Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

I have a new morning habit these days: writing microfiction. I take an unused title from my typically daft repertoire and use it as a prompt to generate a flash fiction. Some titles easily inspire stories and a premise quickly forms in my mind, no matter how surprising that may turn out to be. Some titles just lead to creative false starts and dead-ends. But that's the daily discipline of writing for you. What I do find invigorating is how I've been able to create interesting plots and characters within 300 words or fewer. Being someone who submits to competitions and submission callouts, it helps to have at least one option for every conceivable word limitation. I have a half dozen serviceable drabbles (100 words exactly), a couple of decent dribbles (50 words exactly) and even the occasional 10-word or 6-word tale. Mind you, I do think these latter types are too short to work as self-contained narratives and even verge on poetry, but that's just my judgement. Anyway, here...

  It’s term time again, when disgruntled teachers and students are glaring at each other across the classroom, parents breath a sigh of relief and retired teachers raise a large glass of wine to celebrate. But not everything is doom and gloom. I chanced to look at some snippets I still keep from those halcyon days, so here they are for your amusement. Business students often get the wrong idea about the world of work. One young person informed me that ‘small businesses cannot have special offers to attack customers’. Quite fortunate if you regularly support your local shop. The Office Shops and Retail Premises Act apparently states that ‘Sedentary workers must be suitable in design’, though also specifies that ‘Clothing should not be worn during working hours.’ So if you’re a budding naturist, and are suitable in design, you’ll be in with a chance of a job. Spelling errors accounted for many a laugh in the staff room, even before we ‘helled a reunion party...

The joke goes something like:   Q) What is so great about Sweden? A) I don’t know but the flag is a big plus.   Gerrit? At first I laughed but then I realised that the same could be applied to the England flag. That’s a big red plus. Doing a modicum of research then revealed that the flags of Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Finland and Greece all feature a plus mark too. And thereby the novelty of the joke fades. Assessing these flags though, there are a few that wouldn’t technically fit the joke. Switzerland’s flag is a small plus. Greece’s flag is a small plus hemmed in by five blue lines or four white lines depending on which colour you think most dominates the space. They wouldn’t fit as replacements for Sweden in the joke. Denmark, Finland and Norway are all big pluses in the same way as Sweden but, let’s be honest here, are these actually plus signs? I would argue that they are crucifixes that have fallen to the left. The vertical line is not dead centre of...

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...

Who is King of the Road? The motorist versus the cyclist.   Many cyclists would have us believe the motorist is the bad guy, forcing them off the road at every opportunity and, of course, this sometimes happens, but not in the majority of cases.   New updates state cyclists should cycle in the middle of the lane on quiet roads, in slow-moving traffic, or when approaching junctions or road narrowings.  The code also says cyclists should maintain a distance of 0.5 metres from the kerb edge when cycling on busy roads or with traffic that is moving faster than them.   Mmm.   In theory this may work, in practice, I am not too sure.   When cyclists are going straight ahead at a junction, they have priority over traffic waiting to turn into or out of a side road, unless road signs or markings indicate otherwise.   Really!!   How ridiculous.   Of course, the motorist must abide by these rules, yet cyclists seem oblivious to some basic rules which als...

Sometimes, inspiration is a long time coming. We get bits of ideas, odd sentences that flit across the mind, that could be turned into … The Calderdale Grid Project provides just the spark we need. Photographers and writers from the area were assigned to a particular map location to photograph the landscape and find inspiration there to produce a written response to the places. Lasting until 26 February, the project was first launched before lockdown in 2019, but has only recently come to fruition. It was also only recently that I came across the idea and thought oh, that looks interesting, and went to see it at the Smith Art Gallery in Brighouse. The Art Gallery and Library are housed in a nineteenth century mansion, built originally as a home but gifted to the council, becoming a Free Library in 1898. In 1907, Alderman William Smith bequeathed his art collection. As well as the art, various exhibitions are held throughout the year. The Grid Project exhibitio...

Opposite the old church and at the top of High Street, was the park, its land generously purchased and developed by a local benefactor whose name it had borne for more than twenty years. It was a place livelier in summer when nurses with their large prams pushed well bundled babies under its leafy canopies and where families strolled along its serpentine paths, their feet unintentionally falling into step with the distant sound of a brass band playing on the solid, iron bandstand. Later, before returning to their villas on the main routes out of the town, these families would pause to admire the tinkling waters of the fountains and acknowledge those they knew with a tip of their gleaming hats or the slightest smile and incline of their pretty heads. When the first frosts crisped the paths, the park gates were locked to keep out those they thought might seek shelter in its pavilions and so, until spring, only two gardeners were allowed entry. Only they saw the beauty of the snowdrops ...

  In prose, I constantly admire a writer who is able to drop poetic sentences like jewels. Sometimes these aren’t entirely appropriate and may even slow plot momentum but they are no less beautiful for it. It’s the literary equivalent of stopping to smell the roses.             However I’m not particularly adept at writing such stunning imagery, at least not for longer stories. When it comes to my more plot-focused fiction, each sentence serves to keep things moving. They’re often short, simple and riddled with inoffensive cliché.             It’s in my character-focused fiction where I find the time to make a moment pretty and quotable. However this doesn’t always work, usually because I’m trying too hard to catch the eye.             My most egregious offences include drawn-out metaphors that don’t comfortably a...

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...

  The past couple of years have changed so much in our world: the way we readily don masks in crowded places, keep our distance or use hand wipes and gel. Many work from home and families are often doing more activities together than before. People moan about not being able to do this or that, about price rises that mean no more Netflix or days out in the car. It made me think of how life used to be, particularly for women.      Back in the days when marriage meant the immediate loss of a job and the expectation that a wife would stay at home to became the ‘homemaker’ or simply a housewife, they always had a plan. Not a plan to escape or paint the town red some day (though I expect many did just that) but a practical, no-nonsense Yorkshire woman’s plan for the week.      Come rain or shine, Monday was washing day. Shine was no problem. Just get it done, outside and blowing in the wind; in the yard if possible, but often across the street, j...

         Probably the answer is ‘yes’, even if you don’t know it. In fact, we’ve all suffered from it, probably since the Stone Age. It was the Old English, as against the old English person who is writing this blog, who not only suffered from it, but named it. It means ‘dawn-care’; those moments when you wake up at dawn and can’t get back to sleep because you are too busy worrying about all the things that do worry us at that time in the morning, like not being able to sleep.      And what about that lovely word Golopshus? No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but if we lived near Norwich, we’d probably be using it all the time. “What a golopshus day it is today?”, “We had such a golopshus meal at that new restaurant last night”, and, provided the person doesn’t overhear or you know them very well, you could say, “cor, he (or she) is rather golopshus!” They might (possibly) thank you for it. It’s an old East Anglian word for luscious, deli...