Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

  Mic Technique   You can hear me at the back, can't you? I'm allergic to pop filters. Metal or sock they bring me out in rash decisions.   You'll forgive me if I sound faint. I prefer it a metre to the side. It's better for my stance which projects confidence while my voice doesn't.   It could be worse. My verse at the start was supersonic and I ran a mile as soon as my mouth ran dry.   Now I share at a more measured pace but I still won't have that microphone near my face.

  Three weeks, four weeks, sometimes five. Time for a place to become familiar and comfortable; not quite enough for it to feel like home. And that is just as well. When the call comes, there can be no sentimentality. Pack a bag and leave, never to return. That slice of my life is instantly discarded, prelude to a frantic journey to another town, another living space empty of memories, associations, friends. A few weeks to write those walls, those windows into my mind, to spread some essence of myself upon them, then the cycle will begin again.               It had been going on so long, this procession of disconnected segments. There was no pattern to it, no linking threads that I could point to and say ‘that is my life.’ And I realised that only I could give it shape and meaning, provide a string on which to thread these beads of my existence. And so, at each new place, I bury something from the last: an object th...