Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

On a clear and cold April morning, we leave the town of Ferizaj where we are staying and head south towards the mountains.  We come off the highway and onto a dusty road, then pull in at a mini-supermarket.  We are here to pick up Hysen, the mountain man who is going to take us up Lybeten, one of the tallest and most beautiful peaks in Kosovo.  Outside the tired-looking building, with its faded cigarette and soft drinks posters, three children sit playing on the ground.  This is the only store for miles which provides essentials for local villagers.  Hysen’s family has owned it for two decades.  The room beside the shop is a café and in the hot summer the plastic white furniture comes out, whilst in the harsh winter the chessboards come out. Hysen comes out of the shop and we climb out of the dusty car to greet him.  He is a sturdy man in his late 50s, with a mountain-weathered face and a smile of rugged serenity.  When I shake his hand, i...

  I love a mystery.   There’s something about one that captures my imagination and like a dog with a bone, I can’t let it go until I’ve solved it.   You never know when you might stumble across one. On a recent visit to Harewood House, near Leeds , a chance remark by my Mum ignited something, which then took hold of me for the next three days.   Harewood was the home of our present Queen’s Aunt, Princess Mary, only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary.   She married a wealthy aristocrat, Henry Lascelles, the 6th Earl of Harewood, in 1922. We were just nearing the end of our tour of the house when my Mum told to me she had previously read that Princess Mary was unhappily married and that her much older husband could be ‘cold and abusive’.   She said that there had been rumours that Mary did not want to marry Lord Lascelles, that she had been forced into the marriage by her parents and that Lascelles had proposed to her after a wager at...

To indent or not to indent? That is the question you never thought you’d have to ask yourself. But there are many such decisions to be made when self-publishing a book. There are the obvious ‘big’ decisions - do you publish just as an ebook or produce a paperback version too or instead? How are you going to go about getting the cover designed? Who are you going to get to edit and proofread the contents? Then there are all the ‘little’ decisions you never thought you’d be dithering over: What size is the book going to be? (Who knew there were so many options? I’m currently deliberating between 5 x 8, 5.5 x 8.5 or 6 x 9 inches). What font are you going to set it in? Arial, Times New Roman, Palatino Linotype, Garamond? What font size looks best? 10, 11 or 12pt? What about line spacing? Single, 1.5 or multiple 1.15? And then there’s the indenting. The convention is to indent the first line of every paragraph apart from the first one in each chapter. But my book is non...

Today, 4 August 2014 is the centenary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany during what was to become World War I.  This poem is a tribute to all those, of whatever nation, who suffered as a result of that devastating conflict.   ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON     To those of you who could not go to war but stayed at home to fight the fight in factories and lonely homes, condemned to wait, and mourn your sons, your fathers, husbands, brothers too. We applaud you.   To those of you who boldly went and not so boldly, too, but still you went, to rot alive in rat infested trench. You fought the fear, withstood the pain, returning home as strangers in a land forever changed. We thank you.   To those of you who gave your all, who sacrificed the precious life you had, whose final days were terror filled, brave enough to show your dread, yet braver still to hide it, too, for others' sake. We salute you.   To all ...