John Burke's a-Musings

On one of the pages on my Blackpool Webs Site I show this photograph described as " The Orion Cinema, now a Bingo Club ". I had a...

Someone asked me what it was that I remember most about holidays. If you have a look at my website you'll see we have been fortunate en...

The monthly track for October on the Billy Fury website is one from my solo album. It's a Patty Loveless country song called " Bla...

And this is before I opened it... I started the day full of good intentions to strip the remaining wood board panelling from the entrance ...

There's a story behind this one. This is my daughter, Gill, with actor Chris Rankin who plays Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter films. ...

Out of all the toys I remember from being a child, this has to be one of the favourites. Before the Danes took off their horned helmet...

The other day I mentioned a 1959 tenpin bowling game housed in a pinball cabinet. Today it's the turn of golf to come under the play...

No I don't mean I'm not going to talk about it again. I mean it's not the first time Blackpool has had a new promenade. Also no...

I really can't remember why I took this particular photo - it must have been on some extremely boring afternoon in or around 1980. T...

I became interested in pinball during the sixties. I grew up with games like Gigi, Ice Parade , and Cross Town . After a lifetime's devo...

Conversation between the women in the library at work this morning. One had been off for the day and her husband was expecting a delivery o...

Whilst I'm in a postcard mood... This is No.139 of a series of postcards, photographed in France sometime around the 1920s. Now Leo ...

One of several old postcards of Blackpool from my collection. I can't claim to be a serious postcard collector, although I have severa...

Creeping Bentgrass were out at Garstang Golf Club last night, playing for a Golden Wedding party. It all went down very well, though I had a...

Hey, groovy, Man! I love playing vinyl and have a saddening and somewhat scary ability to splash out on old decrepit record players so when ...

Still sorting through several thousand old photographic negatives and came across this one. This was my 1972 MkIII Ford Cortina, bought seco...

Carrying on the series of entries on coin slot machines from Blackpool and other seaside town amusement arcades of the 1950s-60s. This is...

I spent yesterday evening driving back from Glasgow in a tropical rainstorm. It never ceases to amaze me how suicidal some drivers are. I mu...

As the new academic year starts, I'm back travelling the roads and rail networks of Britain again. Tonight I'm in Glasgow, overlooki...

Ah, the Blackpool Belle! An illuminated tram, one of several built in the first half of the 1960s, this was a paddle steamer with the lights...