I never entirely plumbed the reasons for his preferring labour, no matter how stultifying or demeaning or ill-paid, to collecting benefits
I was about to be sprung from my class status. My father worked in a factory, my parents owned a tiny house and a secondhand car, they were socially awkward and didn’t speak very good English; I didn’t really know what a rise in status would entail. I had no desire to work in finance or to join any…
I was fated to work in a factory. [...] My father managed to avoid working in the textile plants, but he couldn’t help being employed by ancillary businesses; there wasn’t anything else. When I was born he had been working for about five years in an iron foundry that made equipment for the plants. …
The last time I performed in their theatre—the Jo Ro, opposite the factory—I played Abdullah, a street urchin in Tennessee Williams strange, static play, Camino Real. I was thirteen years old. As Abdullah, I was photographed by the Yorkshire Evening Press, and the accompanying caption came very nea…
There is something salubrious about chocolate production, after all. It’s an amiable
