Although my appearance in Bury St. Edmonds was a while ago (December the 16th actually) I didn’t want the occasion to pass unrecorded.

The final show on my 50 date 2019 theatre tour, it was also the biggest with over 400 people packing the  Apex Theatre. Amongst them was the lovely Helen, the first person I hired to help me when I became an MP in 1997. Helen worked for me in Hull and then in London but now lives with husband Charles and two children in Bury. Also there was Charles Clarke, my boss at Education when I was Minister for Higher and Further Education. He and his wife Carol came over from Cambridge, the base for Charles’s multifarious activities. He was a great politician and is a senior figure in the Society of Former Home Secretaries!

It was a great night and my excuse for leaving it so long until it got the blog it deserved is that we ran immediately into Christmas and then, on January 8th travelled to Australia to spend three weeks with my sister Linda who has lived there for 36 years.

I’m often asked how Linda is (she was the hero of my childhood memoir ‘This Boy’). The answer is she’s doing great with two new knees, fitted last year, and a lovely house near Mandura in Western Australia, close to the beach where she lives with husband Charlie.