"Pleased to meet you Mr Ironside"

In Lancashire, rolls are known as 'barm cakes'. A kind of flat floury white roll as big as a toolmaker's hand. The ones with very dark brown undersides are called 'oven bottoms'. The joy of this food begins at the point of sale, as they would normally be purchased at the local bakeries which in Lancashire are called 'confectioners'. Most of these establishments were family run affairs selling bread, pies and cakes. The pies are generally awesome with rich crumbly pastry and generous highly seasoned fillings with cakes of the desiccated coconut and butter cream variety and those individual strawberry tarts with the highly suspicious red jelly. Loaves come in large, medium or Hovis. None of your artisan sourdough nonsense here! Buying it ready-sliced was considered go-ahead. The interior design of these shops is always at least a decade behind. It's the rules and part of the joy to enter a world of shiny brown wood-grain patterned melamine, glass fronted...

I sailed into Whittier on the second cruise ship ever to visit the port. It was the time of year where the sun never really sets and we had to make do with a couple of hours of dusk from around midnight to 1.30 am. The ship docked at around midnight and, while the passengers were mainly in their cabins sleeping off the prime rib and baked Alaska dinner, myself and Brad the Canadian sound operator ventured ashore. The dock consisted of a slab of crumbling concrete and absolutely nothing else. We walked through a gap in the sagging perimeter fence into Main Street which, in fact was the only street. The best way to describe the vista was 'post apocalyptic'. The town was dominated by what looked like a massive soviet era apartment block where, I was to learn later, almost all of the town's 214 population lived. A handful of low level buildings clad in timber and metal sheeting lined the streets, including the fire station which was  a burnt out shell.  The town's arsonist ...