THE publisher writes: "Winter Breaks is a no-frills weekend flight to the saddest hotel in the world.

It's a grim Saga tour round the pleasures of old age, decrepitude and oblivion." Dying (literally) to go?

Gordon Hodgeon, a one-time schools' adviser on Teesside, is your guide to delights such as

Another wintry visit to the Crem
It's rather like the Post House down the road,
same bricks, same shrubs and lawns,
same chimney stack,
I wonder if they offer bed and board
It gets worse (the gloomy thoughts, not the poem):
Now I'm envying (you as well?) the sod
who's made it to the safety of the casket
and wishing it was me up there instead.

"Casket?" Never mind. Hodgeon has an apt phrase for his own gallows outlook: "dark-humoured fun". A little more light shines in an excellent group of poems inspired by his working-class Lancashire upbringing.