Anything Goes

`You read OUR KID?' I asked a bibliophiliac pal of mine recently, ANYTHING GOES, the most recent book in Billy Hopkins' best selling Manchester-based family saga having just seen the light of day. `Read OUR KID?' said my pal, the polymath. `Of course I've read OUR KID. It's a wonderful book! Y'know, there are people who've read OUR KID who never open a book from one year's end to the next! Praise indeed, methinks - or rather, methought. Because latterly I've begun to wonder whether some of the people who `never open a book from one year's end to the next' have maybe missed out on the rest of the Billy Hopkins canon - which now extends to five books in all: OUR KID, HIGH HOPES, KATE'S STORY, GOING PLACES, and ANYTHING GOES. And a further thought strikes me in this regard. Could it be the case that the people who allegedly changed the habit of a lifetime in order to read OUR KID, have fallen away again when (KATE'S STORY apart) Billy Hopkins - schooled, scanned, socially mobile now too - took himself off to the leafy suburbs of south Manchester? If so, I'm delighted to be able to report that ANYTHING GOES, the latest episode in the Hopkins family saga, sees Billy Hopkins back with a vengeance - and walking the meanest streets known to post-1960s man. No, he's not forsaken the Tropic of Didsbury for the Collyhurst of his youth, though he does see the Land O' Cakes for a spell - not to mention Middleton's newly-built Langley Estate where his parents set up house upon their retirement. But, returned from Africa at long last, having made something of himself in his chosen career, with a good bit of work experience under his belt, having accumulated too some of the financial rewards that hard work should bring in its train, with a wife he loves by his side and kids the same, with middle-age looming, with comfort and cosy contentment in the offing - Anything Goes sees Billy Hopkins' life take a sudden turn for the worse when his parents take ill and die, and a goodly selection of the proverbial bugbears and substances of 1960s Great Britain make specific direct hits in the vicinity of the Hopkins family's domestic fan. There's drug taking for a start by a former A-student who promptly becomes a college dropout; and there's Billy's teenage daughter to cope with too, apostatising in her innocence and inexperience to the dubious religious tenets of an oriental Bagpuss of a man possessed of the obligatory fleet of Rolls Royces and a personal jet plane. In short, all the tender love and care Billy Hopkins and his wife have lavished on their brood over the years now count as nought when set against the self-serving philosophies the kids find so readily available from the very first navel-defluffing screwballs they encounter on the nearest street corner and college campus. Student sit-ins and cacophonous music at Billy's place of work are a breeze by comparison. But as ever Billy Hopkins' good humour and personal philosophy of life shine thro