I just skipped the description, I didn’t miss much… Did I?

No-one wants descriptions these days, they haven’t got the patience. Oh God, great long boring description. I skipped it. Didn’t miss much. I was just thinking how fortunate we are to have such a wonderful luxury. In the past reading was one of the affordable pleasures and Dickens published his work in a series of …

Just waiting for the plot to clot

I have come to a hiatus again. I don’t call it writer’s block. That makes it seem as though  you can always be rattling the keys (or pushing the pen). As though  writing fiction streams out like water through a pipe. You sit down, turn on the tap, write, then turn it off and go …

England’s green and pleasant land

When tourists go to a country they look for the spectacular, the noteworthy, the interesting. They congregate in the Cordobas and the Lake Districts of the world. They do not generally partake of the fields that form the agricultural breadbasket or the cities that provide the manufacturing jobs in a country. But I am visiting …

Learner drivers and the art of the double declutch

My friends and family are in mourning: the Conservatives have sailed home with a workable majority and the Scottish National Party has all but obliterated Labour in Scotland. And I have come home to the Tory heartland, to the town of my birth, a distinction that I share with Margaret Thatcher. It pleases me to …

Leeds leads

We arrived back from Spain at 11:30pm. The booked taxi did turn up and we careered through the Yorkshire countryside, rolling around in the back seat. We fell 23 degrees C in three hours, down to a welcome of three miserly degrees above freezing. Why are butchers always cheery? As I brought a couple of …