The Safari Bus

Grandad's taxi gets a summer upgrade — and the maiden voyage does not go entirely to plan. Stanley takes the great-grandchildren to Knowsley, meets a monkey with strong opinions about wing mirrors, and lives to tell the tale. Then it's somewhere gentler: a hill outside Royton called Tandle, a wood he last stood in as a boy, and a memory that took him sixty years and a cathedral in Germany to make sense of.

Stanley Common is a retired community police officer from Heywood, Lancashire. He writes and records from a shed.

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Two empty fields in one fortnight, three thousand miles apart, and the same fella stood in the middle of both with a megaphone. This week Stanley gives him a name.

From the shed: the President's birthday party that hardly anybody went to, the pollsters up a stepladder at Nigel Farage's own do, and the march through our town that the town answered by going shopping. Plus the writing on the wall, why an echo can only ever tell you what you just said, and Stanley's mother on lugs, gobs, and the order you're meant to use them in.

Fair warning: there's a sober minute in the middle. Our town carries history that deserves better than jokes, and the jokes get put down for it.

Kettle's on. Sit yerself down.

Theme music: "Letters from the Shed", on Spotify by popular demand. Well, one lady from Cleckheaton, but demand is demand: "Letters from the Shed"

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Forty minutes from my shed, just off the M6, there's a pub that's been pulling pints since 1616. In June 1943, it also took four hundred bullets.

This week I got in the car and went to find out why.

It's the story of the 1511th Quartermaster Truck Regiment — Black American soldiers stationed in Lancashire during the war — a colour bar that didn't survive contact with Lancashire landlords, and a night the American army spent fighting itself down a village street three miles from Preston. It doesn't end where you'd expect.

Lancashire keeps turning up in American history when you go looking for it. This is one of those times.

If you're new here: I'm Stanley Common. I write and talk from a shed in Heywood about whatever's caught my eye that week — this one just needed a road trip first. The written version's on Substack if you'd rather read it than listen: [link]

Kettle's on.

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