For Easter, I travelled to see the family. Sunday lunches are always fun, and this time we had 12 around the table. For some reason we got onto ghost stories: for a while my gradnparents have felt they have had a visting pair pf ghosts called George and Alice, so named following a visist from the loal medium who was asking whether they had relatives with such names. Presences are definitely felt, mainly just watching, and the dogs have seen something, refusing to go into rooms at times. However, the ghosts have been quiet lately; my Nan kept asking them what they wanted – I think they just got fed up of being hasselled by her!

Mom and Dad had their own story after that. Travelling back from a do late one evening they’d just turned a corner when a boy on a bike, with no lights, sped across the road immediately in front of them. Dad slammed the brakes on as the boy disappeared down a track to a farm. The spooky thing was the boy had appeared from the left side of the road, where there was nothing but a steep bank and a hedge, there being no way through, and there was no sight of him down the track when they got level. The farm was Yew Tree farm, where Carl Bridgewater, a newpaper boy on a bike was murdered in 1978. In the week the people who had been jailed for his murder started a successful appeal against their conviction, they’re convinced that Carl is whom they saw.

One thing about visiting is hearing the dialect I grew up with and heard on the buses (always pronounced with a z) and in the shops. It contains some nice mediaeval useages such a ‘bist’ for ‘are’, you can see the links to german/Dutch with these. More can be found on the BBC dialect sites