Lost in t’Nidderdale League: The Secret Cricketer

Although I’m from Bristol and therefore, in Cricketing terms, ought to support Gloucestershire, to me Yorkshire has always seemed to be the spiritual home of English cricket.

In numbers terms alone it makes sense. In the Vale of York, just one local league amongst many the Nidderdale League features 54 teams, including the likes of Alne and Beckwithshaw, Kirkby Malzeard, Masham, Newton-Le-Willows, Raskelf, Spofforth and Whixley.

But only one team in this league has ever lost so badly that their local shame became national news.

A quote from Victor Hugo

Found this indirectly via ‘Little White Lies’ – an excellent film magazine – in the current Apocalypse Now issue. “Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenanciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that…

Bookshelf invitation – Magpie Tales

Magpie tales blog asked people to write a poem, or vignette based on this picture: To make it tougher, I gave myself thirty minutes. Here’s my response. Every book is unfinished. The secret’s out. There’s something lacking within, And they squat on the shelves going nowhere. Abandoned on the edge of the road. Mere objects…

Record Store Day – Here’s to Revolver Records, Bristol.

As a teenager in the eighties my hometown seemed blessed with a surprising variety of record shops, but I always saw Revolver as the one true emporium of cool.

The Narroways

We knew it wasn’t ours – considered it on loan,
sliver of old wild earth made common ground,
swallowed by city, only partially digested,
an accidental place, become essential.

Arriving at Whitby

And coming down from high moors
I caught a whiff of Whitby,
Through bitching rain, a coastal squall,
Came a smalltown smell so subtle almost dreamt

The Green – after Wallace Stevens

My attempt to sound a little like Wallace Stevens, with a poem about a mythic Green Man.

An ill-fated encounter between a pompous git* and a pram.

Why is it that a certain kind of person in this country finds it so hard to accept that children exist? It’s not as if they are a rarity. If you have or know children, you’ve probably encountered the type. They’re often male, but not exclusively, usually fairly well-off and long past their own youth.…