Spent a perfect bank holiday with friends walking around Kettlewell, journeying there and back along the M65, a road which is another sign that the dark, satanic mills of once-backwoods Lancs are dark, satanic no more - they are home to new industries, cleaner, brighter businesses at the centre of reinvented Pennine towns, and lining the ribbon of that new road. Home to various peoples, connected by the trade in cloth which birthed these mill towns in an age of Empire, today, Blackburn and Burnley are open to the world; and pray God keep their vibrant multiculturalism thriving despite the stirring of fascists in their streets.
Back home to a tape of C4's earlier programme about London, to whet the appetite before Peter Ackroyd's greatly anticipated series London begins on Friday. London - "a city forged in fire", which has time and again reinvented itself as history and tragedy have struck. Quite a distance from Pennine Lancs, and in many ways no distance at all.
john davies
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