IT’S the school holidays... “Where are you going this year Locky?”
“Rome!”
“Rome? You fibber. Your mum and dad can’t even afford to buy you lace-up pumps, you’re still wearing slip-ons. No way you’re going to Rome.”
“Yeah we are. We’re going to roam round Batley Park Lake for the day.”
Nobody laughed. Story of my life, even aged 10.
I wrote my first ‘Ed Lines’ column 17 years and three months ago. Yes, I know. Slap my thigh and go to the foot of our stairs.
And some of you lot are still reading it!
If it helps make you feel better, while packing my bag for this year’s summer holiday, I came across a sweatshirt and at least a half dozen casual shirts which go back a minimum of 23 years and which I am still wearing.
So shove that in your pipe (on the outdoor patio of course) and smoke it.
It was possibly the seconnd or third (or maybe a bit more) week of Ed Lines before I wrote my first-ever column about ‘the club trip’ to Blackpool or Brid or Cleethorpes, but it was certainly back in 1993.
I was a couple of years away from meeting my wife back then, so the kids weren’t even a distant seed in the apple of dad’s eye.
I lived in a three-bedroomed terraced house up William Street in Staincliffe, overlooking the park at the back of Thomas Carr’s mill, which I bought for £28,000, and there wasn’t a burka to be seen in Dewsbury or Batley.
What there were, were dozens of thriving working men’s clubs, the number of which have probably halved by now.
Leaving the rest of the district alone, my spiritual home patch of Westtown (I also count Ravensthorpe, Thornhill and Thornhill Lees as spiritual home patches being a proud Dewsbury nomad) has seen the demise of the Gladstone and Sawdust, with just the Irish Nash hanging on by its fingernails.
Pubs? Don’t even start. Even when I was the proud young Editor-in-Chief of The Reporter Group I could be relied upon to join the ‘Zoo’ Fancy Dress on Boxing Day.
That was the George Hotel in Boothroyd Lane if you didn’t know, in its pomp with the steady hand of Batley and Leeds star half-back Trevor Oldroyd behind the pumps.
These days the Zoo is still defiantly the bastion of good old Dave Diskin in its Beer Street guise.
From there we would parade with our collecting buckets along Huddersfield Road, down to The Gate, up to the Shepherd’s Boy, then the Fearnside, Park Hotel, St Paulinus Parochial Hall, the Nash, Brunswick, Luppy’s, Gladstone and finally back to the Zoo, with a tipple in each and every one before someone blew the whistle or tooted a horn and we paraded on, collecting for local old people all the way.
I think it was that old Thornhill reprobate Andy Hardy who was somehow surprised by how fast Boxing Day came upon him one year and, short of a fancy dress, tipped a bucket of green paint over his head.
If it wasn’t Andy, apologies, but either way I suspect the numpty in question didn’t even get asked what they ‘came as’. That wasn’t exactly the point.
Ah, happy days. So many good memories, so many fallen soldiers, in more ways than one.
But even then, as an adult in his 30s and, in 1996 with a young ‘son of Ed’ to call his own, there was still, every summer, “the Club trip”.
I always remember our outings from Common Rd WMC in Staincliffe, and from Thornhill Edge when the Stanley Gath buses seemed to line from the Valley Road estate all the way up to Overthorpe, on a Saturday morning.
But the Irish Nash trip was always on a Thursday.
I vaguely recall a train journey in one or two very early years, but of more recent times it was Thursday morning up High Street in Daw Green, with the same Stanley Gath buses standing waiting like a Bedouin’s patient camels, all the way back down past what is now the mosque - formerly a pork butcher’s or even a slaughterhouse as I ironically recall - down past Pinfold Hill towards town.

Well, it’s a road trip for yours truly this summer, though a tad on the longer side than Stanley Gath, Longstaff’s or Lyles might have imagined.
You see I’m sorry, but despite the glorious May and June that we basked in, come the summer holidays (which officially start in my mind when the kids finish school) the heavens open and God reminds England that, actually, we are a bad, bad people who need to suffer the pains of our imagined utopia (ie, six weeks of sunshine from late July to early September).
As if the pain that our respective governments visit on us wasn’t enough the weather gods have to put the boot in too.
So it’s not Blackpool or Southport, Brid, Scarborough or Cleethorpes this summer for this traveller.
No, not a plane to the Caribbean either, or Christopher Columbus-discovered-climes. It’s down through France and Spain, by road, taking in some good old rugby league in Perpignan and Toulouse with a friend just emerging from his second fight against cancer in three years.
Our families will fly down to join us at the other end for the welcome break that the ordeal of living in England 2010 demands, and when they fly home, he and I will mosey our way back too, having a night here and there.
A few jobs might not get done quite as I like back home. Sod em. Someone might start a revolution and overtake the government while I’m away! Well I’ll join in when I get back.
True, there won’t be a committee man walking importantly down the bus aisle with a little brown paper packet containing a 10-bob note as we perambulate through mid-France, which is a shame, but then again I doubt that 10 bob would get me far these days. Maybe half a stale croissant.
So instead I’m going to empty all of my little piggy banks – can I still say that? – and give it big licks, in a fashion that every man and woman who ever went on the George’s Boxing Day Fancy Dress would be proud of.
I’ll let you know when I get to the south of Spain. Or rather, IF I get to the south of Spain! Au revoir mes amis!