In the final week of May 1931, Baker Street and Marylebone Road were covered with straw in order to reduce any disturbance to a man who lay dying in his flat above Baker Street station.

This was one of the last occasions this public mark of respect was shown.

It was for Arnold Bennett, the 150th anniversary of whose birth is this year.

During his life he was a highly regarded and successful author and, probably because of this, despised by Virginia Woolf and the ‘Bloomsbury’ set as provincial and old fashioned.

Bennett has experienced significant reappraisals of his literary talent and it is to be hoped his anniversary will be properly celebrated not just in Stoke on Trent, his home town but more widely.

Stoke is also my birthplace and although, having lived in Hereford for 20 years and considering myself a Herefordian, I still have huge affection for the city.

Stoke is in the national spotlight owing to the recent by-election and I hope, despite being dubbed the Brexit capital of England, the result reflects the motto of the city which comprises a federation of six towns, ‘vis unita fortior’ – ‘united strength is stronger’.

Hereford Sixth Form College prepares 1,000 young people a year to leave their home county.

Many will seldom return but I am sure they will feel the same affection and pull of their ‘dulce domum’ as did the mole in The Wind in the Willows.

"He saw clearly how much it all meant to him and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces but it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."