PASSING Accrington Town Hall recently, I reached into my pocket for my hankie and, shock horror, my fingers closed on five chunks of broken biscuit and more crumbs than you can shake a stick at.

For a 62-year-old it came as something of a shock. Till receipts, bus tickets, a bit of loose change, OK, but broken biscuit - really.

Thinking back to the previous evening I remembered the need to carry a cup of tea, the newspaper and a biscuit from the kitchen to the middle room and I must have slipped the biscuit in my pocket and then forgotten about it.

Thinking further back, I reckoned it must have been some 50-odd years since I had biscuit crumbs in my pockets.

Back then, come washday all over Lancashire (it being a Monday) thousands of mums would be 'turning out' little lads' pockets, revealing marbles, bits of string, a fluff covered wine gum, the blackened remains of a screwed up Elastoplast (and if you were unlucky, knicker elastic offcut from a catapult repair - which could lead to some very dodgy interrogation) and, of course, biscuit crumbs. Little did we know, or care even, that the turned-out hoard to the average mum was a wonderful map of all the things that her lad had been up to since the previous wash day.

Many an early bath or bed arose from the failure to destroy incriminating evidence - happy days, remembered, thanks to failing memory and a biscuit.

D PRATT (Mr), Plantation Street, Accrington.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.