In yesterday’s Guardian, author Margaret Drabble listed the top 10 literary landscapes and put Burslem at No.2. I’m shocked. Has she seen the Potteries since the early 1970s? Shambolic, impoverished, rusty, broken – these are words that spring to my mind as someone who grew up in Staffordshire. Margaret says Burslem has a “weird post-industrial landscape” – that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard about the place for 30 years.