Yorkshire

Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays, episode 3

The third episode of my one-woman Yorkshire village sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays was released on Friday. As before, you can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or at https://anchor.fm/jysaville where you should be able to play it in a browser without logging in to anything. Or you can listen to all the episodes right here in the embedded player:

In case you haven’t encountered the podcast yet, Lee-Ann’s been moved on to a four-day week at work and wants to spend more time with her portly black and white cat (Lord Salisbury) and research the history of the village she lives in. Unfortunately her interfering older sister (Gina) doesn’t think those are worthy pursuits, and Fridays are usually spent trying to thwart Gina. Lee-Ann’s Scottish neighbour Douglas isn’t on anyone’s side but his own.

It’s structured like a sitcom, but told as a monologue from Lee-Ann’s point of view. This Friday, Gina’s been inspired to a spot of decluttering and reorganisation, and since she’s still storing some of Lee-Ann’s belongings from her downsizing move a few years ago, those are the first items on the To Go list.

I have nothing against inspirational podcasts, and nothing intrinsically against Gina listening to them, it’s just that what they often inspire in her is an increased desire to interfere in my life.
episode 3, Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays by JY Saville

Research for this month’s episode included jute production at the Dundee Heritage Trust website, which was a fun way to disappear down an industrial history rabbithole. I lived in Fife for a few years and I must have seen some kind of a display about jute which stuck vaguely in my mind and offered itself up in this context – possibly in Kirkcaldy, which I seem to recall was the home of lino. I am much more familiar with the worsted manufacture mentioned in connection with Lee-Ann’s Gran. Both my grandmothers worked in textile mills in the Bradford district, one of them was even a burler and mender, as was Sister Number Two until she was made redundant about twenty years ago. Some of the machinery from her mill ended up at the Bradford Industrial Museum, which is well worth a visit if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Burling and mending room at Cawthra’s, Dudley Hill in the 1930s, from my Nana’s photo album

One of the themes of the series is the class difference between aspirational older sister Gina and contentedly rooted Lee-Ann. A bit like childhood friends Terry and Bob in the fantastic 1970s sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, I suppose. Gina has left her working-class upbringing behind now she’s a forty-something lawyer with a solidly middle-class husband; Lee-Ann doesn’t see what there is to be ashamed of. Despite them both having white-collar jobs and living in the same village, they have different outlooks on life.

Gina said the word was ‘anything’, not ‘owt’, ‘Honestly Lee-Ann, you don’t live in a terraced house in a mill town now.’ Strictly speaking Upper Wheatley had a mill long before Bingley ever did. And technically the building in which my over-priced attic conversion sits is a house sandwiched between two other houses, which sounds a lot like a terrace to me.
episode 3, Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays by JY Saville

While Bingley is a real place (I lived there for a short while in my twenties), Upper Wheatley is not. However, I have used Addingham to inform its size and appearance in my mind, so if you want to form a mental image of its buildings and surroundings you could do worse than use that as a starting point, while bearing in mind that Upper Wheatley as a place is not at all like Addingham – it has a station for a start, whereas Addingham’s closed in 1965.

If you’ve enjoyed any of Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays and want to support me as I make episode four, you can always buy me a cuppa…

I made it to podcast episode 2

An awful lot of podcasters apparently give up after the first episode. Tried it and didn’t like it, perhaps, or became discouraged by the tumbleweed that greeted their first offering. Well, because I like to be different, I’ve persevered to make the second episode of my sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays. It was released on Friday and as before, you can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or at https://anchor.fm/jysaville where you should be able to play it in a browser without logging in to anything. And if I’ve embedded it properly, you can listen to both episodes right here:

Before you listen, you may want to know what this podcast is about. It’s about Lee-Ann who’s been moved on to a four-day week and wants to spend more time with her cat and research the history of the Yorkshire village she lives in. Unfortunately she has the sort of interfering and organised older sister (Gina) who doesn’t think those are worthy enough pursuits, and she spends most of Friday trying to get Gina off her case. She also has a dry, laid-back Scottish neighbour called Douglas, and a portly black and white cat named Lord Salisbury. It’s structured like a sitcom, but told as a monologue from Lee-Ann’s point of view. I’m not saying you’re going to learn anything from Lee-Ann, but she does drop real history in now and then (like sourdough bread being around in ancient Egypt).

Lord Salisbury leapt on to Douglas’s knee to show Gina that he’s not standoffish, he just doesn’t like her. Douglas said he was sure he’d regret asking, but why was my cat called Lord Salisbury?
episode 2, Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays by JY Saville

Lord Salisbury (as I’m sure you all know) was a Tory prime minister of the late nineteenth century, and according to HCG Matthew in my Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, ‘the last Prime Minister to wear a beard’. There is no deep meaning behind my choosing the name, it is simply an improbable name for a cat (and turned out not to be the name of a cat who used to live round the corner from me, but that’s another story).

Richard Oastler, who gets a mention in episode two, was another nineteenth-century Tory, this time from Yorkshire. Best known for being instrumental in the Ten Hour Act (1847) which limited the amount of time in a day that children could work, there is a statue in Bradford of him accompanied by sorry-looking children. It’s not that far from the statue to William Forster (not a Tory), whose 1870 Education Act gets a passing mention.

Robert Owen, also mentioned in the second episode, was a Welsh mill-owner and famous socialist. Similar to Titus Salt in Yorkshire or the Cadbury family in the Midlands, he had a village for his workers at New Lanark in Scotland and was attempting to improve their health, morals, and general wellbeing. We learnt about him at school, and then presumably because it was a lot closer to get to, went for a day trip to Quarry Bank mill instead.

As a bonus historical fun fact, pilates (which crops up in both episodes, actually) was called Contrology until its inventor (Mr Pilates) died in 1967. I have a feeling if it was still called that, Lee-Ann wouldn’t be quite so set against it.

If you enjoyed either episode of Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays and want to support me as I make episode three, you can always buy me a cuppa…

So, I wrote a sitcom podcast

Remember how I did James Cary‘s sitcom course last year? And then realised that writing a radio sitcom was a daft idea because you’re either competing for Radio 4 or you have to do your own podcast? Well, I’ve done my own podcast. It’s called Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays and you can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or at https://anchor.fm/jysaville where you should be able to play it in a browser without logging in to anything. And if I’ve embedded it properly, you can listen right here:

I had a pilot script for a sitcom that I was working on during the course (until I got diverted by an idea for a historical sitcom, which I still can’t quite get right). It was about a woman who’s been moved on to a four-day week and wants to spend more time with her cat and research local history – can you tell she’s partly inspired by me? Unfortunately she has the sort of interfering and organised older sister* who doesn’t think those are worthy enough pursuits, and she spends her entire Friday trying to get her sister off her case so she can have a free Friday.

*I should point out that although I have two older sisters, neither of them are remotely like Gina. Though Sister Number One did once say that I spent too much time reading about life instead of experiencing it, and she’s not that keen on cats either.

I wasn’t sure I’d quite got the script right – I remember having a conversation with James about how to ensure Lee-Ann wasn’t simply reacting to her sister Gina, and how to make her a funny character in her own right (I hope I solved that one in the end). Even after the diversion into the historical sitcom though, I kept coming back to Lee-Ann. I liked the entangled but antagonistic relationship with Gina, and I liked her dry, laid-back neighbour Douglas. Was it likely to bump Ed Reardon from a Radio 4 slot? Probably not. Did I want to make it? Of course I did. I wasn’t owed any favours by actors though, so I shelved the podcast idea.

And then I remembered how much I enjoyed reading my stories aloud, and how I’d written well-received comedy monologues before. I set about adapting the script to be told entirely from Lee-Ann’s point of view, but still with the odd scene-setting sound effect, and with scene-breaks. So it has the length and structure of a half-hour radio sitcom episode, but it’s all in one voice (except for Lord Salisbury the cat who is expertly played by Parkin, one of my cats).

So if a monologue sitcom about two sisters needling each other in a Yorkshire village sounds like it might be your bag, scroll back up and give it a go. If you enjoy it, subscribe so you hear about episode 2 then tell your friends, and if you’re grabbed by the Christmas spirit you could even buy me a cuppa…

Meditation on stone

It may look like a shrivelled mouldy potato now, bluish purple with a few streaks of pink, but on the beach, shiny with seawater, it was stone-washed denim with red veins. I shifted other stones in my search for fossils and it caught my eye, caught my heart. I brought it home by train across the county and forgot about it.

I’d like to say I gaze upon it and ponder the vastness of geological time, the insignificance of man in earth’s history, but it’s a stone among stones. It has no special place like the few treasured fossils in the glass-fronted cabinet, handed down the generations, or the ones under the glass dome of the thimble-stand that we found ourselves. It doesn’t even have the status of the plainer ammonites in the glass vase on the hearth. It is a stone in a small basket of stones, picked for its colour and kept for its holiday memories which have now faded with its hue. I can’t tell you when I found it, or if it was in Whitby or Filey. It is overlooked, another piece of clutter.

Holding it now, it feels like a pumice stone, light and pitted. It fits in my hand like an unyielding stress-ball covered in a light film of dust – who dusts their basket of stones? Who has a basket of stones? It is a small piece of the earth which has tumbled down a cliff, rumbled under water. It is a shrunken asteroid, an inhospitable mining planet from 70s sci-fi. If I tasted it would I taste salt and seaweed and fish and chips? Would I get an electric jolt as though it was a 9V battery? Would I convince myself it was a mouldy potato and spit it out? Would I lap up the discarded body parts of tiny long-dead creatures?

Do you miss the sea? Can you hear its shush-shush in your dreams? Do stones dream? Can you hear me? Where does a stone’s soul go when it splinters and crumbles to dust?

I imagine the stone maintains a dignified silence, and then it hits me: on its timescale I am inaudible, a microsecond’s squeak, and even if it did hear, and understand, and choose to reply, it would take aeons for its thought processes to grind together into something resembling words, and by then I would have splintered and crumbled to dust.

This post began as an exercise in the New Writing North How to Start Writing the Climate workshop in July 2021. If you enjoyed it you can always buy me a cuppa…

The Split by Laura Kay

Lesbian rom-com, mostly set in Yorkshire and includes a cat. What’s not to love? I mentioned in September that I’d bought The Split after seeing Laura Kay at a Stay-at-Home litfest session on romantic comedy novels but hadn’t read it yet. Well, now I have and it was great.

Unemployed teacher Ally’s been ditched by the love of her life in London, so she packs a change of clothes and the cat and crawls home to her dad in Sheffield. Much as she’d love to wallow while she waits for Emily to realise how much she misses the cat (and hopefully Ally), her dad’s not about to let that happen. It seems her childhood friend Jeremy’s crawled back home after heartbreak too and their respective parents figure they might cheer each other up as well as get each other out of the house. Reluctant at first, they soon fall back into their old groove and of course Ally’s going to sign up for the half-marathon in solidarity when Jeremy decides that’s the way to get his boyfriend back. Happily, though the training might well kill her, Ally’s at least found an attractive young running coach but she’s probably straight. Isn’t she?

The tagline was, ‘The laugh-out-loud read we all need right now’. I don’t normally trust ‘laugh out loud…’ quotes, in fact it’s often enough to put me off, but I genuinely did laugh out loud a fair few times. This was the easy-to-read rom com I was looking for all those weeks ago. It was much more me than The Cornish Cream Tea Bus and not only because I’m bisexual and not very feminine. It was full of normal people who work in shops, schools, a call centre, and go to old man pubs and chip shops. They regularly travel by bus, and when Ally leaves London she does so by train not car, in fact it’s mentioned later that she can’t drive. Training for a half-marathon doesn’t magically make them fit, slim, healthy and happy. And of course it’s set in Yorkshire.

The one downside is that Ally turns out to be an irresponsible cat-owner, which has put OneMonkey off reading it. On the whole though I zipped through and really enjoyed it. More than anything, it was a real affirmation of friendship.

If I’ve introduced you to your new favourite book you can always buy me a cuppa…

D is for Down South

For such a tiresomely Northern writer I have a startling confession to make: I spent nearly five years living Down South. In my defence I was not quite three when we decamped to the East Midlands and just gone seven when we returned to Drighlington having fit in a miserable eighteen months in North Cornwall in the meantime (don’t ask).

I don’t remember that much about it, and certainly if I look at a map of England now I’ll struggle to find the places we lived. Other than a lovely pool of floating lights for diwali in Leicester, what I mainly remember are differences in language. Not long after we moved to a village near Loughborough in the summer of 1981 we had a workman in one day and he called my Nana ‘mi duck’ whereas she of course called him ‘love’. Over his teabreak they had a good long chat about the different dialect words they used, and I listened with fascination. It was the first time I remember realising that there were different regional English varieties.

I knew there was BBC English (the proper one) and American English (a bad habit picked up from watching films) but without knowing the word ‘colloquial’ at that age I thought the way we spoke at home was what colloquial English sounded like all over the country. I don’t remember being an object of interest at school, however, until we moved to Cornwall.

Cornwall in red. The East Midlands is north east a bit, or maybe a lot.

Cornwall is as far away as you can get from West Yorkshire and still be in England. I had the unfortunate combination of being an intruder in established friendship groups, and having a noticeably different accent and unfamiliar vocabulary. I learnt to avoid the troublesome old-fashioned bits that were still current in Yorkshire but apparently not down there: thee and thou, the dost tha and hast tha constructions, saying five-and-twenty-past when telling the time (though I’ve reclaimed that one recently, I never stopped saying it that way in my head). The East Midlands workman notwithstanding, I was baffled as to why my classmates would pick up some of my perfectly normal utterances as catchphrases and use them out of context.

It took me years to untangle which bits of my ‘not proper’ vocabulary were general UK slang and which were Yorkshire dialect, in fact I went to university unaware that some of the words I used wouldn’t generally be understood. Which led to interesting conversations with Geordie OneMonkey when we first met, but that’s another story.

D could also have been for dogs, Drighlington, dancing, or detective stories but if you enjoyed this one you can always buy me a cuppa…

Do you know more than you think about garden birds?

Last summer when lockdown had apparently made everyone in the UK appreciate nature more, I wrote a light essay about the birds in my garden. I wanted to braid past and present together and show that, almost by accident, I now knew far more than I thought about birds. I forget exactly why, but I’d started listing things I’d learnt from nearly a decade of watching our wildlife garden from an upstairs window, and I kept remembering another thing, and another and finally realised the list was longer than I expected. It made me think of the Monty Python sketch about the Spanish Inquisition, where Michael Palin starts listing their weapons, remembering another, and has to settle for a vague statement (‘Our chief weapon is surprise, fear and surprise…Our two weapons are fear and surprise, and…Amongst our weaponry…I’ll come in again’). Hence I called it ‘Among the things I know about birds’.

I couldn’t quite get the form of it right last summer and I put it away for a while then had another go after I’d read the admirably accessible An Indifference of Birds by Richard Smyth. When I’d finally got it in a state I was happy with, I sent it out to a couple of magazines. It was accepted almost immediately by ThereAfter, and finally appeared online this week. Richard Smyth’s read it and he liked my descriptions, if that’s an incentive.

I saw a woodpigeon on its too-small nest in the yew tree last Spring, looking like a parent with a well-cushioned backside trying to sit on a primary school chair, and I didn’t have to look it up. The beefier, more consistently-coloured cousin of the city centre pigeon, I’ve watched its kind crash onto the bird table, snap flimsy sapling branches and make its clod-hopping way around our garden for years. I could no more mistake it now for the elegant mushroom-coloured collared dove with its black torque than I could mistake a magpie for a jay.
from Among the things I know about birds, by JY Saville

I partly wrote this essay in wonder at my accidental education, but also as encouragement to other suburban (or even urban, if there’s any greenery nearby) nature enthusiasts who consider themselves clueless about the wildlife around them. You probably know more than you think you do. And if you don’t yet, then you can almost certainly learn gradually and painlessly by watching, with occasional looking things up in books or online. Ultimately, it’s not a race and it’s about enjoyment and appreciation rather than accumulating knowledge. I learnt recently that the sound like a rusty pump handle that I’ve noticed for the last few years is the call of a great tit, but I can’t recognise any other birdsong. Except the cloth-tearing sound of a jay, of course. And the squabbling jackdaws. And the tawny owl that sits on the roof sometimes. Hang on, let me come in again.

If Among the things I know about birds made you look at your surroundings differently, you can always buy me a cuppa…

Airedale by Dylan Byford

Outside London, it’s pretty rare to find English sci-fi set in a real place. I can think of one or two set in Manchester, and Peter F Hamilton’s Greg Mandel series set in and around Rutland, but beyond that I’m struggling. It’s fair to say I was intrigued when I spotted one of the first novels from new crime publisher Northodox Press was ‘a near-future thriller’ set in a place I used to live: Airedale.

If you’re a dog-lover you might be familiar with the terrier of the same name, but I’m guessing that outside Yorkshire (probably even inside most of Yorkshire) the name won’t conjure up a place for you. As you might have guessed, it’s the dale (valley) where the River Aire runs, and these days houses Leeds commuters, many of them living in buildings that forty years ago were textile mills. There is also a UNESCO world heritage site, the mill village Saltaire. Dylan Byford has cleverly taken this geography and history and extrapolated it into a messy future. An unspecified time when another industry is disintegrating in the periodically flooded dale leaving empty warehouses and unemployment, Saltaire exists in a protective bubble, and northern politicians look to Durham rather than Westminster.

Airedale is a cyberpunk police procedural featuring politics, subversion, riots and local businessmen. It’s full of wonderful details of integrated technology and state surveillance, what’s changed and what hasn’t. Haz Edmundson is a contractor working for the police, what we might call a forensic computing expert who doesn’t usually have to deal with dead bodies. Except tonight, when for one reason or another he’s there when the body of an activist is discovered and he can’t let it go when it’s officially marked as an accidental death. How far is he prepared to go to uncover the truth? And who can he trust?

Haz is a wonderfully human character. A hopeless, unreliable, scruffy single dad who’s good at his job but not hard-boiled enough to deal with death in a detached way. He’s also apt to ask the wrong questions at the wrong moment, and land himself in trouble. I would happily read more books about him. If he can hang onto his life or his job long enough to star in them. There were a couple of interesting strands that weren’t fully followed up, in my view, and I don’t claim to completely understand the conclusions but I had a fabulous time along the way. Except for the bit near the start that’s really not for the arachnophobes (grit your teeth and race through it, it’s only half a dozen pages and only one of them is horrifying).

I didn’t pay for my copy because I won it in a draw on Twitter but other than them once reading (and rejecting) the manuscript of a crime novel of mine set in Newcastle, I have no relationship with Northodox and I don’t know Dylan Byford either. If you like William Gibson but have always wished someone would write in a similar vein but with uncool characters in small town Yorkshire (it can’t just be me), you are definitely onto a winner here. Similarly if you enjoyed the Greg Mandel series from Peter F Hamilton (I reviewed the first and second books a few years ago), or if you’re a fan of British police procedurals and you have an open mind on the SF elements. It does have a great sense of place, and I was initially attracted to it because of the setting, but I was hooked from the first page and the setting soon became the icing on a fine cake. Highly recommended, whether you know where Airedale is or not.

If I’ve introduced you to your new favourite book you can always buy me a cuppa…

A dark fairytale, The Crows Remember

I have a dark fairytale up at Crow & Cross Keys this weekend. It’s called The Crows Remember, and it’s a reprint of a story I wrote for the 52 Crows project from the illustrator Bonnie Helen Hawkins in August 2018. Here’s what I said about the story in my blog post that week:

The Crows Remember is a sad story, as pretty much everyone who’s read it so far has pointed out, but I was going for fairytale/folktale and there’s often an undercurrent of sadness or something dark at the core of those so I think I found the tone I was looking for. It’s set (though I didn’t specify in the story) in Swaledale, which to me is a mysterious place populated by the shades of my ancestors, and some sheep – all of 30 miles and a couple of dales away from where I live, but when you don’t drive it’s not an easy place to visit. Unless maybe you’re fitter than I am and own a bicycle.

It’s great to have this story out in the world again, it seems to have been getting some love on Twitter already – thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to read it. Here’s the excerpt Crow & Cross Keys chose to share on their tweets:

Next morning as she swept she saw something flutter past the open doorway, and when she went to look there was a velvet ribbon the colour of fresh blood lying on the flags. She stepped out and looked around but there was only a crow watching her, head cocked.
The Crows Remember by JY Saville

If you’d like a short excursion to a dale haunted by the beauty of the past, where wildflowers still bloom, go to https://crowcrosskeys.com/2021/04/24/the-crows-remember-jy-saville/ and if you enjoy it, you can always buy me a cuppa…

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

Big Sky is Kate Atkinson’s fifth Jackson Brodie private detective novel, and if you haven’t read the first four I’d recommend heading there first (Case Histories from 2004 is the start of the series). Partly because they’re good books so why not, partly because characters from the past turn up in Big Sky and while I don’t think a Brodie novice would be totally flummoxed, there’s definitely deeper satisfaction to be gained if you’ve been there before.

If you are new to Jackson Brodie, don’t expect much sleuthing. He is, if not quite the world’s most feckless detective, at least the luckiest. He doesn’t so much go out and find answers as stumble across an answer while he’s looking for something completely different, and possibly even fail to recognise it as an answer for a while. My dad and I both read this in the same week – he got it out of the library ebook system after I mentioned I’d finally got round to buying it – and I wondered aloud if Brodie did any proper detecting at all in this one. My dad leapt to his defence and pointed out one thread that counted as such, but still, even by Jackson Brodie standards he’s something of a bystander in this story.

The novel makes for grim reading. And yet with Kate Atkinson’s usual lightness of touch and wry humour I found myself smiling more than I would have imagined, given the subject matter. There’s a tangle of historic child abuse cases, present-day grooming on the internet, and people-trafficking. All set in Yorkshire, mostly at the coast. The cast of characters is varied and nuanced (and tellingly detailed), and it’s not always easy to pick out the good guys and the bad guys. As ever with Jackson Brodie novels, coincidences and connections abound – if you’re new to the series, be prepared for pretty much anything that could be connected to be connected.

In the background of all this is Jackson’s feelings as a father having had a fall-out with his grown up daughter, and currently in charge of his adolescent son. How the world has changed, how old he feels, how nostalgic. And how some things don’t change. He’s suffused with as much melancholy as you’d expect from a middle-aged divorced man who’s a fan of female country singers, but overall the book has an air of hope. Well worth a read, which I guess you’d expect me to say since I’m such a big fan of Kate Atkinson but start at Case Histories and you will be too.

If you found this book recommendation helpful you can always buy me a cuppa…

Did I mention they filmed my monologue?

I announced with great delight recently that Slackline Productions had chosen my monologue, I Could Murder a Custard Cream, to be filmed for their Slackline Cyberstories. It is now available on YouTube starring Susannah May and directed by Callie Nestleroth, and it’s been done so well I grinned incessantly for the full 9 minutes and 51 seconds.

It’s a dark comedy set in a village in the Yorkshire Dales, and revolves around the magnificence of the humble custard cream (that’s a popular biscuit, for those not from round these parts). Susannah was glintingly wicked as the nameless biscuit-lover.

She was also kind enough to say that this was one of her favourite monologues,

Thanks Jacqueline. I truly loved performing this. One of my favourite monologues 🎥🎬🎭🧑‍🦰

— Susannah May🎀 (@SusieMay27) April 30, 2020

and Lee Stuart Evans, author of the novel Words Best Sung (which I reviewed a while ago) said it was brilliant.

Brilliant! Great writing @JYSaville and lovely performance by @SusieMay27. Congratulations.

— Lee Stuart Evans (@TisMeLeeSE) May 1, 2020

Lee’s a genuine TV and radio comedy writer by day so I’m choosing to believe that he knows what he’s talking about! As does my dad of course, who declared it ‘most amusing’.

If these endorsements have made you think that this film might be worth ten minutes of your life, I urge you to go and watch now at https://youtu.be/J4BR3odiNQI

While you’re there, I’m sure you can spare a few more minutes for the other Cyberstories too, they’re good. You can quote me on that if you like.

All Points North by Simon Armitage

IMG_20190604_142451~2.jpg

This book had been sitting on my To Read shelf for weeks when Simon Armitage was announced as the new Poet Laureate, so it seemed only right to take it down and start reading. As you might expect from a Poet Laureate, he’s best known for his poetry and there are a couple of excerpts of it in All Points North, but only as they pertain to broadcasts or events he was involved in. On the whole, this is memoir and observational humour, as if Alan Bennett had grown up on the wild edge of Yorkshire in the era of Joy Division. Released in 1998, if the book came out now it would most likely have been a blog first.

There is ‘genuine memoir’ if you like, nostalgia and childhood memories, tales from his time as a probation officer or appearing in local panto (transplanted to the coast for an am dram conference), and the more recent that could be categorised as ‘scenes from the life of a poet’, like a visit to a film set or making BBC radio programmes. All of this reveals his poetry background: the creation of atmosphere, the lyrical descriptions of the everyday, the skirting of pretentiousness without ever quite falling in. There are also bits of local news deftly retold, snippets, fragments, snapshots, anecdotes from the pub that in another context or told in another way would be nothing.

Being, as the title suggests and his origins dictate, northern in character and largely about the north, the book is infused with dry humour and a keen sense of the absurd in the mundane. I particularly enjoyed the dialogue where the insurance firm phones (twice) to check he really is a poet (“Are you well known?”). The bulk of the book is written in second-person, as though he’s sat outside himself reminding another self of his actions and memories, which causes the odd tangle of position (who, then, is ‘we’?) but if you’re happy to accept that it makes for an interesting style.

I loved it and kept laughing loudly on the train as I read, but I would imagine All Points North to have particular appeal or relevance to those who know or love West Yorkshire, maybe also to those who know or love someone from West Yorkshire. If you read it without any prior exposure or knowledge, you may well come away with the wrong impression.

Writing on Air Festival 2019

The beauty of radio in the internet age is the listen-again function, which means that when a local station’s annual celebration of writing blossoms into a four-day extravaganza featuring hosts of established and emerging, amateur and professional writers from across the region, you don’t have to try and take it all in at once.

Last month was my fourth year of being part of the Writing on Air festival from East Leeds FM (Chapel FM as it’s sometimes known, it being based in a converted chapel complete with organ and stained glass) and it continues to be a pleasure. Because it’s a community arts venue there’s some great encouragement for young writers in the area, and I particularly enjoyed Scattering Sounds, which collected some writing from the Associate Writers group. Throughout the festival there were interviews, discussions, readings; poetry, prose, drama; the topical, the evergreen; gravity and humour.

You can see some of the bustle of the festival (including Keely and Karen rehearsing) via the Chapel’s photo collection on Instagram, and all the programmes from this year’s festival are available to listen to online on the ELFM player (last year’s festival is still available too, and many of the participants appear regularly on ELFM throughout the year).

This year I featured in The Food of Love with Rosalind Fairclough and Emily Devane, where Emily and I read three of our stories each, Roz read three of her poems, and throughout it all we had marvellous, specially-arranged accompaniment on cello (Keely Hodgson) and violin (Karen Vaughan). You can listen to us, or you can even watch the video we didn’t realise was being recorded (don’t worry, you don’t need a Facebook account to access it).

(And for those few who still haven’t heard the radio drama Roz and I wrote for last year’s festival, here’s a direct link to listen to it now).

David Crystal and English pronunciation

Yesterday afternoon OneMonkey and I enjoyed a highly entertaining talk at the Ilkley Literature Festival by David Crystal the well-known linguist. His latest book is Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation, which covers a wide range of topics under that heading, so he concentrated his three-quarters of an hour on regional accents.

You probably know how interested I am in accents and attitudes to accents, and you may also have picked up that Geordie OneMonkey and I have quite different accents (slowly morphing into one another until, we often joke, one day we’ll both sound like we’re from Middlesborough) so we had plenty to talk about afterwards. As Prof Crystal said, accents and differences in pronunciation provoke strong feelings: there are two aspects to pronunciation, intelligibility (can people understand you?) and identity, and clearly it’s the identity aspect that stirs people up.

Because people move around so much or (as with OneMonkey and I) settle down with someone from a different place, it’s harder to pin down someone’s origins from their accents than it once was. However, apparently on average the accent changes every twenty-five miles in England (possibly in the whole UK, I forget which he said), which is fascinating. It also makes me wonder how ‘the Yorkshire accent’ can be seen as the third-nicest accent in the UK when Yorkshire is a massive place encompassing such different accents as Hull and Huddersfield (both of which I dislike), Sheffield, Whitby and Bradford. Do they all sound broadly similar to people from further afield, I wonder? In the same way that I say someone sounds southern, but unless they sound like Phil from Time Team (Somerset?) I’m unlikely to be more specific.

David Crystal obviously knows his stuff and was a witty and engaging speaker, full of anecdotes and facts, and not averse to doing impressions of the Queen. If his books are half as entertaining they should be well worth a read and I intend to seek some out at the library soon. I’m only amazed I’ve never read any of them before.

The Food of Love

You’ll be eager to know how the Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe event went, no doubt, if you read last week’s post about the preparations. It was every bit as wonderful as I’d dared to hope, and then some.

OneMonkey took loads of photos of us

The sun was warm, the breeze not too strong (though we did have a moment of concern with the pages of music at one point – mostly the clothes pegs and bulldog clips did their job). Past and present members of Ilkley Writers turned up to support us, and a couple of Wharfedale Poets for good measure. Add in the various other friends and family, festival-goers and passers-by and we had an impressively large audience – I did a rough headcount at some point and got to 60, the steward thinks there were 70 (plus 4 dogs) – sitting on benches, standing on the grass and generally having a pleasant Saturday lunchtime.

For those interested in glimpses behind the scenes, here’s a photo of a couple of pages of my script (it happens to be the end of the pop song tribute, Variations on the theme of young love):

Stage directions are hand-written so I don’t accidentally read them out, and there’s a list of the pieces that come after that and before my next one.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, several came up afterwards to tell us so. I was still excited hours later, but that might partly be relief that it didn’t rain, nothing blew away, and the audience could hear us OK. Emily and I spent the rest of the day with tunes from each other’s pieces stuck in our heads, and I’ve inspired Keely to dig out some cassettes from her youth. If you’ve been round here a while you’ll know how much music means to me (hence, I suppose, this entire event) so I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself.

The general cry was ‘When can we do it again?’ so plans are already afoot. If any of them involve a recording I’ll point you at it, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with another picture of us and you can either remember what a lovely time we all had, or imagine what it was like to be there.

Roz York, Emily Devane, and JY Saville in her trusty old biker jacket (Black Sabbath hoodie hidden by music stand)

Musically accompanied at the fringe

Remember that homage to the 3-minute pop song I told you I was writing, back in July? Well, that and the other pieces by me, Emily Devane and Rosalind York are all ready for our event at the Ilkley Literature Festival fringe this Saturday lunchtime, The Food of Love. Did you spot the mention of live music? That’s the ultra-exciting bit, which meant we went to a rehearsal this week at Karen the violinist’s house, and were blown away by musical interpretation.

Thanks to Karen’s husband for this photo of Emily, Roz and I hard at work (aka drinking tea, playing with the dog, and listening to the musicians)

When I floated the idea of this event (based on a throwaway remark from Emily, months before the fringe application deadline) I had no idea what kind of musical accompaniment we’d have, but between us we knew a few people who might agree to collaborate so we sent the application in and decided to worry about detail if we got selected.

When we heard we’d been given a slot in the programme, Roz suggested asking Keely Hodgson if she and her cello would like to be involved. We all know her from her Purple Room showcase of local musicians and writers (in fact we all read there in June) and I like the sound of a cello, though I still had no idea what form the musical end would take. Keely invited her violinist friend Karen Vaughan into the mix and I had even less clue what the final performance would sound like.

Karen and Keely genuinely hard at work (thanks again to Karen’s husband for the photo)

We sent Keely our stories and poems, shuffled into some sort of order, and left her to mull it over and discuss it with Karen. What with holidays, work and other commitments we didn’t manage to get together until ten days before the performance! I was nervous as well as excited when I entered the room but as they played the first few bars for Roz to recite her first poem over, I knew this was going to be fantastic.

Keely has chosen just the right music for each piece, and arranged it for herself and Karen so that it works brilliantly. We spent several hours drinking Karen’s tea, reading and re-reading our pieces aloud, while the two musicians experimented with cutting, repeating, playing in different styles. They now have cues written on their scores, like ‘repeat until Poland’, and of course being a writer I made a note of fabulous questions like: Is Carol waking up in a sweat before or after I come in?

I wrote about the benefits of writing with a partner when Roz and I wrote a radio script together, back in March, and I can highly recommend collaborating with musicians as well. Seeing how someone else interprets your work, and hearing it acquire an extra dimension with a punctuating score is magical. If any of you are within striking distance of Ilkley at 1pm on the 29th of September, come along and share the magic at the bandstand on The Grove. It’s free, open air (fingers crossed for a dry day) and unticketed.

The Crows Remember, an illustrated fairytale

At the start of this year the illustrator Bonnie Helen Hawkins (accompanied by a story from novelist Joanne Harris) kicked off her 52 Crows project, in which she vowed to draw a crow every Monday all year, to illustrate a story or poem. This week I was lucky enough to have her choose my story The Crows Remember as the focus of her drawing and man is it good! She’s gone colourful for this one, picking up on the wildflowers I mention and using them to beautiful effect. You can see her gorgeous drawing (and read my story) on her blog. I urge you to go look at all the other wonderful pictures and read everyone else’s stories and poems as well.

The Crows Remember is a sad story, as pretty much everyone who’s read it so far has pointed out, but I was going for fairytale/folktale and there’s often an undercurrent of sadness or something dark at the core of those so I think I found the tone I was looking for. It’s set (though I didn’t specify in the story) in Swaledale, which to me is a mysterious place populated by the shades of my ancestors, and some sheep – all of 30 miles and a couple of dales away from where I live, but when you don’t drive it’s not an easy place to visit. Unless maybe you’re fitter than I am and own a bicycle. I digress…

I hope you enjoy the story. I don’t see how you could fail to be impressed by the drawing. And if you’re anywhere near Bath, I think there are plans for a 52 Crows exhibition next year, keep an eye on Bonnie’s Twitter for details.

Sick of football? Let me read you some stories

So stunned was I by the England-Panama game that I failed to blog yesterday, but during (at least the second half of) England’s next match I’ll be in the local pub reading stories. Ilkley Writers are interspersing their stories and poems with a couple of 20-30 minute sets from singer-songwriter Lisa Marie Glover. Tickets are only a fiver and you’ll be supporting local creative types. PurpleRoomFlyer

Of course, given that most of you reading this won’t be in the vicinity of Ilkley on Thursday evening (or maybe you were, but you’re not reading this till next week and you’re cursing your poor timing), it seems only fair to remind you that you can listen to me reading a few of my stories (and an essay) here, and there’s a whole radio drama to go at, over at East Leeds FM. And if you’re still looking for distractions from the football, I can recommend a good book.

Writer as performer

The last week or so it’s all been about performance. On May 17th I read some stories at the All Ears Listening Club in Ilkley, alongside Andrea Hardaker and David Hesmondhalgh. At first it seemed quite daunting – a couple of rooms of music enthusiasts had gathered for their regular fix and we were not there to give them those kind of sounds. The music was loud and the conversations were louder. I fell silent as I felt every word I tried to bellow scorching my throat, and I had a sudden fear of standing up to read later and simply croaking. Then eventually the three of us were introduced and it was absolute hear-a-pin-drop quiet, so fast that I was looking for the mute button someone in charge had clearly pressed. All eyes (and ears) on us, and no-one knowing quite what to expect. I read four pieces with some kind of musical connection (you can listen to Summer of ’96 here, you might already have read it at the Fiction Pool. You can read The Lesson at Ellipsis Zine, too) and they seemed to go down well. We’re already talking about reading together again somewhere, maybe with musical accompaniment.

Last weekend Alice Courvoisier and I sat down to plan the order of the York Festival of Ideas event we’re doing with Alice’s friend Carolyn in a couple of weeks. I guess it’s largely the history and philosophy of science (mainly physics, because that’s what we collectively know the most about). It’s on June 14th and tickets are free.

As if that wasn’t enough, Ilkley Writers (or some of us anyway: Jane Cameron, Emily Devane, Andrea Hardaker, David Knight-Croft, Patrick McGuckin, Rosalind York and me) are reading at the Purple Room event at the Wheatley Arms in Ben Rhydding on June 28th 8-10pm (tickets £5 on the door). We’ve been paired with Lisa Marie Glover and there should be four sets (two music, two spoken word) over the course of the evening. Just as long as I don’t lose my voice over the next month…

Writing a script with a partner

JY Saville and Rosalind York at Chapel FM

I wrote about writing with a partner, for the New Writing North blog, so if you’re not sick to the back teeth of me banging on about Lavender Ink (the radio drama Roz and I wrote for this year’s Writing On Air), you can read about how we went about writing it, here.

Marvel at our logical approach, learn from our mistakes, celebrate our continued friendship, then listen to Lavender Ink itself (there’s a link at New Writing North or you can go straight to Chapel FM). Feedback, as ever, gratefully received.

Oh, and for those who read last week’s post which mentioned the renewed search for a day job, I’ve found one, so come next month I won’t have to worry about the Earl Grey supply drying up for a while.

The tip-tap of monkey keyboards

The uninspiring life and ponderous thoughts of a part-time writer