Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

She left right left right left right away.   I don’t know but I’ve been told I’m rough, not ready to be good as gold.   One, two. Sound off. Three, four. Sound off. Five, six. I miss the sound of her voice.   Lift your hands up to the sky she drilled the heart of this GI.   If I should die in this camp, bury me beside that tramp.   Her company halts.

  in its tiny global space surrounded by wet fueled by greed of the big boys as ordinary people need help support plagued by isms disparity of citizens law and order corrupt bottom heavy top light an anachronism of itself a whale floundering a ship grounding what glorious past? its young men conned time and again heroic lions dead driven to battle into slaughter no they did not stop they died instead what pride but what a price to pay for land grab by those who sat at long tables with strong liquor and fat cigars and yet those like them still rule our very existence so what prayer to say to a god that cannot hear what futile war will be next prayers won’t help they never help reality get a grip we do not want do not need any more

Eight of us standing on a suspended walkway Staring down at the swirling waters below. A riverside walk, followed by a canalside walk, Followed by a couple of pints in the sunshine. Talk of this and that. Someone says – why don’t we each make a list of our top ten tunes? Ten’s not enough, somebody else says. Make it twenty. In time for the next meet-up. It’s agreed. We only get together every three months, so there’s bags of time. Back home, pen and paper. Don’t overthink it. Just jot down what comes into your head first. Good progress. Apache by The Shadows – the first single I ever bought. All or Nothing, Small Faces. What a voice! I Heard it Through the Grapevine. How can you not dance to it? Before I know it, there’s a list of thirty on my piece of paper. And I’m not even out of the 80’s yet. OK. A bit of pruning needed. Maybe even a lot of pruning. That’s better. Twenty five. And now there’s even some 21 st century tracks! Tinariwen … Camelph...

         Probably the answer is ‘yes’, even if you don’t know it. In fact, we’ve all suffered from it, probably since the Stone Age. It was the Old English, as against the old English person who is writing this blog, who not only suffered from it, but named it. It means ‘dawn-care’; those moments when you wake up at dawn and can’t get back to sleep because you are too busy worrying about all the things that do worry us at that time in the morning, like not being able to sleep.      And what about that lovely word Golopshus? No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but if we lived near Norwich, we’d probably be using it all the time. “What a golopshus day it is today?”, “We had such a golopshus meal at that new restaurant last night”, and, provided the person doesn’t overhear or you know them very well, you could say, “cor, he (or she) is rather golopshus!” They might (possibly) thank you for it. It’s an old East Anglian word for luscious, deli...