A real readybrek kid 
My prep school, at Gosforth, played the St. Bees cricket 3rd 11 . They had an advantage because they used the full sized ball. We used a smaller one. I opened the bowling for my side. This bigger ball felt enormous.
I remember thinking how windswept and stark that school was, perched on St Bees Head. I was glad I wasn’t going on there as most boys at my school did.
People from up-norf have bigger balls (says Chris) magic!
No. Heysham is blessed with two nuclear power stations, Heysham 1 & 2
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I am extremely surprised that Heysham 1 is still going @Katiefleur b ut you are right - I checked!. Heysham 2 was commissioned in the early 80s as far as I can remember (I worked on it!) and Heysham 1 is way older than that!
Lovely photos!
If you’re under 44, had you been born in Saint-Tropez the midwife would probably have been my godmother as she worked there as a midwife until the late 1990s! Small world, isn’t it?
Her husband (my uncle then) ran the St-Tropez hospital from the 1970s to the 1990s, the old one, which was located approx. 300 yards from the town centre on Avenue Foch (it had actually been officially inaugurated in 1903 by Marshall Foch himself) – and only 3 minutes’ walk from the delightful Plage des Graniers where I’d go as a lycéen & student whenever I visited my family there, for Easter or in September. September-time in particularly was pleasant, relatively quiet and not boiling hot. By contrast now, Sept. is manic, not as bad as June-August but still super busy, the effects of overtourism I suppose. My family tells me that they have those horrible traffic jams until well into October now. The upside is that they can sell their properties a fortune… When they moved there in the 1970s, property in the Grimaud-Sainte-Maxime area (a couple of miles inland) was roughly the same price as it was in Orléans, give or take 10%.
There’s a lovely 1-mile walk to do from Saint-Tropez harbour to the Graniers beach, using the Sentier du Littoral (which stretches the length of the French Mediterranean coast, that St-Trop’ area segment is one of its highlights), the path goes through the place on your photo actually, the Ponche area, the old fishing district of St-Trop’.
The old hospital is now gone, along with the Clinique de L’Oasis which was next door. A much bigger hospital (Pôle de santé) opened outside St-Trop’ about 20 years ago to replace it, it’s located between Port-Grimaud and Gassin, next to the Collège-Lycée du Golfe where maybe you went to school at some point.
I really like Saint-Tropez (especially out of season, obvs. !) and have plenty of memories there. I saw the Gipsy Kings busk their way to stardom there! They busked on the harbour and the bars & discos around it, circa 1981-82 (they came from the Arles & Camargue area), before they became international mega stars. I still go but irregularly, was last there 2 years ago but it really was too hot for me, 33-35 everyday, the Musée de L’Annonciade just off the harbour is a little gem.
St-Trop’ has of course a rich artistic past, it was the original artists’colony in the south of France, in the 1880s-90s (along with Collioure, a few years later), when St-Trop’ was but a sleepy fishing village. The sea and fabulous light in particular attracted artists, the pointillist Paul Signac in particular who was the first to set up camp there, he loved the sea and bought a boat where he’d spend months on, Georges Seurat of course too, he’d frequently visit, then the Fauvists took to the place, especially Matisse (who soon decamped to Collioure), it attracted the Nabis (Bonnard, Vuillard…), Picasso later etc.
And the Tarte Tropézienne of course! Invented by Polish immigrant Alexandre Micka and popularised by Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco and a few others after them. Legend has it that Micka didn’t get a penny out of it, although he did (late on) patented the recipe but apparently it was too late, or summat like that.
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