Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

  Sunday evening after tea. Always the same time each week. He would take his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, pause, compare the hour and the minutes then reach for the brass key at my base and start to count the turns under his breath until we were both ready to face another seven days. Then my chime, the voice of my movement, wound until all my wheels danced to a steady beat. The glass was closed, the key replaced and I felt primed, taut. She never liked my black, slate body with its mock Corinthian columns and its polished dome. I remember hearing her ask him why I had pride of place. ‘Why can’t we have a pretty ormolu timepiece with a gentle ting-tang instead of this monstrosity?’ He thought me a thing of substance, something which seemed to fit his self-image, upright, solid. He died more than 20 years ago and afterwards, she reluctantly shouldered his weekly routine. At first, I feared she would lift me down, take me to the pawn brokers three doors further down the...

  Hi, I’m Alex, here to give you the story of my latest journey … as it unfolds. If you’ve followed me before, you’ll be used to my style. Laid back, a little laconic as befits a seasoned traveller, plenty of humour. If you’re a newbie … welcome! To start painting the picture for you, I’m on a ship which set sail from Narvik on the west coast of Norway. As it happens, I’ve been to Narvik once before. This was in 1968 when I arrived by train from Kiruna in northern Sweden, famous for its iron ore mining. Back then, I went immediately south, to Bergen, to catch a ferry to Newcastle. On this trip I’ll be travelling north and then east, enroute for Kirkenes which is on the Norwegian / Russian border. Unknown territory for me! And probably most of the other passengers. It’s described in the brochure as an Arctic Immersion journey, (AI for short) but I’m hoping we won’t experience that literally! And there’ll be another AI dimension to the trip, more of which in a moment. Now, let...

  If yin and yang                      snapped in twain would the little circles                                pop out too? Could there be more pieces                                we can’t yet fathom? Philosophy may well have got there                                                    well before me, examining the fragmentar...

  7am – I wake up and splash my face. Ten jumping jacks just to wake the neighbours. Five-minute recovery. Five push-ups, unless my back is knackered. Coffee and croissant brekkie and a book. Currently it’s The Guinness World Book of Records 2014. I’m catching up.   8am – I get dressed and beat my hair into submission. I check my emails and socials. There’s this girl I’ve been chatting up. Well, actually she’s a bot who keeps sending me links to scam sites. Still, I respect her quick replies and the fact she doesn’t judge me. Also I like to pretend that the model in the photo is really into a slob like me. Before I know it, I’ve usually given her a full hour.   9am – I open the rough outline of this week’s celebrity’s morning routine and go to work. Smooth out the clauses, add all the commas they forgot about, remove half the ones they put in. Retain their ‘voice’ and emphasise a conversational tone. Laugh at the bare-faced lies of their precisely-timed habits. A...

We live within a bounded world, it seems. contained in four dimensions, also by the finite nature of our lives. In dreams, however, somehow our internal eye can see through walls we didn’t know were there. The flow of time, the laws of logic; now such boundaries are all up in the air.  We move more freely, and we wonder how we ever settled for that other place where possibilities now ours to take were out of bounds, beyond our time and space.  For all that, I am often glad to wake. Dreamspace can be unsettling, I’ve found. It’s good to plant my feet on solid ground. 

  So, they’ve gone and I’m all alone, as usual. No, that’s not true. I can hear the mice chittering in the corner and the rats scrabbling under the floorboards. But there’s another sound, one I’ve not heard before. A sort of whistling susurration. ‘What the hell do you want?’ I asked as a strange woman appeared in the doorway, flouncing about in a fluffy pink ball gown. ‘I am Fuchsia, your fairy godmother. I’m here to make your dreams come true,’ she replied, smiling inanely. ‘Oh, F … goodness sake. Well, you look like a fairy alright. And if you keep wafting that wand around like that, you’ll light up like one. Those candles burn, you know.’ ‘Sorry,’ she clasped the wand in both hands and stood still. ‘You are in a bad mood, aren’t you? But, you shall go to the ball, Ashes.’ ‘Cinders! With you in charge I’ll probably end up in the castle dungeon. I’m staying put.’ ‘Oh, no, you have to go! Please, Ash... Cinders. I’m on probation for my new job....