Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

  It was many years since I had visited the ancient Pilgrim City. I was in the shadows of the great Cathedral where merchants and street vendors competed for attention with their cacophony of ringing voices and shrill cries. Shoppers nudged together to reach for vegetables and fruit set out on hawkers’ barrows.  Further on, under the painted sign of a black cow, a butcher stood with his cleaver aloft, a blood-spattered apron tied around his large belly. Next door, a sign above the fishmonger’s, showed a vivid, aquamarine sea and its harvest of orange crabs, silver-scaled fish and oysters: a picture far removed from my memories of the drab, grey, shifting sands and sea of the Kent coastline. My eyes fell from the sign to the queue at the fish counter and that was when I saw him. A long, thin man, his knees slightly bent as if in the act of supplication. As I stared at him, I saw him stretch out a lank hand with thin, pale fingers that closed around the parcel of wet fish he had purchase

  The Brits.. …. are coming, and they’ll talk a lot of tosh they’ll talk of visions and plans but they ain’t got any dosh the only way that they could think to help us is by sending a worn-out double decker bus they can’t afford to send smart bombs or many fancy tanks so for those particular items you need to ask the Yanks plus you’ll need to call ‘em between eleven and noon as they’ll be in “meetings” every afternoon they’ll try to cosy up with real world leaders but they’re seen as a country of pleaders and they firmly believe in getting paid lots of cash by talking very posh and selling oil and gas and as any struggling person knows they seem to enjoy cutting energy, especially when it snows we are all members of that former exalted clan but we are tired, pissed off and in need of a viable plan no more corrupt cops or MP’s abusing rules and watching porn they should fully expect to be jailed and made to face our scorn but no, they smile smugly in their