Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

June 1987. The Grand Hotel, Margitsziget, Budapest.   James Fincham strode into the lobby and walked straight to the reception desk, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.   He set his brown leather holdall on the floor beside him.   The desk clerk looked up.    “Szervusz, Mr Leadbetter.   Good to see you. How can I help you?”   James replied in flawless Hungarian.    “Good morning, Ambrus.   Please can you tell me if Miss Fodor is in her room.”    “No, I believe she is in the lounge, sir.”    “Thank you, Ambrus.”   James ran his hand through his hair and walked over to the lounge area, towards a woman seated on an oversized sofa.   As soon as she saw him walking towards her, she leapt up and moved towards him.    “Henry, you’re late, darling. I feel as though I’ve been waiting for hours.”    “I’m only five minutes late, Martuska.   Come here.”   He bent down to kiss her.    “Not here, Henry.   Everyone will see.”    “I don’t care.”   They sat down

His death had come so suddenly. Not an old man at all.   She’d ended up with the job of clearing her father’s house. None of her three brothers was ever to be seen if there was practical work to be done.   Sorry sis, just about to fly to LA. Business you know.   Not that they were all in the States, but they were all busy, busy men.   It was partly guilt though. She’d seen little of her father over recent months. They’d frequently not seen eye to eye. Was she trying to make up in some way for that lack of contact?   Order had always been her thing. Even as a girl, her bedroom had been so neat and tidy, everything in its place. The contents of her father’s house had succumbed to the same order, felt-tip ticks in relevant columns on her checklist, a testimony to her skills.   Category one. The rubbish – junk as her mother would have called it. A cluster of king-size supermarket bags were lined up in the back porch, waiting patiently to be carted away by a man with a van.  

It looked incredible. Black oak aged for three centuries, originally used on an ocean-going vessel from the heart of the age of sail. The price had been incredible too—over two thousand pounds.  But, how many people could boast a window frame dating back to the early seventeen hundreds? We’d seen an advert about the wood beam, reclaimed from a Whitby shipyard as they wrapped up their business because of the current economy, and just couldn’t resist. We made a real feature of it in the bedroom, decking the room out in an opulent array of pirate maritime chic. When it was complete, the room was the spitting image of something you’d expect to see in Pirates of the Caribbean. My wife and I laughed at the imagined view of Johnny Depp flouncing around from the table filled with map charts to lean into the soft oval curve of the frame and the beautiful window seat it edged in its ancient dark timber. We both loved it, and it wasn’t until the third night that I awoke dripping with swe

The solar system of Star 95 closely matches project requirements. Give me a percentage. Percentage of what? Of finding a planet as neat as Earth. Could be as much as sixty, sir, according to our best scientists. The reactor lasts fifty generations? Seems hard to believe. We are at the limit, Mr President. One hitch in the first thousand years and we could run out of gas.   The volunteers – I’m concerned. Will they survive the radiation? Models show some damage to the genes. Whoever lands on two point zero may look… different. How different? Better or worse? No, don’t tell me. Prepare the launch. I wrote this poem in Loutro, Crete, after a boat trip at night. Riding the waves, there was a clear sky above (before the moon rose). With the roar of the boat's engine it felt like we were flying through the universe towards the stars.

Well, when you’re sitting in a caravan with the rain rattling down on the roof, you have to have something to do, don’t you? So, stuck inside, we put the bird pole outside the window and sat back to watch. First came the blue and great tits, squabbling and fluttering from the peanuts to the fat balls. Their young ones came too, happily helping themselves until mum or dad came near, then there was a sudden flurry of wings, a gaping maw and the parent bird obligingly stuffed food down the nearest mouth. I’ve always had the feeling that it’s children who train their parents, and now I know. That lot were soon shifted off by the woodpeckers – greater spotted ones, and we spotted them again and again as they wolfed down the contents of the feeders. For a while we were quite excited at the thought that we were watching a different variety – middle spotted woodpeckers, never before recorded in Britain. Then we read the book again and realised that the one with the red topknot was a