They are diffident, tolerant, undemonstrative, and loyal, and the influence of Grom permeates, even when she is absent. Her habit of torturing him by eating pungent and unsavoury food with gusto (and without teeth) and in public is politely avoided without resentment on either side.

He refuses any self indulgence his affectionate love of Grom (his grandmother-Edith) is epitomized by his refusal not only to take the same bus with her to work, (in Hell’s Satanic Mill) but a different bus route entirely. I feel I begin to get a little closer to its hooking summons to travel with it: Phillip is disarmingly devil-may-care on the surface. If a reader is tempted to sympathy, it quickly disappears. Into Phillip he pours his unstated affection for his home but like a shirt tail that should not escape but does. Well that’s not all: it asks me to take on trust Sheffield in the seventies, through the eyes ears and nostrils of Phillip, its narrator and interpreter of the author’s sardonic, nostalgic and dismissive memory. I am not sure I can analyse why, or even that I garnered half of what its sharp language referred to, for it is a new language, and describes a world as unfamiliar as Bangladesh, although it only asks me to travel as far as Sheffield, Ilkley, Barnsley, Skegness and environs.

It got better and better, once the idiom lodged, and more compelling. This is not a world I know anything about, yet something in the self-effacing and evocative staccato began to mesmerize.

This book takes a willingness to be persuaded, but becomes increasingly addictive, as you bite into separate scenes, and ride a great many buses in pursuit of Sheffield United, the possibility of ‘gear’ or a good dust up with Skin heads or Rockers, and those who fail to appreciate the finer distinctions in Motown and Soul. The first taste is of something indefinable salty and lime flavoured, with more than a hint of sea, of vinegar, of jellied eels and certainly bracing. Readers who are used to Walkers Crisps in portioned packets will find opening this unfamiliar shrink wrapped alternative challenging. ‘You weren’t supposed to be clever where I came from…’

Wood, Talc and Mr. J by Chris Rose