The wonder of Woolies' woolies

Returning to the Wellingborough wheat topic once more... One of the reasons I find this, the last days of the working boats, so fascinating, is that it falls - just - within my lifetime, and yet is still another world. While Nutfield was being bow-hauled down the Rothersthorpe locks, I was picking forget-me-nots and painting with water on the faded peeling maroon paint of our shed door in Thornton Heath.

And this is brought home to me all the more keenly by the feature in Waterways World. See there on page 66, the little boy sitting on the bollard, and again, in the bottom corner of page 67, trotting down the towpath. He must be about my age; maybe a year older, no more than that. But even more to the point, look at the jumper he's wearing. I know that's a Winfield jumper from Woolworths, because I had one exactly the same (only with the welts in blue not brown). They were made to last in those days; I still have it somewhere, after me and my sister, it was worn by my own children. A strange link with the past, but a link all the same.