AT the front of his new book, All Our Yesterdays, Gervase Phinn's 63rd, is a picture of the author aged six.
There is the same impish grin underneath slightly screwed-up eyebrows you see on the now 61-year-old Phinn on the jacket.
The first picture would have been taken around about the time he was sent to the shop to collect his father's tripe.
"The woman behind the counter was Norman Evans and Les Dawson rolled into one," he says.
Unfortunately, a dog took a liking to the tripe, snatched it and young Gervase and his pal Philip chased it through the streets before retrieving it after the cow's innards had been trailed in the gutter.
He sneaked it back home, washed it in the bathroom, handed it to his mum and said nowt. After eating it his father reflected on its tastiness.
Gervase Phinn's childhood was "lovely," he says and this book may safely be considered to be the perfect antidote to all those Misery Memoirs and Painful Lives in the bookshops.
"At a time when everything on the news is doom and gloom and misery we need a book to record happier times," he says.
There are big chunks of his own childhood here, as well as anecdotes from readers who have enjoyed his books on Dales life, as a teacher and school inspector, and cullings from other autobiographies.
It's probably the only book you'll find to combine Phinn's confessions of wetting the bed on a Blackpool holiday, Vivienne Westwood's explanation of why she doesn't wear knickers (a childhood hatred of bloomers) and DH Lawrence remembering his pet rabbit Adolf poop on his bedspread.
Then there's Frank Muir not so fondly recalling the tiger nut which chewed like carpet while Stephen Fry gets his school report: "He has glaring faults and they have certainly been glaring at us this term."
Phinn's own childhood was in Rotherham and it was far from being miserable.
"I thank God my childhood was so very different. It was joyous. Growing up, I imagined that all children had loving, amusing, supportive parents like mine," he writes.
Phinn has mined his childhood, and many others, for All Our Yesterdays and the tone is upbeat. There is a little sadness here and there but shafts of sepia sunlight keep bursting through.
He's written all those books
and boasts that while some might be out of print (he's still looking for a first edition of his first Dales book which he gave away) he has never been remaindered.
"I always look in the bookshops because I could always sell them at a profit," he quips.
These days the author lives in Tickhill and keeps very busy. More books are on the way and he's never short of an anecdote to fill them.
"I went back to see my old headmistress Miss Wilkinson, aged 102. She said 'You've got more degrees than a thermometer but at school you were never at the top table.'"
Happy days.
All Our Yesterdays is published by Country Publications at £9.99.
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