Darfield

I've been thinking about the fact that, as readers, we don't only read words on pages or on smartphones or on billboards or as subtitles on the bottom of a French film. The word '˜reading' can be used for all sorts of things. We talk about reading a situation, so that when you walk into a room you can sense the atmosphere and you reach into your bag for a knife to cut it with. Some people say, of other people '˜I can read him/her like a book' and as a child I often wondered what that meant, and I imaged my Auntie staring hard at my Uncle Charlie's waistcoat to try and work out some semblance of plot or character development, and failing.

I like punctuation, and I like relating to it in Yorkshire ways. Here’s the dropped flat cap of the full stop, and the slipping flat cap of the comma. Here come the waves on the moonlit beach at Scarborough that is the semicolon, and the reflected moon on the calm waters off Brid that is the colon. And the ellipsis…? Well, that’s three Yorkshire puddings on a plate, obviously, and the question mark and the exclamation mark follow the emotions of the Yorkshire football fan as they prepare for the new season. Will we get promoted? Of course we’ll get promoted!