the map? Actually, no.
These days it is hidden, renumbered as, among others, the B197, the A602, and the B656, but often still known locally as The Great North Road. All it has lost is the traffic that grew and grew until it clogged this great national artery.
That old, original route can still be driven the 400 miles from capital to capital, on a journey that does indeed have much in common with cruising America’s Route 66.
Driving the Real Great North Road is travel writer Andy Bull’s account of doing just that.
It’s also about re-living a time when the road, in the words of JB Priestley, cut through towns like a knife through cheese; when it guided stars from Sting to Bryan Ferry, Mark Knopfler to Eric Burdon, to fame and fortune; when Dorothy L Sayers found a road “that winds away like a long, flat, steel-grey ribbon – a surface like a race-track, without traps, without hedges, without side-roads, and without traffic.”
All you need to do is find the old road first. Let Andy show you how.

By Tony Hannan

It’s Britain’s hottest summer since 1976 and cricket is in a sweat of transformation. Audiences no longer care for long-form County Championship fixtures, traditional touchstone of the calendar. They prefer flash, bang, wallop! Or so the experts suppose.
Where though does that leave those twenty minor counties from Newcastle to Norfolk who for the last 125 years have provided a stepping-stone between recreational cricket and the first-class county scene?
Come 2020, the venerable Minor Counties Championship will be blown away like dandelion seeds on the breeze, to be replaced by a freshly branded and ‘more marketable’ National Counties Championship.
Well, that was the plan. In 2018, few had yet heard of Covid-19. What they did know was that their beloved competition was under existential threat and those to blame were at Lord’s, more interested in such innovative concepts as the promised new ‘Hundred’ than bolstering that which had stood the test of time.
Tony Hannan, author of Underdogs, spent what turned out to be the penultimate Minor Counties campaign in the company of Cumberland CCC, amid the dramatic lakes, fells and mountains of Cumbria. And echoing that dramatic terrain, tells a story of ups, downs and a few surprises.
A team of journeymen skippered by Gary Pratt – who famously ran Australia captain Ricky Ponting out during 2005’s Ashes series – are but one thread in a tapestry that is by turns earthy, lyrical and amusing.
The Wicket Men draws stumps on a mostly ignored but emblematic level of cricket, a pastime whose arcane rhythms and rituals are rooted in English folk tradition.