Stanley's back from the school holidays to find the country arguing about black puddings.

Every second Sunday in September, Ramsbottom holds the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships — twelve Yorkshires on a twenty-foot plinth, three puddings each, underarm only, and all the money to charity. This year an animal rights outfit wants the puddings vegan, the papers have decided five hundred years of tradition is under attack, and the organisers have said something quietly interesting.

Also in this episode: Toy Story on repeat, a battle at Stubbins in 1455, Grandad's taxi, and a stricken Fiesta.

The written version is on Substack — View from the Shed.

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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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I wasn't planning a midweek episode. But a man has resigned from Parliament on purpose, so there can be a by-election, so he can stand in it — and the only candidate who's stepped up to face him wears a bin on his head. Ten minutes on Boaty McBoatface, Mr Blobby, five Christmas number ones about sausage rolls, a gritter called David Plowie, and what all of it should have taught the men who call themselves the voice of the people. Kettle's on. Sit yourself down.

Read the piece at Views from the Shed on Substack.

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Nobody in Heywood has noticed it's the fourth of July. The bins went out as normal.

But Stanley has reason to think about America. After leaving the force, he spent some years as security advisor to an American scientist — which meant collecting his colleagues from Manchester Airport and explaining England to them on the way. None of them knew there was a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the middle of Manchester. None of them knew why.

It's quite a story. It involves cotton, a blockade, a hall full of starving millworkers, and a vote that Lincoln himself wrote to thank them for. There's a cobbled road above Rochdale that's still there if you don't believe him.

Also in this episode: what a moor actually looks like, how a young Texan in cowboy boots got on at the local, the tradition of women dancing together and where it comes from, and Mrs C answering the only question the Americans ever asked about VE Day.

A follow-up, of sorts, to last week's episode about the man who called Manchester a town.

If you know an American, send them this one.

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Andy Burnham is the man who ran Greater Manchester for nine years — which means, among other things, that he was the man at the top of the organisation that pays Stanley’s pension. So Stanley has been paying attention.

This week, somebody asked the man across the water what he made of the lad from Leigh. The answer involved the word “town.” It was not meant as a compliment.

In this episode: a Labour conference in Manchester, a case of mistaken identity involving a former party leader, an old sergeant’s advice about toolboxes, an operation named after a hammer, and a song that was read out loud at hundreds of rallies — by a man who thought he was warning the world about something else entirely.

He told them. Out loud. To a microphone.

Transcript on Substack at stanleycommon.substack.com. Free to read, free to subscribe.

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Three pensioners walk into a pub. The conversation starts with JD Vance’s chicken coop, moves through the Epstein files and the Prince Formerly Known As Andrew, takes a detour via the Pentagon’s UFO releases, and ends with Kath the barmaid asking Stanley a question he’s been sitting on for thirty years.

It turns out South Lancashire has a reputation. UFO Valley, they call it. And a retired police officer on night shifts on the moors above Ramsbottom saw two things he never filed a report on. Until now.

Plus: Ronald Reagan says something to the United Nations that nobody knew what to do with. Steven Spielberg makes a film called Disclosure Day. And Stanley wonders whether someone, somewhere, is getting us ready for something.

He could be wrong. He often is.

Views from the Shed is written and presented by Stanley Common, a retired community police officer from Heywood, Lancashire. New episodes weekly. Find the newsletter at Substack — search Views from the Shed.

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