When the pits shut, it was pushed towards the kind of chain-store retailing that defined a strangely circular economic model, in which people worked in shops to spend money in other shops.
"They just shut pit upon pit upon pit.
Britain's last remaining miners became industrial travellers over the past 15 years, moving from pit to pit as they shut.
It's not as intense now, because the pits are shut". McCulloch is one of the towering figures in Cumnock's history.
Mr. Gross, who likes to say that "every serial killer in American history began by torturing animals; that's a known fact," says S.P.C.A. investigators have shut down pit bull- and cock-fighting operations in Gordon Heights, Brentwood, Wyandach, Islip, Mastic and Amityville (that one, officials say, was run by a corrections officer).
But earlier this year came news that work on a new seam at Maltby had had to be suspended, because of unusually high levels of gas, and the pit was to be shut.
I contributed to the fictions myself at the time, co-writing a radio series about a miner called Stephen J Blackburn who got made redundant when they shut his pit and became a private detective; it was surreal, but the times were surreal, and life and art became mixed up, bleeding into each other like paints.
Whenever I saw the wagons stalked with skeletonic humans, or marching of innocent men and women towards the pit, my systems would shut down on me and I would turn the TV off or walk away from it.
So when Mrs Thatcher decided to shut the pits, she didn't just shut the pits, she got rid of the camaraderie".
Burn pits at Balad were shut down in 2009, but they continue to be used at small bases in Afghanistan.
