Grass does not grow under my feet!

Do I do anything else apart from writing? Well that would be telling! Be that as it may, a taster of the latest ‘tome’. Let me know what you think.
————————————————————
A beautiful early evening in late August; the sort of evening that middle-aged people think that every evening in late August was like when they were young, only usually of course they weren’t. Mind you those same people looking at photos of themselves taken at the same time as those misremembered beautiful evenings in late August always seem to remark that somehow or other they miraculously look slimmer, chicer and altogether more attractive than they felt themselves to be at the time the photos were taken, which only goes to prove that either most middle-aged people need to visit an optician as a matter of some urgency or they missed an awful lot of opportunities when they were younger.
Sitting on a quaint but uncomfortable and guano-encrusted wooden bench in the trying to be family friendly garden of the “The Cocked Pistol’, an old Cornishire smuggling pub situated in a picturesque small river valley surrounded by gently rolling heavily-wooded hills and built in the 1950’s complete with thatched roof, authentic oak-type beams and a tourist-attractive history that was total bollocks but nevertheless highly imaginative and vaguely entertaining, a slightly rotund pixie-like figure five and a half feet tall, not athletically built with a bald pate and a one inch wide band of hair running around his head starting from his temples and meeting at the back was taking a reflective sip of his pint of ‘Fetid Old Socks’ and looking at just such a photo, taken on just such an evening. Detective Chief Inspector Leon Karno, inevitably ‘Fred’ to his schoolmates and contemporaries at Hendon when he joined the force, ‘Guv’ to those detectives who worked under his somewhat quixotic direction in the Cornishire CID and ‘bastard’ to a fairly impressive number of local and not so local villains in Cornishire saw that the photo revealed a much younger but still recognisable Fred Karno and a mate, William Hiscock, whose cremation he had just attended. He and ‘Wild Bill’ had been quite the local lads, able to out drink all of their contemporaries and still stand up after six (occasionally claimed to be sixteen) pints of the local cider known as scrumpy; they had all the best chat-up lines, most of which Karno fondly remembered as starting with a cheerful ‘ello my luvver’; he also remembered that usually the hoped-for romantic encounters ended with a friendly riposte of ‘my friend says why don’t you fuck off and stop bothering her!’ Bolstered by this early success with the opposite sex, Karno had got a haircut and graduated from the police training college at Hendon eventually to join the CID; Wild Bill had graduated from the local scrumpy and eventually became a fully-fledged alkie and professional ‘gentleman of the road’, although they kept in irregular touch whenever Karno’s beat took him past whatever hedge Wild Bill was currently residing in. Middle age respectively found the two old pals a DCI and a DOA, Wild Bill having been found under a chic hedge in a more upmarket part of Cornishire clutching a half-empty bottle of meths, his preferred tipple of later years.