Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

It was one of those late summer days when harvesting had started that I first visited Porthcurnick Beach. Wheat that had spilled from combined harvesters had mixed with sand and was thrown from our spoked wheels in golden clouds of dust on the dry, narrow roads . We were three. Two young women and one Labrador dog in a sports car, top down, our eyes shaded by flamboyant sunglasses. For five days the sun shone down on us from a cloudless sky and the blue English Channel lapped the Cornish coast in warm, watery folds.   This was The Roseland where the sea had nibbled sandy coves from the land and where headlands, bays and cliffs provided easy walking along the South West Coast Path. To the west was Portscatho, a former pilchard fishing village and to the east, past the coastguard lookout, was Nare Head and the path to Mevagissey and Fowey. In that shimmering heat we joined others on the path through the stile and down the steps to claim our daily space on a sandy beach awash with...

Ninety-three years ago, it was announced that a new planet had finally been found. Actually, it had been found some weeks earlier, but the Lowell Observatory kept it quiet. The planet had no name, hiding in the dark as if plotting some subterfuge. On the fourteenth of March, Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old from Oxford suggested naming it after the God of the Underworld – Pluto. It was accepted, partly on the grounds that the first two letters were the same as the initials of the Observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell. In astrology, Pluto rules the subconscious, that which is hidden below, but also suggests renewal and rebirth. On the downside, it signifies an obsessive desire for power and control, as well as general destructiveness. So what happened in the decade after Pluto’s discovery? It began with Stock market crashes and general economic depression throughout the world. Unemployment in the UK reached two million, around 18% of the population. This was the time that...