I was back in Yorkshire over the course of the last weekend for a fleeting visit, knowing that soon I shall set down roots there once again.
The vast, frozen spine of the Pennines, its ribs splayed out to the sides, x-ray bright with snow against the darkness; a leviathan unconscious but breathing underneath the inclement weather.
Up at the apex where as I child, I swore, I had reached the highest point on the planet, with Barnsley and Manchester both glowing thousands of feet below, and the ashes of Sylvia Plath interned beneath the earth, I apprehended the surrounding bleakness and called it home.
This Yorkshire, this excess of memories where Danny would make balistically for the door when the wind caused his fur to stand up the wrong way; where I smashed my mouth open on a concrete post we were using as a cricket stump; where I met the wet-eyed, wet-lipped muse who doubled as my first serious girlfriend, for all of seven weeks.
This Yorkshire into which I leaked last year, suspicious-looking under the umbra at three o'clock in the morning, seeking out the woman who deserved so much better, and whose motif is the gently admonishing: does this look like a girl's house? when I failed to put down the toilet seat; where I restricted you to three or four hours of sleep and promised you far more than I ever delivered. For as long as I live, I'll think of: does this look like a girl's house? on a regular basis.
This Yorkshire, a spaghetti of events experienced, and events half-imagined, and infused with a history which a Lamarckian would stain us all: Arthur Scargill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Harold Wilson, Peter Sutcliffe, and I go back no more than 25 years in selecting those names.
Austere, spare Yorkshire, I see your stripped trees and sinewy dogs and hear your pebble-smooth vowels in my dreams, yet I wake up separated from you, the beat of a heart with no organ present, a river without flow.
