Chorley

Well, it wasn't St Something's in the something (see last Sunday). It was St James, Chorley. Not a robe in sight.

Carpets, chairs, a worship band (rather older than last week's, playing songs considerably more slowly), and a visiting preacher who went down a bomb with most of the congregation as he negotiated in a lively way some bits of the Bible about anger and what to do with it. We had a chat with a few nice people afterwards, who were mostly a bit surprised to get visitors who'd walked to the church from the canal.

This wouldn't have surprised Nicholson's, which thinks of the canal as skirting Chorley. We'd walked to the supermarket last night, and couldn't see any particular reason to visit the town for anything else. It has its share of abandoned industrial buildings, one reduced to being rented out as a phone mast. It certainly isn't a TV mast, judging by our lack of reception.

As we came back to Erin Mae, it appeared that the Wigan flight had followed us here.

Well, we'd decided it was time to have a barbie, and figured there was just enough time to fit one in at lunch-time before the rain. Unfortunately we found ourselves engrossed by the first half-hour of the British Grand Prix (via broadband). By the time the meat was cooked the skies were beginning to drip, and we retreated indoors. It was very tasty, but a lost photo opportunity.

During the second world war (and before I was born), my dad was involved in aerodrome construction in various places around the country. At one point he and my mum and my two older brothers lived in a house called Chorley Hall. There's a local house that goes by this name, but the internet makes it look far too grand to match the few photos that I remember seeing – I'm sure they pumped their own water and generally lived pretty close to the earth. So I think it must have been another Chorley. They seemed to have looked back on the period with some affection, and I must ask the brothers what they know about it all.

Tomorrow we have one more visit to the town – a walk down to B&Q to return some unwanted items and then catch a bus back to Adlington to pick up the item we missed on Saturday. Hope it's arrived. I don't feel in the mood for spending yet another night here.