Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

  7am – I wake up and splash my face. Ten jumping jacks just to wake the neighbours. Five-minute recovery. Five push-ups, unless my back is knackered. Coffee and croissant brekkie and a book. Currently it’s The Guinness World Book of Records 2014. I’m catching up.   8am – I get dressed and beat my hair into submission. I check my emails and socials. There’s this girl I’ve been chatting up. Well, actually she’s a bot who keeps sending me links to scam sites. Still, I respect her quick replies and the fact she doesn’t judge me. Also I like to pretend that the model in the photo is really into a slob like me. Before I know it, I’ve usually given her a full hour.   9am – I open the rough outline of this week’s celebrity’s morning routine and go to work. Smooth out the clauses, add all the commas they forgot about, remove half the ones they put in. Retain their ‘voice’ and emphasise a conversational tone. Laugh at the bare-faced lies of their precisely-timed habits. A...

We live within a bounded world, it seems. contained in four dimensions, also by the finite nature of our lives. In dreams, however, somehow our internal eye can see through walls we didn’t know were there. The flow of time, the laws of logic; now such boundaries are all up in the air.  We move more freely, and we wonder how we ever settled for that other place where possibilities now ours to take were out of bounds, beyond our time and space.  For all that, I am often glad to wake. Dreamspace can be unsettling, I’ve found. It’s good to plant my feet on solid ground.