First visited : 2 June 2014
The Grey Horse sits on the B6169 ( Broadstone Road ) on a bend near the large Broadstone Mill. It is probably in Reddish rather than Stockport.
It's a bigger place than you imagine from the outside. Now owned by the Joseph Holt brewery it's been kept in good shape. The furnishings are clean and comfortable but it's a bit soulless even allowing for the fact I was visiting in the early afternoon at the start of the week. The wall decorations are a bit ad hoc and the over-sized lamp shades look really out of place. There are plenty of screens for the football and a heated covered terrace for the smokers but nothing to encourage a return visit.
Walking along Broadstone Road I found myself wondering what , if anything, my companion 35 years ago, Stephen now remembered of these trips.
It was obvious, long before he left school just under three years later, that our friendship had become an embarrassment to him. At the tail end of 1979 he'd bought into the Mod Revival in a big way and being "cool" was all important to him. I was, as he gently put it, a "boring square" and everything we'd done up to that point a childish thing to be put away. C'est la vie as they say.
Before I left Littleborough in 1997 I used to see him around every now and then and he'd be friendly enough. He had a job in catering and got married in his early twenties but it was over by the time he was 30. I don't think there were any kids.
You would assume he now has a less Stalinist view of our activities but it's unlikely much detail survived the purge. My guess is he would be able to name a few places we went to and roughly the time frame ( by an unhappy chance it wasn't long before his gran, who brought him up and was a lovely person , died ) but little else. That I was preserving the memory like this would no doubt embarrass him anew.
