At 15, he became a casual: one of the label-wearing, wedge-flicking, swaggering hooligan peacock boys who dominated the north-west when I was growing up. Casuals were working-class lads (called Perry boys in Manchester) who loved football, fighting and brilliant sportswear.

For these are but mockful and treacherous things — / The thorns that crackle to sharpen their stings.

MAKOWIEC. (Poppy-seed. roll).

The red-painted farm-houses, peculiar to Norway, lay picturesquely scattered on the higher points of the undulating valley, where men and women were busy hay-making.