Mostly what differentiated the North from the South, however, was the exceptional sense of economic loss, of greatness passed, when you drove through places like Preston or Blackburn or stood on a hillside like this. If you draw an angled line between Bristol and the Wash, you divide the country into two halves with roughly 27 million people on each side. Between 1980 and 1985, in the southern half they lost 103,600 jobs. In the northern half in the same period they lost 1,032,000 jobs, almost exactly ten times as many. And still the factories are shutting. Turn on the local television news any evening and at least half of it will be devoted to factory closures (and the other half will be about a cat stuck up a tree somewhere; there is truly nothing direr than local television aews). So I ask again: what do all those people in all those houses do and what, more to the point, will their children do?

 We walked out of the grounds along another track towards Eldwick, past a large and flamboyant gatehouse, and David made a crestfallen noise. 'I used to have a friend who lived there,' he said. Now it was crumbling, its windows and doorways bricked up, a sad waste of a fine structure. Beside it, an old walled garden was neglected and overgrown.

 Across the road, David pointed out the house where Fred Hoyle had grown up. In his autobiography (It'll Start Getting Cold Any Minute Now, Just You See), Hoyle recalls how he used to see servants in white gloves going in and out the gate of Milner Field, but is mysteriously silent on all the scandal and tragedy that was happening beyond the high wall. I had spent .3 on his autobiography in a secondhand bookshop in the certain expectation that the early chapters would be full of accounts of gunfire and midnight screams, so you can imagine my disappointment.

 A bit further on, we passed three large blocks of council flats, which were not only ugly and remote but positioned in such an odd and careless way that, although they stood on an open hillside, the tenants didn't actually get a view. They had, David told me, won many architectural awards.

 As we ambled into Bingley down a curving slope, David told me about his childhood there in the Forties and Fifties. He painted an attractive picture of happy times spent going to the pictures ('Wednesdays to the Hippodrome, Fridays to the Myrtle'), eating fish and chips out of newspapers, listening to Dick Barton and Top of the Form on the radio a magic lost world of halfday closings, second posts, people on bicycles, endless summers. The Bingley he described was a confident, prosperous cog at the heart of a proud and mighty empire, with busy factories and a lively centre full of cinemas, tearooms and interesting shops, which was strikingly at odds with the dowdy, trafficfrazzled, knockedabout place we were passing into now. The Myrtle and Hippodrome had shut years before. The Hippodrome had been taken over by a Woolworth's, but that, too, was now long gone. Today there isn't a cinema in Bingley or much of anything else to make you want to go there. The centre of the town is towered over by the forbidding presence of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society not a particularly awful building as these things go, but hopelessly out of scale with the town around it. Between it and a truly squalid 1960s brick shopping precinct, the centre of Bingley has had its character destroyed beyond repair. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find that beyond its central core Bingley remains a delightful spot.

 We walked past a school and a golf course to a place called Beckfoot Farm, a pretty stone cottage in a dell beside a burbling beck. The main Bradford road was only a few hundred yards away, but it was another, premotorized century back here. We followed a shady riverside path, which was exceedingly fetching in the mild sunshine. There used to be a factory here where they rendered fat, David told me. It had the most awful smell, and the water always had a horrible rustycreamy colour with a skin of frothy gunge on it. Now the river was sparkling green and healthylooking and thespot seemed totally untouched by either time or industry. The old factory had been scrubbed up and gutted and turned into a block of stylish flats. We walked up to a place called FiveRise Locks, where the LeedstoLiverpool Canal climbs a hundred feet or so in five quick stages, and had a look at the broken windows beyond the razorwire perimeter of French's Mill. Then, feeling as if we had exhausted pretty much all that Bingley had to offer, we went to a convivial pub called the Old White Horse and drank a very large amount of beer, which is what we had both had in mind all along.

 The next day I went shopping with my wife in Harrogate or rather I had a look around Harrogate while she went shopping. Shopping is not, in my view, something that men and women should do together since all men want to do is buy something noisy like a drill and get it home so they can play with it, whereas women aren't happy until they've seen more or less everything in town and felt at least 1,500 different textures. Am I alone in being mystified by this strange compulsion on the part of women to finger things in shops? I have many times seen my wife go twenty or thirty yards out of her way to feel something a mohair jumper or a velveteen bed jacket or something.

 'Do you like that?' I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad.

 'That? she'll say. 'No, it's hideous.'

 Then why on earth,' I always want to say, 'did you walk all the way over there to touch it?' But of course like all longterm husbands I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say ' I'm hungry', 'I'm bored', 'My feet are tired', 'Yes, that one looks nice on you, too', 'Well, have them both then', 'Oh, for fuck sake', 'Can't we just go home?', 'Monsoon? Again? Oh, for fuck sake', 'Where have I been? Where have you been?', 'Then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?' it doesn't pay, so I say nothing.

 On this day, Mrs B. was in shoeshopping mode, which means hours and hours of making some poor guy in a cheap suit fetch endless boxes of more or less identical footwear and then deciding not to have anything, so I wisely decided to clear off and have a look at the town. To show her I love her, I took her for coffee and cake at Betty's (and at Betty's prices you need to be pretty damn smitten), where she issued me with her usual precise instructions for a rendezvous. Three o'clock outside Woolworth's. But listen stop fiddling with that and listen if Russell & Bromley don't have the shoes I want I'll have to go to Ravel, in which case meet me at 3.15 by the frozen foods in Marks. Otherwise I'll be in Hammick's in the cookery books section or possibly the children's books unless I'm in Boots feeling toasters. But probably, in fact, I'll be at Russell & Bromley trying on all the same shoes all over again, in which case meet me outside Next no later than 3.27. Have you got that?'

 'Yes.' No.

 'Don't let me down.'

 'Of course not.' In your dreams.

 And then with a kiss she was gone. I finished my coffee and savoured the elegant, oldfashioned ambience of this fine institution where the waitresses still wear frilly caps and white aprons over black dresses. There really ought to be more places like this, if you ask me. It may cost an arm and a leg for a cafetiere and a sticky bun, but it is worth every penny and they will let you sit there all day, which I seriously considered doing now as it was so agreeable. But then I thought I really ought to have a look around the town, so I paid the bill and hauled myself off through the shopping precinct to have a look at Harrogate's newest feature, the Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre. The name is a bit rich because they built it on top of Victoria Gardens, so it really ought to be called the Nice Little Gardens Destroyed By This Shopping Centre.