Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

I leave the house and bury my cold hands in my coat pockets immediately.  My breath steams in the frigid air, and the returning inhaled icy breath shocks my lungs, nearly making me cough.  I’m almost tempted back inside for another hot coffee, but I’m pulled back by the magnetism of the place. Walking gingerly on yesterday’s slush, now glistening and rock hard in the watery, early morning light, I walk down to the footpath that leads through the fields.  With each footstep I take, I slip a little on the ice, and it feels like hard going even though it’s a route I’ve taken hundreds of times, a path burned into the neural pathway in my brain. The path up through the field crunches under my feet - frozen ice and grasses alike giving way at each step.  How silent it is! - no traffic sounds to break the stillness of early morning, not even a hardy dog walker, with their charge wrapped up against the cold. This liminal space is mine for a little while longer. I reach the r...

I wonder how many of us wander around a town without ever really looking at the buildings? We look in shop windows, perhaps notice if the door is easy to open or not, but do we ever bother with the skyline? With the shapes of the roofs, the style of the windows or even what the buildings were made of? Try it. Look up and see what is under the eaves. If you look closely, you might even spot a few grotesques or even a gargoyle glaring down at you. What’s the difference? Well, the terms tend to be used interchangeably these days, but technically a gargoyle is a grotesque, but a grotesque is not necessarily a gargoyle. From Ely Cathedral Grotesques were named after the strange heads found in the underground or buried ruins of Roman buildings known as Grottes. They often are in the form of animals, real or imaginary, such as lion heads or dragons. Others show human heads, such as monks, or possibly to honour the person paying for the building, though many seem to have a very different pu...

Looking down from Castle Hill A beautiful world, perfect and still. The setting sun its crimson glow Casting shadows on the earth below. So many memories slowly unfold Kept close in my heart – stories untold.