When a customer wearing a Stockport County face-mask walked into the Strawberry Pig, a popular fish and chip shop on Park Lane, in Poynton, last month, the owner looked up from behind the counter and smiled.
‘Did you know Mark Stott used to work in here when he was a kid?’ he said. ‘We had his sister serving customers but I never promoted Mark out of the kitchen. I guess I got that wrong.’
Stott lived up the road in those days on the Parklands Estate in the village outside Stockport. His parents had split up, his mum raised him and his sister by herself and they were on food tokens at Poynton High School.