fleapit

At the tender age of 15, just a year after he left school, Sol bought his first cinema - a Sunderland fleapit called the Gaiety.

In those pre-television days going to the pictures was the most important leisure activity for many of us and we visited the local fleapit at least twice a week

He moved into theatre where he became a fleapit manager, rising to senior executive of African Consolidated Theatres in South Africa.

THE evening progressed, via a service station at a godforsaken fleapit called Miles to a similar facility in the middle of the night at Morven, where it was hard to see outside owing to the thick blanket of moths and flies on the window.

It was certainly a far cry from the fleapit I previously stayed at in the Thai capital.

But the more revealing tale is that he's a pukka fan of 30s and 40s noir black and white Hollywood movies and spills the beans that as a lad his mum would get free tickets for the local fleapit in their hometown.

If Guston was a mandarin, he was one who had done the equivalent of giving away his money and settling into a fleapit rooming house to drink Thunderbird and think about the sea.

It was to them that we felt closest, for they were even more broke than we could be - but whenever one of them got a postal order, he would shower us all straightaway with cigarettes and chewing gum, or take us to the Royal, a fleapit in Rue des Vieux - Jesuites that showed Westerns and gangster movies.

This bar was a pioneer in reinventing San An from 18-30 fleapit to stylish resort.

In July in Swansea, scriptwriter Andrew Davies, film critic Berwyn Rowlands and Dylan expert Jeff Towns, president of the Dylan Thomas Society of Great Britain, will explore the remains of the fleapit cinemas Dylan used to frequent in Swansea, delving into his love of Hollywood and the influence of classic 1930s and 1940s movies on his writing.

With audiences likely to be armed with full popcorn buckets, this seems to be a perfectly appropriate way to introduce a family blockbuster to the masses who believe in the old fleapit mantra: "watch film, stuff face".

And it's a loving homage to the B-movies that played in fleapit cinemas in the Seventies, replete with oodles of violence and nudity.

Very occasionally we went to The Triangle in Gooch Street, a real fleapit, or The Luxor, the other way from The Triangle, off Longmoor Street.

When I was a tiny tot I can remember watching Path News at the local fleapit cinema and seeing black and white images of Bradford (Park Avenue) beating Arsenal at Highbury.

Cheryl and I stayed the night in a real fleapit of a place.