Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

  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...

  “There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain, And nothing more wretched than Man Or more arrogant.” Mattie had hated the school motto from the moment she first saw it. Her eyes were drawn to the stern, black letters, each a foot high, painted on the wall of the high-ceilinged dining hall.   She supposed they had been there for years and years. The plastered wall was cracked and patched under its whitewash, but the words were solid – forbidding and black as crows. She thought they must be repainted every year, ready to frighten a new intake of children. The motto was as stern and incomprehensible as the school itself, Mattie thought.   As she hurried up and down the bewildering staircases and along the endless corridors of identical wooden doors, the words whirled around in her mind in a tangle of double negatives. Did the motto mean that everything was certain, or that everything wasn’t? She felt like Alice in Wonderland, spinning as she fell down the rabbit...

  I never thought I’d go back to school, certainly not at my age (thirty-one and three-quarters as Adrian Mole might have said). That was before I saw the advert, in the airport of all places. “Heathrow Flight School. New term, new start. Apply …” Returning to my hotel, I thought hard. Flying is something I’ve done a lot of, but somehow, never really felt, well, comfortable with. Oh, I’m competent enough, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always room for improvement and I felt I needed that little extra something. I’ve known a few people who always seem more confident, more skilful than me. Now it was my turn. Off went my application form and, to my surprise, back came the offer of an interview. Did that mean, I wondered, that I have all the right qualifications to be a top flyer or that I was so hopeless they thought any improvement would make them look good? There was only one way to find out. But for a start, what should I wear? Should I go for ‘man-about-town, j...

I Am Thinking of a Number Mr Patel had a big bushy beard. It was mesmerising the way all that black fuzz scraped against the buttons of his blue work shirt, never once unsettling his green silk tie. He had a very energetic way of standing, moving back and forth on his heels and constantly jutting out his chin.             “All right you lot,” he said to my class one day, “I am thinking of a number. Any guesses?”             “Four?”             “No.”             “Eleven?”             “Not a chance.”             A quiet descended, broken only by the occasional knock on our low ink-stained tables or the click of a wonky ch...

There was a funny smell in the long room; a meaty warm smell, like gravy. “Mummy, I’ve got tummy ache.” “It’s just butterflies. They’ll go away in a little while, when you settle in.” It didn’t feel like anything as pretty as butterflies. I felt as though my stomach was full of snakes, writhing in a great tangle and threatening to escape up my throat. I sat on my mother’s knee, waiting.   I looked down at my new shoes, brown and shiny like a conker. I had been desperate to wear them for weeks, but they had to be kept “for starting school”. Now the day had come. I smoothed my blue pinafore over my knees, and bit my lip. “Look! There’s Lizzie!” My mother stood up, waving to catch their attention. Lizzie and her mother joined us at our table on low plastic chairs.   I smiled at Lizzie, and she smiled back, but she looked as though she had the snakes too, and she had been crying. “We are going to be in the same class, aren’t we, Lizzie?” I said. ...