Fourth series, episode 20

All 152 episodes are available here on the HebWeb.

In the latest episode, there's clubs in pubs, readers writing, tellers uniting, Rachel announcing, Non Doms denouncing and much more! 

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Pumpkin weekend

Hebden Bridge recently had its annual Pumpkin Weekend. So, thinking of the proposals to site dozens of giant turbines on Walshaw Moor, I looked back to a photograph from October 2021, of our granddaughter making notes for her future, and thought, "Well said, King Pumpkin Head!"

Clubs in Pubs

As a writer who performs this is what I do between gigs …

The Golden Lion

The Wednesday Writers Group gather on one of their Wednesdays each month to share poems and prose in an out of the way corner of this Tardis of a pub. This time there was a fifteen minute slot for guest writer Frank Burton, a prolific fantasy novelist and publisher. In the second half, the MC, organiser and regular writing tutor, Theresa Sowerby gave me a good slot.

This being the season for dark and harrowing tales, I recounted a story I recovered from a long lost pulp fiction novel that enthralled the Bloomsbury Group one sunny afternoon a hundred years ago. In Hippy Valley (2018) I moved it to autumn, two hundred miles North and a thousand feet higher.

Frank's Ramble

When Frank went rambling up on t' moors,
His venture seemed romantic,
But when a heavy mist came down,
Frank wor feeling frantic.

He'd got no signal on his phone
And day had turned to night.
And moon and stars had disappeared,
But then Frank saw a light.

A coach lamp shone beside a door,
But t' house wor dark an' shuttered.
"Is anybody home?" he shouts,
"To ring for t' taxi …" mutters.

Three times he raps upon that door,
Faint echoes each recall,
But as he turns to walk away,
Sharp footsteps resound in t' hall.

And t' door opens to dazzling light,
Frank thinks himself inspected.
"Who is it my dear?" a voice enquires.
"It's he whom we expected."

Frank follows her, as if in thrall,
Muttering apologies.
But as he turns into t' front room,
He's shocked at what he sees.

He looks at one face, then at t' other,
Then "Lord have mercy!" he begs.
No eyes, no nose, no mouths at all,
Their faces as smooth as eggs.

He stands transfixed before them both,
Then he hears an inner yell,
He concentrates, then hears more clear,
And t' words are, "Run like hell!"

He staggers back down t' dazzling hall,
An' sprints down t' gravel track.
Then plunges into mist an' moor,
An' never once looks back.

But on some lonely moorland track,
Dipped headlights at last he spots,
An' Frank strides out on t' tarmac road,
An' car slows down an' stops.

T' car's engine purrs as they set off,
Frank states his destination.
In time his hooded driver asks,
"What caused your perturbation?"

Relaxing then, Frank tells his tale,
An' t' driver listens intently.
Then, smoothly slowing t' car to stop,
"No features at all?" asks gently.

When Frank turns to his rescuer,
His courage leaks its last dreg.
No eyes, no nose, no mouth at all …
His face as smooth … as an egg!

Stubbing Wharf

On the 30th birthday of the Shaggy Dog Storytellers club, we had a special guest, but back in October 2016, it must have been a stories from the floor night. Comic folksinger, Keith Donnelly was MC and he said to his audience, "Do you want to see something scary?" Then turned his back on us for a moment, before spinning round to reveal his Donald Trump mask. I was sitting next to a friend of Tristan's who had travelled up from the South. She told me, "I think Hilary Clinton will win."

I wasn't so sure. More people love celebrities than love politicians. After Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the States, in the UK a football mascot dressed up as a monkey, a joke candidate, stood for a Mayoral election. Monkey's outfit was based on a local legend, adopted by Hartlepool United fans, in which a monkey washed ashore from a wrecked ship was hanged for being a French invader.

Monkey man said, "I'm not 'party political'." But was paid £53,000 per year when he was duly elected.

Shonaleigh at Shaggy Dog

This October, our special visitor was Shonaleigh, who retold tales from a Dutch Jewish – but Nazi interrupted – tradition, in which grandmothers told their granddaughters a cycle of four thousand or more ancient, sometimes rabbinical, interconnected tales, from the lowlands of Northern Europe. Many of the tales tell of strong, adventurous girls.

She told us, "I was 16 before I encountered the Grimm tales of handsome princes rescuing young women from towers."

 

Her parents managed to escape from Holland at the start of the war, but thousands of storytelling grannies and little girls did not make it to our shores. Shonaleigh (her name was anglicised, she told her mother it made her sound like a steamboat) is probably the last Drut'syla performer in this ancient Jewish tradition. But you can check out a growing archive of the tales from YouTube recordings made in her kitchen.

See You Soon

One night, daughter and granddaughter had a sleep over at ours. Next day, in our book lined boxroom, I noticed Leah had been reading The Never Ending Years of Being Dead (2007) by Marcus Chown 'the finest cosmology writer of our day'. I hadn't read from it for a few years, but remembered that cosmology is even weirder than belief in an afterlife, when I read Chown's preface of some items he'd cover:

"the most widely accepted theory of the Universe's origin implies that Elvis is alive and well and living in another space domain (in fact, an infinite number of space domains) … nobody can rule out the possibility that the stars are technological artefacts built by extra-terrestrial intelligence; a computer program less than four lines long could be generating you, me and everything we see around us; all of us might be resurrected in a computer simulation at the end of time."

The Never Ending Years of Being Dead would feel like just a moment when we all woke up again! I'd recently chosen a cardboard coffin for my own funeral and wondered for a moment if I should have "See You Soon!" printed on the lid.

Spiked!

On Facebook, Liz Aldis wrote that she and three female friends in their 50s were in the Old Gate pub when one of them had her drink spiked. They were walking to Vocation when it hit her. Liz wrote, "Please be on your guard if you're going out, we ain't kids and not stupid but it can happen to anyone."

Thankfully, her friend came round when they got home.

Old Cestrians

When older people meet up and ask each other how they are it's more than just a greeting.

One morning in the Co-op carpark we bumped into Mo, who was in my year at Chester college half a century ago. She'd recently been to a Reunion, meeting women friends she's caught up with ever since. They stay in a hotel just outside Chester and walk in along the towpath, playing the ABC game, taking turns to go through the alphabet by providing names of food … apple, banana carrot, or animals, no doubt.

But this year they changed the ABC to ailments they'd had.

The Budget

It was a commanding performance. Someone really had to stop the rot.
Austerity didn't work. But in this mixed economy, did she hit her New Deal sweet spot?

Well, Rachel from Pudsey, we'll soon find out. Whether we believed in you or not.

Readers Write

A Shropshire Lad

I've known Pete Jackson, a decade younger than us, since his Subbuteo playing days in the Wirral back in the 60s. He's spent his working life in Telford as a dynamic, enabling, community support worker but now he's dependent on professional help. He wrote to say he'd really like it if I shared this piece.

Tongue Cancer, 4am

The Road to Healing: pain relief and sleep.

It's 4 am … and I am trying to capture how I feel.

My mouth, once a simple part of me, now feels foreign – dry and cracked, as though parched by a desert wind. Breathing through the night becomes a struggle, the air itself seeming to scrape at the inside of my throat. I wake to a mouth thick with sticky saliva, a discomfort that sticks to me like a second skin, and the mornings start with the ritual of rinsing and clearing, trying to find some relief.

Eating, once a pleasure, now feels like an uphill battle. What was once soft, nourishing food now sits like a challenge on my plate. My body knows it needs the fuel, but the act of swallowing is like trying to push through an invisible barrier. I rely more and more on the PEG tube, a lifeline ensuring I get what I need to keep going, even as my body feels like it's turning against me.

There's pain – constant, sharp and relentless. The mouth ulcers have become unwelcome companions, burning with a fierce intensity that makes even speaking a trial. My lips crack, my skin reddens, and I can feel the itch and irritation as the radiotherapy leaves its mark. Each new day is a reminder of what I'm putting myself through in this pursuit of healing.

But in this "brutal" journey as my nurse so aptly put it yesterday, I remind myself that this treatment will work. The hope, the belief that this path – no matter how hard -is what keeps me moving forward …

So I walk, each day keeping up my steps, each day telling myself that this body, battered as it feels, is still strong. The discomfort grows, but so does determination. There is light at the end of this road. It just takes every ounce of strength I have to get there and with Laura at my side I know I will.'

Here's one of the poems I liked from I am water by Joy Edwards …

Listed

Six years ago its back was 'torched'.
The Grade 2 listed closed its doors.
Steel shutters blinded windows.
Blackness clogged its pores.

The building, left, could've been homes,
But the Grade 2 listed stood rejected.
Dry rot seeping through its bones,
Slowly dying, spurned rejected.

Thinking of its glory days
When Worsted cloth was all the rage,
way back in eighteen forty eight,
two hundred drew a living wage.
That Grade 2 listed paved the way.

Two years back the Grade 2 listed
Succumbed to arsonists.
This time they raised it to the ground.
Yet it survives, still, on that list.

All that remains is a stone façade.
Unaffected by the blast.

That Grade 2 listed just gets smaller
Every time that I drive past.

And finally

The British Do Not Clean

Madhuri ZK Ewing, Calderdale's resident Californian poet sent me a video of her performing The British Do Not Clean commenting, "One thing I love about you Brits, is the ability to laugh about yourselves."

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