Don't panic!
Not another maudlin Saturday thread.
Why not share a happy memory we have, about growing up in this huddle of northern towns, surrounded by wild moorland?
I remember one fantastic Sunday afternoon, when l was about ten.
It has snowed heavily the day before, but this day was startlingly blue skyed, and clear.
As ususual for Sundays, we'd been to church in the morning, and to Nan's afterwards for lunch.
Dad decided it was a good day for an 'adventure', as he called doing something out of the oridinary, such as walking to Rishton on the canal path in the pitch black, or sledging over Brookside in the moonlight, which are just two more examples of our many 'adventures'.
The roads were too bad to drive on, so we set off from Stanhill on foot. Warmly dressed in thick coats, hats, and gloves.
Eventually we got up on the moors, above Haslingden Old Road, and started to climb higher still. Avoiding the massive boulders, which had been rolled thunderously down the hills, after the recent bursting of the reservoir banking, a year or so before.
We climbed higher, and higher. We never saw another soul. Just us four adventurers. Dad, Mum, my brother, and me.
It was so beautiful, it was breathtaking. Literally, being so icy cold.
I remember feeling so happy to live somewhere so lovely, and felt so safe, and secure in our little family unit.
For some reasons we took a camera. Must have been film needing to be used up after Christmas, before it was taken to the chemist to be developed.
Even stranger are the photographs.
No 'Smile lads', 'Now you do me and Dad', posed, cheesy grins.
None of us are looking at the camera.
All are looking back, down the moors. Me pointing something out, whilst my brother looks at whatever it is through his binoculars. Mum, looking young in a brown wool maxi coat, and knitted cloche hat. Julie Christie dressed by Bessie Bradock. Dad, in a black coat, his legs hidden by a snow drift.
Reject photographs, from some seventies band album cover.
I haven't seen the photographs for years. Dad's been dead for nearly eighteen years. My little brother has two children older than we were then.
When I think what fun we had that day, the beauty I saw, the love I felt, it feels like it happened yesterday.
What happy memories of growing up in this part of Lancashire have you?
We've all got at least one...hopefully.
So spill...
