I didn't say Morley, Leeds, because that could be seen as an insult to an historically independent borough and in any case postcodes and local government boundaries tend to distort human geography. Morley is by no means Leeds, just as the county of Humberside was never by any means anywhere.

Nor does Burnley represent, in any representative way, Lancashire. It's a place with an enormous sense of its own place, which is in a strip of cotton settlements, also including Nelson and Colne, in east Lancashire; it's not a poor relative of Blackburn or Manchester and actually many Burnley people regard the Blackburn accent, which we think of as the definitive Lancashire accent, as being, as they would dismiss it, 'well funny'.

Anyway, this visit to Burnley, Lancs, was my first for years and years and was to a terraced street which, when I was last there, was quite distressed and might, through neglect, have tumbled down were it not for the fact that the stone mill cottages were very solid and so, as we shall see, were the stone mill cottage dwellers.

This street, home to my oldest (sorry, most longest-term) friend Kath, was the one where Paul Abbot, author of the TV show Shameless, was brought up. All the goings-on on the Chatsworth Estate, including a regularly alcoholically-collapsed father and feral children, were rehearsed in this corner of Burnley.

When I first encountered the street it was a bit like that, although it was also pocketed by warm, decent, life-enhancing people, which sounds patronising but isn't because it was.

My return to Burnley demonstrated this. The street, Healey Wood Road, is on the very edge of town – cross it and walk a bit and you are in the middle of the Pennine hills.

In between there is a scruffy area of old quarry land once occupied by abandoned caravans, cars, sheds, TVs and things you would rather not investigate.

Kath and two of her female neighbours bought a patch of land opposite their Healey Wood Road homes, cleared and enlarged it with creative planting and possibly creative land-grabbing and installed gravel paths, terraces and water features so now it's become a wonderland – very much like the Chatsworth Estate, Derbyshire, and not at all like the Chatsworth Estate, Paul Abbot-land.

For example, Kath held an evening barbecue in the communal garden at the weekend and wondered which patio it should be held on so as to best catch the falling light. Nobody in the history of Healey Wood Road has ever had to worry themselves about which patio to eat on; it's as unlikely a dilemma as wondering which paddock to exercise the ponies on.

Things have changed for the better, as, here and elswhere over the last 10 years, things generally have, although you would have to extract toenails to get anybody to admit it – windows are clean, woodwork is painted, hanging baskets are looking jolly, and it was even rumoured that one of the nearby terraced houses had sold for £70,000!

My outing to Morley was equally surprising, but only because of my appalling ignorance. I have only passed through it a couple of times during my 35 years in Leeds and didn't realise it was as different to Leeds as stone is to red brick or independent businesses (such as the café playing nothing but 1950s pop tunes) are to acres of chain stores.

Morley's huge Central Methodist church is also very remarkable – it's not derelict and it doesn't sell carpets.


Victim of technophobia

IF you were to telephone my house and wait for long enough, you would be transported to some circle of Dante's Inferno or to Guantanamo Bay.

This is because I bought a budget telephone with a built-in answering machine. Unfortunately, on the default setting, the answering machine lady, taking a very high-handed and unpleasant tone, said: 'The person you wish to contact is not available and' (I'm paraphrasing here) 'you cannot leave a message. Please go away immediately. I despise you.'

So, even though I had lost the manual, I determined to reprogramme the machine with a friendlier message so I could keep at least some of my friends.

But it all went wrong and now my answering machine message is stuck at a midway point between my success in wiping off the default message and my frustrating and abject failure to load a new one.

It says: 'Oh no, no, noooo' in a tone of such total despair that I hope someone doesn't feel obliged to forward it to the Samaritans or the police so that I find my house surrounded by emergency teams, counsellors and psychiatric social workers, which could be just the thing to drive me over the edge.