The Yorkshire Poet, 44 Black Carr Road, Rotherham (2026)

22/12/2025

On behalf of Shaun Bennett:

I'm not going to get rid of friends over this but it is important to me. Fighting the Black Dog!!! Well, I'm gonna say bye-bye to some of you. Now I'm watching the ones who will have the time to read this post until the end. This is a little test, just to see who reads and who shares without reading!
I know that 97% of you won't broadcast this, but my friends will be the 3% that do.
Please, in honour of someone who is fighting
Su***de, Mental Health issues and PTSD - Copy & Paste - write Done

19/12/2025

MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

It was the Thursday before Christmas, and a hush had settled over Kitty Cotton’s cottage, the kind of hush that comes only to houses where memory has lived longer than laughter. Kitty sat before the hearth, watching the flames rise and fall like old promises trying to keep warm. She pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders. The smell of baking drifted from the kitchen: mince pies, her yearly ritual.
Charlie Snow had loved them. Sixty years had passed since he marched off to the war that promised it would end all wars, and still she baked them every December, as though he might walk through the door and ask for one; grinning that lopsided grin.
The fire crackled, the mantel clock ticked, and somewhere in the cottage, so faint she thought she imagined it, came the sound of a very tiny throat being cleared.
Kitty decided she needed a little comfort, she poured herself a small glass of eggnog, her favourite Christmas tipple, and took one of her freshly baked mince pies from the cooling rack. Settling back into her chair, she took a generous bite, a crumb tumbled from her fingers and fell to the floor,
but when she looked down, it wasn’t there.
Kitty frowned, scratched her head, and leaned forward; that was when she saw him.
A mouse, no more than three inches tall, standing bold as brass on the hearthrug. He wore a bowler hat, slightly askew, and had the unmistakable air of someone who considered himself a gentleman of the world. He dabbed his whiskers with a tiny handkerchief, then looked up at her with bright, intelligent eyes.
“Mmmm,” he said, patting his little belly, “tastes wonderful! Did you bake this?”
For reasons she could not explain, perhaps loneliness, perhaps the firelight, perhaps the shock of being addressed by a mouse in formal headwear, Kitty replied softly:
Pierre tapped his hat in gratitude, and then glanced around the cottage with the air of a seasoned traveller appraising fine lodgings.
“A charming establishment,” he declared, “warm, well kept, and with excellent pastry. Clacton by the Sea is lovely, of course, but one does tire of the gulls.”
Kitty stared, torn between astonishment and amusement.
“You’re… very polite,” she managed.
“I was raised well,” Pierre said, producing his tiny clarinet. “Now then, shall we have a little music?”
He settled himself on the hearthrug, crossed his legs with impeccable poise, and began to play “Stranger on the Shore.”
The notes drifted through the cottage like candlelight, soft and golden. Kitty felt something loosen in her chest, something she had held tight for decades. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she was nineteen again, dancing with Charlie Snow at the village hall, his hand warm in hers, the world still whole.
When she opened her eyes, Pierre was watching her kindly. “Music remembers what we forget,” he said.
Kitty swallowed hard. “Yes. Yes, it does.”
Pierre played on, filling the cottage with warmth and memory. Outside, the snow thickened. Inside, time softened.
When the final note faded, Pierre stood, bowed deeply, and tucked his clarinet beneath his coat.
“I must be off,” he said. “Christmas is a busy season for a mouse of my talents.”
“Will you come back?” Kitty asked before she could stop herself.
Pierre smiled, a small, knowing smile.
“Where there is music,” he said, “and good pastry, I am never far away.”
And with that, he vanished, leaving behind only a faint whiff of cheddar and the lingering warmth of his music.
Kitty sat very still, listening to the quiet. The cottage felt different now, not less lonely, but less empty. As though something had been returned to her, something she hadn’t realised she’d lost.
She raised her glass of eggnog.
“To Charlie,” she whispered. “And to Pierre.”
The fire crackled in agreement.

18/12/2025

PIE IN THE SKY

Captain Maxwell D’Ascoyne was the only son of Sir Norton D’Ascoyne, Member of Parliament and Cabinet stalwart at the War Office. Sir Norton’s days were spent in rooms heavy with to***co smoke and the rustle of dispatches, where generals muttered about the Balkan crises and the machinery of Empire. His voice carried the weight of authority, clipped and certain, as if every syllable were a command. Maxwell, however, carried a different scent: linseed oil, rubbed into cricket bats until they gleamed like relics of Harrow afternoons.
The D’Ascoyne household was divided between solemnity and sport. Sir Norton’s study was lined with maps of Europe, pins marking regiments and supply lines, while Maxwell’s room was cluttered with bats, pads, and rugby boots, each polished with improbable seriousness. The contrast was not comic daftness but dignified improbability: the head of the household preparing for conquest on the battlefields of Europe in Whitehall’s cabinet rooms, the son and heir preparing for the assent of the Matterhorn with cricket bats and sporting bravado.
At Harrow, Maxwell had been known for his straight bat and his refusal to flinch in the scrum. He was not the brightest scholar, but he was the sort of chap who believed that courage could carry a man further than Latin declensions. His teammates remembered him as the boy who oiled his bat before every match, inhaling the linseed scent as if it were incense.
“A bat must be tended like a mistress,” he would say, echoing his father’s military tone but applying it to sport.
By 1910, England basked in its Belle Époque, gramophones played Wagner and Listd in drawing rooms, suffragettes marched behind their banners in London, and the Titanic had sailed with tragic grandeur.
Maxwell, restless, joined Edward Whymper’s British Expeditionary Team, determined to climb the Matterhorn. He carried his cricket bat alongside ice axes, insisting it was his talisman. The porters laughed, but Maxwell did not, he treated the improbable with solemn dignity, as if the Empire itself depended on his sporting instincts.
Sir Norton, though bemused, encouraged the efforts of his son, believing in the “have a go” spirit, the kind that had carried the Empire across continents. “If you can climb the Matterhorn with a cricket bat in hand,” he told his son, “then you can face anything Europe throws at us.” It was an improbable blessing, but it carried weight of Britain’s imperial Might.
Four years later, Europe did throw its worst. In 1914, war erupted, and Maxwell, true to his father’s War Office heritage, joined the Army Flying Corps. It was the newest, most improbable branch of service, machines made of canvas and wire, engines coughing like bronchial consumptives, pilots strapped in with little more than courage. Maxwell embraced it with the same earnestness he had shown on the cricket field. He believed that if a man could keep his eye on a ball hurtling at ninety miles an hour, he could keep his nerve in a cockpit rattling over Flanders.
Training was brutal, the machines were fragile and the odds were long, while the challenge lay in the improbability of survival. Yet Maxwell treated it all with comic dignity. His trusty cricket bat even at the ready. Fellow pilots teased him, but when he spoke of Harrow matches and great mountain climbs, they listened, his confidence was unnerving, his earnestness contagious.
Sir Norton, still at the War Office, read dispatches of casualties while his son flew reconnaissance over enemy lines. The contrast was stark: father commanding regiments on paper, son risking life in improbable machines. Yet both carried themselves with solemnity, as if duty were not choice but destiny.
Maxwell’s image became legend among his peers. Photographs showed him in flying gear, bat tucked under arm, as if sport and war were inseparable. He was not reckless, but he was improbably confident, the sort of chap who believed that courage could bend reality. His comrades said he flew as if he were still on the cricket square at Lords, eye steady, hand firm, never flinching.
Maxwell was no ordinary pilot. He was a throwback to a bygone age, a former public school boy whose manners and tastes belonged more to the dining room of London’s finest restaurants. He was on first name terms with the legendary chef Auguste Escoffier and with César Ritz, maître d’hôtel of The Savoy, and he measured his life by the gold standard of fine dining rather than the battlefield. Yet when war came Maxwell’s aircraft was unlike any other in the squadron. Where his comrades stripped their machines down to bare essentials, Maxwell insisted on refinement. A rocking chair, made from mahogany and finished with brass fittings, was bolted into the cockpit in place of the standard seat, and a fully functional kitchen at its rear ; Maxwell believed that the gentle sway of the rocker steadied his nerves and gave rhythm to his manoeuvres, as though aerial combat were a kind of dining hall ritual.
To complete the illusion of civility, he secured the services of François de Gaulle, younger brother of Charles, drafted not into politics or command but from the kitchens of the Savoy itself. François became Maxwell’s private chef, but he was no ordinary cook, but a culinarian genius spirited directly into the crammed fuselage behind the pilot’s seat, preparing delicacies at altitude with the same precision he had once reserved for banqueting halls of London. Pastry was rolled beside the altimeter, sauces simmered near the fuel gauge, and the aroma of fine dining mingled with the smell of aviation fuel.
Maxwell’s licentious needs were thus met in full. He could sip Da Hong Pao tea while banking hard to port, nibble caviar on toast between bursts of machine gun fire, and demand venison pie at the very moment the enemy closed in. To him, war was not deprivation but theatre, and the cockpit was his stage, a place where mahogany veneers, brass, and haute cuisine indulgence was made possible by François.
Word had spread, and the German aristocracy bristled with envy. They were men of ceremony, heirs to duels at dawn, pistols at ten paces, sabres flashing in the mist. They longed for ritual combat, for the dignity of tradition. Yet Maxwell had already faced the demon Pongo Patterson at the Gabba while on tour with England in Australia. Patterson was the man who bowled thunderbolts at 100 miles per hour, and had been swatted aside by the prodigious batter with four boundaries in his opening over, eventually breaking the heart of the Ozzy speed merchant before lunch.
Compared to that trial of man against man, the German elite were diminished, their Teutonic bravado, puffed up with hunting horns and beer hall oaths, and collapsed when measured against the epicurean pilot who treated war as theatre. To Maxwell, they were not adversaries but lesser foes, shadows of Patterson’s fury.
And so, when they marked him as their target, Maxwell rocked gently in his mahogany chair, sipping a glass of red Barbera with a piece of Chèvre cheese, and smiling at the absurdity of it all. For him, aerial combat was no deprivation but a banquet, and every burst of machine gun fire was applause echoing through the dining hall of the skies.
Outraged by the dismissive flying antics of Captain D’Ascoyne General von Hoeppner took pen to paper. His letter, addressed directly to the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, thundered with indignation: “This is not cricket, as you say.” The complaint, heavy with Teutonic bravado, eventually made its way across desks and corridors of Whitehall until it landed squarely before the Minister for War, Sir Norton D’Ascoyne.
In a packed parliamentary sitting, Sir Norton rose, spectacles glinting, and read the letter aloud. The chamber erupted. Hats were tossed into the air, order papers waved with gusto, and laughter rolled like cannon fire. The King himself, apprised of the affair, decreed that a special award should be struck in Maxwell’s honour.
Its design was suitably absurd: Two Fingers Rampant, engraved upon a shield of brass and mounted on a mahogany plinth, symbolising defiance with comic dignity. Present to Maxwell in full ceremony, it marked him not merely as a pilot but as a master of theatre over bluster.
By the Spring of 1915, the skies above Europe had become less a theatre of war than a dining hall of absurd invention. The now aptly named British “Flying & Fine Dining Corps” expanded rapidly, recruiting not only pilots but pastry chefs, sauciers, and sommeliers. Each squadron was assigned a maître d’, whose duty was to announce the menu before take-off and ensure that the mahogany veneers gleamed under the morning sun.
The Germans, meanwhile, floundered. Their engineers, tasked with adapting the Fokker machines to culinary use, produced only smoke and disappointment. Attempts to install bratwurst grills beneath the fuselage ended in charred sausages and scorched leather seats. One prototype, the “Bratwurst-Bomber,” was unveiled with great fanfare in Berlin, only to collapse when its sausage rack caught fire mid-flight, forcing Baron von Richthofen himself to bail out with nothing to show but mustard stains on his flying jacket.
The British press seized upon these failures with glee, headlines proclaimed: “Hun Sausages Grounded, British Pies Ascend!” Maxwell himself was photographed reclining in his rocking chair, fork poised over a venison pie as tracer fire streaked past his cockpit. The image became iconic, reproduced on postcards and cigarette cards, a symbol of comic dignity and culinary supremacy.
In Parliament, Sir Norton announced the formation of a new medal to accompany the “Two Fingers Rampant.” This one was dubbed the “Golden Ladle,” awarded to those who combined aerial gallantry with gastronomic flair. Recipients were required to demonstrate not only marksmanship but also the ability to whip a soufflé at altitude.
By summer, the Flying & Fine Dining Corps had become a legend. Their sorties were described not in terms of dogfights but in menus: “Three courses over Ypres,” “A pudding run across the Somme,” “Champagne at Cambrai.” To the Germans, it was humiliation; to the British, it was theatre elevated to ritual. And at the centre of it all sat Maxwell, sipping tea, nibbling caviar, and smiling at the absurdity of war turned banquet.
And so it was that Captain D’Ascoyne and his devoted chef met their demise together, not in the blaze of aerial combat but in the comic tragedy of falling from their aeroplane while attempting to make an upside down cake over the fields of Flanders. Their plane, inverted in defiance of gravity and culinary convention, became an instrument of their own eternal demise
When news reached London, the city prepared a cortege unlike any other. Their bodies were borne back through streets lined not only with soldiers and statesmen but with the culinary staff of every great restaurant and hotel. White aproned brigades stood shoulder to shoulder, chefs’ hats raised in solemn salute, ladles and rolling pins held aloft like ceremonial swords. The air was thick with the scent of French cuisine and fresh bread, as kitchens emptied to honour the fallen.
In Westminster Abbey, they were laid side by side, pilot and chef, comrades in absurd theatre. Their monument was simple, yet devastating in its wit:
“GONE BUT NEVER HUNGRY.”
Thus ended the tale of Captain Maxwell D’Ascoyne tragic, comic, and eternal, a man who turned war into banquet, and whose final act was a cake attempted upside down, remembered forever in brass, mahogany, and laughter echoing through the vaulted halls of the great and the good.

13/12/2025

WARNING!
The reader of these pages may find their contents
FANTASTICLE

GONE WITH THE WIND

You could find the Dincroft Alps six miles outside Rotherham in the pit village of Dincroft , which lay beneath a mountainous array of slag heaps that dominated the skyline. The houses there were all two up, two downs, narrow and unyielding, their yards hemmed in by cracked flagstones and the smell of decades of coal mining. At the bottom of each yard stood the privvy: unlit, its walls painted with white distemper that flaked like old skin, cold in summer and even colder in winter. Spiders, big buggers with hairy legs claimed it as their domaine, their webs trembling when the door slammed. Toilet paper was nothing more than squares of newspaper threaded onto string, an appliance of necessity, not comfort.
Inside number seventeen Lumbutts Street the Farnsworth’s endured. Alf Farnsworth Snr, a man not afflicted with fretting, contemplated his lad, not with laughter but with a miner’s dread: that the boy’s tinkering would amount to nothing, or worse, that it would consume him. Alice, his wife’s voice carried through the yard, not playful but weary, calling Alfred in from the shed where he hunched over a stockpile of empty jam jars of chip fat and tins of magnolia emulsion and half empty paint tins.
Young Alfred was different. While the other lads chased footballs across the recreation ground, he worked alone, driven by a strange conviction: that he could harness waste and turn it into warmth. He spoke of free gas and electric for old folks’ homes, a dream born not of whimsy but of the sight of pensioners shivering through winters, their breath clouding in unheated rooms. His early inventions were crude, boots with heels at the front, to enable you to walk faster backwards, engines that ran on chip fat, and silent door knockers, but behind them was a stubborn purpose.
The shed was not a sanctuary but a workshop of shadows. The paraffin lamp smoked, the tools rusted, and the air was thick with the smell of paint and oil. Alfred’s hands were blackened, his fingernails rimmed with soot.
He was twenty five when Winston Churchill’s men came calling, looking for minds willing to twist the ordinary into weapons of war. They found him in Dincroft, a young man already driven by that enigmatic indecipherability. . . . . Yorkshire grit!

***

The envelope was thick, cream coloured, and bore no return address. It arrived one morning in March 1940 with the chill of winter still hanging in the air, slipped through the letterbox like a secret. Alice Farnsworth turned it over in her hands, uneasy at its weight. Alf Snr read the single line aloud, his voice flat: “Report to London. Transport provided.” No explanation, no signature, only the authority of war.
Albert folded the letter carefully, as though it might crack if bent. He knew at once this was no ordinary conscription. His shed inventions had been noticed. The jam jars of chip fat, the silent door knockers, the backwards boots, all the daft contraptions mocked by neighbours, had somehow reached ears beyond Dincroft.
At Rotherham station, Albert stood with a small case: scraps of sketches, an array of tools, and a paraffin lamp wrapped in newspaper. His mother pressed a scarf into his hands, his father muttered something about “Do thi best lad,” and then the whistle blew. The train lurched south, carrying him away from cracked flagstones into a future he could not imagine. He travelled alone, the carriage quiet, the countryside rolling past in muted colours.
Buckinghamshire fields replaced the pit village landscape. At Whitchurch, Albert was led to The Firs, a country house commandeered for war. Its corridors smelled of oil and cordite, its rooms cluttered with prototypes: sticky bombs on mantelpieces, limpet mines beside teacups, engines cobbled together from bicycle chains and paint tins. Here he met the fellowship: men and women from all walks of life. Seamstresses who stitched wires into upholstery, cooks who measured powders with the precision of pastry, clerks who sketched blueprints with steady hands, mechanics who coaxed engines from scrap. They were not soldiers but civilians, summoned for their ingenuity.
The place was known by its code name, MD1, but everyone called it Churchill’s Toyshop. It was overseen by Major Millis Jefferis, a Royal Engineers explosives expert, and Stuart Macrae, a former science editor turned organiser of eccentric brilliance. Backed directly by Churchill, they had gathered this motley fellowship to bypass bureaucracy and turn odd ideas into weapons of war.
Albert, once the odd lad of Dincroft, now stood among them. His backwards boots were no longer curiosities but part of a collective arsenal; issuing them to the French Army to enable them to retreat with greater speed. The work was dangerous, chaotic, and absurd, but it was purposeful chaos, and Albert had finally found his guild.
The years passed quickly, an apprenticeship like no other! Young Albert excelled; his invention of exploding bratwurst sausages, known by the lads as ‘the banger’ proving a huge success along with the backward firing 7.65mm Browning Walther PKK a hand gun carried by Adolf Hi**er himself caused chaos amongst the senior ranks of the Third Reich.

***

Only one week after VE Day had been announced, Albert stepped off the train at Rotherham station; he was not the same young man who had left five years earlier with a paraffin lamp wrapped in newspaper. His gait was quicker, his eyes brighter, his case heavier with sketches and notes. He had been tempered in the crucible of The Firs, where chaos had been turned into invention, and now he carried that fire back north.
Dincroft had not changed much, other than the slag heaps had grown higher. The two up, two downs still lined Lumbutts Street, the yards were still hemmed in by cracked flagstones, and the privvies still stood at the bottom of each garden. But Albert had changed. He spoke now of engines that could run on recycled household waste, of lamps that could burn without oil, of warmth drawn from waste. His neighbours, once amused by his backwards boots and silent door knockers, now listened with a new respect.
Albert dreamed of transforming the pit village into a place where ingenuity replaced deprivation. He sketched plans for communal heating systems powered by natures by-products and for street lamps lit by captured gases. He spoke of the fellowship he had met at The Firs, seamstresses, clerks, mechanics, cooks, all ordinary people who had turned their trades into weapons of war. Their example convinced him that Dincroft too could be a workshop of invention.
He had nurtured the idea of jam jars of sunlight, inspired by the Toyshop’s eccentricity. He told the lads on the recreation ground that one day they would play football under lights bottled from the sky.
At first, the villagers chuckled, but they began to see the promise. When he fashioned a contraption to pump warm air into the chapel during winter services, they nodded with approval.
Albert’s shed became a gathering place of possibility. Men and women brought scraps, jars, and tools, eager to see what he might conjure. He was no longer the solitary tinkerer mocked for daft contraptions; he was the architect of a new kind of resilience.
Albert had returned to Dincroft a man reborn, full of ambition, brimming with ideas, and convinced that ingenuity could be the village’s salvation. His apprenticeship in invention had graduated into a mission: to turn hardship into warmth, waste into light, and eccentricity into dignity.
Albert had a new idea whizzing round his brain. He began collecting his own bubbles from the bath after breaking wind, convinced he could extract the warm methane trapped inside. Fuelled by rhubarb pie and mugs of Yorkshire tea, he scribbled a formula on the back of an envelope: Pie × F = E.
From this he built the Bubbleator, a contraption of pipes and broken down contraptions from the tip, designed to capture the gas. With patent rights in mind, Albert placed an advertisement in the local paper, seeking sympathetic volunteers willing to donate their vapour. He even wrote a pamphlet, complete with diagrams and instructions, explaining how to manage one’s ablutions and control the process. “Fart into the bag enclosed,” it declared, “and seal with sticky tape as tight as you can make it, so nothing can escape.”
Soon Albert published a thesis entitled The Complexities of Farts, filled with calculations, schemata, and pie charts. To the astonishment of his neighbours, he was juxtaposed with Faraday for his work on miasmic vapour, and even secured a sponsorship from Andrex to promote their toilet paper. Production began in earnest, and Albert gave away his bio gas freely, warming nursing homes and the Miners Convalescent Home for the dear old lads and lasses, all thanks to rhubarb pies generating natural gases.
But Albert was not content. His ambition grew. He turned his mind to the age old problem of nuclear fission. One day, in a moment of revelation, he declared the answer obvious: sunlight in a jam jar. Screw the lid on tight, and like a magic lantern, you had light forever—so long as you never removed the lid. He spoke of jars of sunshine sold for a shilling, illuminating rooms without gloom.
Neighbours chuckled, but Albert pressed on. He had solved, he claimed, the riddle that had defeated Faraday, bottling neutrons in glass to turn night into day. And even as he basked in this triumph, his imagination leapt again: capturing the energy of thunder and lightning. He had not yet worked out the details, but the dream was gathering pace. “Watch this space,” he told them, eyes alight with conviction.
Albert’s shed became his crucible. For months he laboured there, sleeves rolled, hands raw from pipework, the air thick with rhubarb mash and fermenting vapour. Bags of gas were stacked to the rafters, each one a fragile promise of warmth and light. He scribbled calculations by candle, muttered incantations of science and folly, and refused to leave until the Bubbleator sang its peculiar tune.
But invention is never without peril. One night, a bag swelled beyond its seams, self combusting and with a hiss and a roar and a naked candle flame, disaster struck! The chain reaction was merciless: flames leapt from bag to bag, until Albert’s shed was a pyre of his own making. The villagers of Dincroft woke to the crackle of timbers and the smell of stewed rhubarb, watching as the old garden shed collapsed into ash. Albert stood among the ruins, soot streaked and hollow eyed, his dream seemingly undone.
Yet Dincroft was built on more than bricks and mortar. Within days, neighbours rallied. His Auntie Edna had baked fresh pies to fuel the next batch of gas; Uncle Jim hammered new beams with a carpenter’s rhythm; lads and lasses hauled timber, nails, and hope as they dismantled the old village hall. The Bubbleator rose again, patched and perfected, its pipes gleaming against the winter sky.
Albert, undeterred, declared the fire a lesson in progress. If rhubarb could ignite, then surely sunlight could be bottled. He spoke of jam jars filled with eternal light, lids screwed tight to trap the sun forever. “A shilling a jar,” he promised, “and no gloom shall enter your room.”
Thus, from ashes and accident, Albert’s vision endured. His contraptions were no longer mere curiosities; they were symbols of persistence, proof that folly and genius, when tempered by struggle and community, could illuminate even the darkest hall.
So Albert, soot streaked but unbowed, stood at the heart of Dincroft, buzzing with invention. His Bubbleator hummed, bags of rhubarb gas piled high, warming nursing homes and banishing the chill for the dear old lads and lasses. What began as folly had become a gift, freely given, a comic miracle wrought from pie crusts and persistence.
Yet Albert was never content. His mind leapt from farting to fission, from rhubarb to radiance. And in a moment of revelation, as sudden as a brick to the brow, he saw the answer: capture the sunlight in a jam jar, then screw the lid tight, and you had light forever, a magic lantern for a shilling. Neighbours chuckled, but Albert pressed on, declaring he had solved the riddle that had defeated Michael Faraday, bottling neutrons in glass to turn night into day.
No more atramentous gloom, no more dismal nights. A jar of sunshine on the mantelpiece, illuminating rooms with comic dignity and unnerving plausibility. And just as Albert basked in his triumph: Hey presto! Capturing the crackle of thunder, the flash of lightning, harnessing storms to light the world. He had not yet worked out the details, but the dream was gathering pace.
Thus the tale of Dincroft did not end with Albert’s jam jars, nor with his storm catcher. It ended with the village itself, and a new shed rebuilt from ashes, warmed by rhubarb, lit by bottled sun, and forever alive with invention. For in Dincroft, folly was never folly at all, but the spark of resilience, the humbug of genius, and the promise that tomorrow’s miracle was already on its way.

09/12/2025

SLOW-SLOW-QUICK-QUICK SLOW

It was one of those rare summer days in Blackpool, a holiday maker’s delight. The Golden Mile was a myriad of day-trippers and vacationers that had converged in their tens of thousands to enjoy the spectacle of a day by the sea side.
Uncle Fred adjusted his bow tie with the solemnity of a man about to face judgment. The Tower Ballroom shimmered, the organ’s thunder rolled above him, chandeliers scattering light across the world’s most famous dance floor. Auntie Lil, resplendent in a shimmering ensemble that caught every flicker of gold, placed her hand in his.
Then Reginald Dixon struck up on the Whurlitzer, giving it some welly. Then through the magnificent ballroom, a sound both jaunty and commanding, as if the very walls of Blackpool had been summoned to bear witness. . . . . . The foxtrot began.
They moved together with deliberate grace: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Each step was a negotiation between memory and muscle, between the years they had carried and the rhythm that still carried them to this day. Fred’s shoes whispered across the famous sprung floor, his face set in concentration, while Lil’s smile betrayed the thrill of being once again a Spanish doll in his arms.
The crowd hushed, sensing the ritual in their movement. It was not merely dance but a reckoning, two aging rockers proving that time could be bent, if only for the length of a song, the sequence repeated, slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, until the ballroom itself seemed to pulse with their cadence.
When the music paused, Fred tightened his grip, guiding Lil into a turn that drew a cheer from the gallery. For a moment, they were not pensioners from Rotherham but champions of a mythic order, their foxtrot a testament to resilience, absurdity, and love.

***
Uncle Fred was the outdoor type. He loved the open air, the smell of grass after rain, and the freedom of the wide spaces. Auntie Lillian, his sweet and doting wife, shared that delight. Every weekend they could be seen pedalling their tandem bicycle across the Yorkshire countryside, faces lit with broad smiles, the picture of cheerful endurance. The tandem itself was no ordinary machine but a relic of their shared life, cherished like a family heirloom. Its paint was chipped in places, its leather seats worn smooth by decades of journeys, yet Fred treated it with the reverence of a craftsman tending an altar. On Friday evenings he could be found in the shed, sleeves rolled, polishing the handlebars until they gleamed, tightening bolts with the solemnity of a priest preparing for mass. He would oil the chain with a careful hand, listening for the whisper of perfection, and test the tyres with a firm squeeze, nodding in satisfaction when they yielded just enough.
Lil, watching from the doorway, would smile at his devotion. “It’s not just a bicycle, Fred,” she would say, “it’s our passport to adventure.” And Fred, adjusting his spectacles, would reply, “Aye, Lil lass, and it’ll carry us yet over moor and dale, so long as I keep her in trim.”
Today’s adventure was mapped with precision: a route across the Yorkshire Moors to Whitby, with a scheduled stop in Pickering for early morning tea. The plan had been rehearsed in their heads all week, each turn of the road imagined, each hill anticipated. At 6am sharp, the tandem rolled out of the garden gate, Fred at the helm, Lil perched behind, her scarf fluttering like a pennant in the dawn breeze.
Lil had packed provisions with the care of a seasoned quartermaster: tuna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and Fred’s favourite pickled eggs nestled in a tin. The scent of vinegar and brine mingled with the cool morning air, promising sustenance for the miles ahead. As they pedalled into the rising sun, the rhythm of their legs matched the rhythm of their hearts, steady, enduring, and full of anticipation.
The countryside opened before them like a stage, hedgerows glistening with dew, skylarks darting overhead, and the moors in the distance waiting like a vast, untamed audience. Each push of the pedals was a declaration: that age had not dimmed their appetite for adventure, nor dulled the tandem’s mythic power to carry them into stories yet to be told.

***

But their pleasures were not confined to the lanes and hedgerows. Fred and Lil were ballroom enthusiasts, and their devotion to dance was as steady as their devotion to each other. Once, they even appeared on television, an episode of Come Dancing from Butlin’s Pwllheli, where their formation team, The Edwin & Constance Grant Figurants lifted the winner’s trophy. The photograph of them grinning into the camera, trophy raised high, became a family relic.
Yet beneath the sparkle lay a problem. Auntie Lil had begun to struggle with her breathing. Emphysema, the doctor said, and the pillion rides on the tandem left her breathless. She turned to restorative pills and analeptics, hoping they might ease her hindrance. Fred, ever the melancholic genius, grew despondent watching her swallow tablets.
He was a man who could calculate the square root of pi on his fingers, and he longed for a solution more elegant than pharmaceuticals.
One morning, seated on the toilet in contemplative solitude, inspiration struck. He would build an engine. He would dismantle the lawn mower, salvage its moving parts, and attach them to the tandem. With chip pan oil and liquid concoctions from the medicine cabinet as his unlikely fuel, he would propel them forward without pedalling, free to roam wherever they pleased.
It was indeed a scheme worthy of man’s ingenuity half spectacle, half salvation. Fred’s blueprint for the tandem-engine was still pinned to the potting shed wall, a relic of his interrupted cogitation.
The heart attack had struck like a stage curtain falling mid-performance, and the tandem, stripped of its promise, was sold to a neighbour who used it only for trips to the allotment.
Lil, however, refused to let fate dictate the rhythm. She purchased a genuine ‘Hog’ a Harley-Davidson XLH 1000 Sportster, a machine that seemed to embody her transformation from ballroom grace to leather-clad defiance. Its 997cc air cooled V Twin engine was the heart of the beast, a cathedral bell that tolled with every stroke, producing a growl akin to the King of Beasts. The Sportster’s Showa forks at the front and dual shocks at the rear gave her resilience on the road, absorbing the jolts of potholes and fate alike, while the single disc brakes front and back offered her the power to halt the spectacle when she wished. At around 240 kilograms, with a narrow tank holding nine litres of fuel, it was heavy enough to command respect yet nimble enough to weave through the narrow roads of the Yorkshire Dales and Moors, with her band of East End Angels. She pressed the electric starter and the machine leapt alive, no ballroom partner required, its chain drive binding her to the road as firmly as Fred had once bound her to the dance floor. Chrome gleamed where sequins once sparkled, and the roar of the Harley became her anthem, a hymn of survival and spectacle. What she bought was not merely a motorcycle but a mythic machine, half Barnum’s humbug, half salvation, and wholly her declaration that she was back in the saddle.
Soon she was roaring down the highway with the Angels, her leather jacket stitched with patches that read like a new liturgy: Ride to Live, Live to Ride. The ballroom’s “slow slow quick quick slow” was transposed into the Harley’s thrum, an anthem of combustion and defiance.
Fred, meanwhile, lay in bed, his melancholy deepened by the sight of Lil’s leathers by the door. He counted the beats of his faltering heart like a metronome, recalling old algebraic equations as if mathematics might steady the rhythm.
The bypass surgery came like a deus ex machina, a surgeon’s scalpel cutting through despair. When he emerged, stitched and reborn, Lil was waiting with a brand new sidecar, fitted for purpose, polished to a mirror shine. Together they mounted the Harley, Fred easing into the sidecar with the dignity of a man restored. Pharmaceuticals were abandoned, beta blockers forgotten, as if the very roar of the hog had become their medicine.
They rode through the lanes and hedgerows once more, but now with a mythic soundtrack: the Harley’s growl echoing against stone walls, the sidecar rattling like a carnival drum. Villagers waved as they passed, uncertain whether they were witnessing a love story, a resurrection, or a traveling circus. Fred raised his hand in salute, Lil leaned into the curve, and together they became a spectacle of survival.

**

It was a Saturday night some five years later, the kind that had become ritual for Fred and Lil. The kettle had boiled, the mugs were lined up, and the telly flickered in the corner of the sitting room. Strictly Come Dancing was on, its glittering spectacle filling the house with sequins and applause. Fred sat forward in his chair, eyes fixed on the screen. Lil, wrapped in her dressing gown, tapped her foot against the hearthrug, her breath catching with excitement as the couples spun across the floor. And in that moment they were transported, back to Blackpool, back to the Tower Ballroom, back to the nights when Reginald Dixon had thundered on the Whurlitzer and they had danced beneath chandeliers. The memory was sharp, almost painful in its clarity. Fred glanced at Lil, and she at him, and without a word they both knew.
“Come on, love,” Fred said, rising with a creak of knees. “Let’s give it a whirl.”
Lil laughed, half protest, half delight. “In here?
“In the kitchen. Where else?” Fred replied, already clearing the chairs. “We’ve no sprung floor, but we’ve got linoleum.”
They carried their mugs through, setting them on the counter beside the biscuit tin. The cooker light became their spotlight, the kettle hissed like an orchestra tuning up, and the kitchen floor was suddenly transformed.
Fred slipped into his old Teddy suit, though it hung differently now. The jacket pulled tight across his shoulders, the trousers clung to thighs two stone heavier, and only the brothel creepers seemed unchanged, squeaking against the linoleum with every step, faithful companions from another age. Lil tied her dirndl skirt, the waistband cinched higher than it once had, lace top bobby sox stretched bravely over her calves. She smoothed them with a dancer’s instinct, chin lifted, eyes sparkling, though she knew the skirt was more memory than fit.
They stood together in the cooker light, a pair of echoes dressed in fabric that remembered more than it revealed. Fred’s lapels carried the ghost of Teddy boy swagger, Lil’s skirt the memory of sixties dance halls. Their shoes, the only garments that fit, became symbols of continuity, soles that had tapped out foxtrots, stamped paso dobles, and shuffled through countless routines.
Then the music began. Fred counted under his breath, voice steady, ritualistic: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. His brothel creepers squeaked as he guided Lil across the linoleum, trousers straining with each step. Lil’s skirt swayed, buttons tugging, but her smile widened as she followed his lead. Together they moved between fridge and pantry, the kitchen transformed into a ballroom.
They shouted “olé” during a paso doble, Fred biting down on a rose with comic solemnity, Lil stamping her feet until the bobby sox threatened to slip. They laughed through a flamenco beat, their costumes creaking but their rhythm intact. The salsa burned across the tiles, the Viennese waltz spun them dizzy, and the Lindy Hop shook the CD player on its shelf.
The clothes strained, the shoes squeaked, but the dance carried them. Each step was both comic and defiant, a refusal to let time dictate the rhythm. And when at last they collapsed together, breathless and aching, they were not pensioners in ill fitting costumes but Fred and Ginger reborn, two weary old rockers who had once again cut their grooves.
When at last they collapsed together, breathless and aching, the cooker light dimmed and the music faded. They were not pensioners in a terraced house but Fred and Ginger reborn, two weary old rockers who had once again cut their grooves. Lil reached for the kettle, Fred reached for the biscuit tin, and together they toasted their triumph with Yorkshire tea and ginger nuts.
Upstairs, the house settled into silence. “We did ourselves proud tonight,” Fred murmured as they climbed the stairs. Lil squeezed his hand. “Aye,” she said softly, “like we always do.”

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