Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

I’m nearly there, I’m making it.   I managed to keep it up for 49.5 seconds last week.   I tell you twice a night, three times a week is finally paying off.   My wife says she’s never known anyone like me.   So I told her, ‘I just need to keep practising’ and suggested making it four nights a week.   She was a bit dubious at first but after a couple of days thinking about it, she agreed.   She even went and bought me a new, soft tape measure so I could really keep tabs on my performance – it does get a bit awkward with that metal thing I used to use. I kept pressing the retract button when I got a bit excited and that’s painful, I can tell you. I was a bit disappointed with my mate, Jack, though.   He was the one got me started on this regime in the first place.   ‘It’s amazing,’ he used to say, ‘you’ll feel so much better for it’.   And so I began, just once a week at first, just for something a bit different.   All th...

Redline is the second  "Harry Vos Investigation". Set in Belgium, the novel begins with the discovery of a body - identity unknown - and takes us, and Vos, into the worlds of tattooing, nuclear waste and fracking. I caught up with author Dave Rigby to chat about the book, Belgium and the business of writing.  What inspired you to write about environmental issues and shady land dealings? I’ve always had an interest in environmental issues and specific concerns about nuclear power and more recently, fracking. There’s been an increasing need for storage sites for nuclear waste, particularly with problems around reprocessing of nuclear fuel, the decommissioning of older power stations and recent proposals for building new ones. Likewise, there’s been a lot of interest from companies wishing to develop sites for fracking, another area of activity which has serious environmental implications. (Although fracking is not currently permitted in Belgium, there’s an a...

It fell down the Moore West drain cover some time ago. A smooth grey plastic pebble with no features aside from the white speckles forming a ring around its centre.             It barely made a sound as it landed, a mere splash in muddy water. And yet it wasn't dragged off by the current. Instead it gained a strange heaviness and sank like all pebbles ultimately do.             And then, at the bottom of the cloudy brown, it malfunctioned back to life. It switched on without prompt and started to emanate bright white lights that cut clean through the water and reached out past the drain cover.             This light bent and shaped itself into something flat at the bottom but curved at the top: a gentle curve, the curve of a human foot. The light created a twin and these both sprouted up into thin legs that broadened in...

My black shoes. My shiny, black patent shoes. My full-back black shoes. My lean-heeled black shoes. My higher-than-high black shoes. They are special, my black shoes. Look at me, they say. My glamorous black shoes. I stand tall in them. I feel majestic in them. They hold me at the top of the stairs, poised to convey me down and make a graceful entrance. My inky, ebony black shoes. One last look at the way they elongate my legs. One last look at their gleaming, resplendent beauty, before I remove them and walk barefoot downstairs. They will not throw me headlong today. My killer black shoes.