Yorkshire Pepper Cake.  This cake, served at Christmas and New Year, was almost exclusive to the Ryedale area, with other parts of Yorkshire having their own Yule Spice Cake recipes, which were often more like breads made with yeast. Children would go round the houses singing the rhyme, ‘A little bit of pepper cake A [...]

Frumenty, eaten in Yorkshire on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, is a thick, milky pudding, traditionally made with the husked wheat, or in some areas, barley. The wheat heads were soaked in water for a day, then poured into a Hessian sack and beaten against the floor to separate the hullins. The whole [...]

- Mark Haddon. (Vintage Books. ISBN 0-99-45025-9) Mark Haddon’s novel, aimed and marketed differently for both child and adult readers, begins with its protagonist, a 15-year-old autistic boy, Christopher Boothe, discovering the body of a neighbour’s dog, pinned to the ground by a garden fork. The police hold Christopher for questioning over the incident, but [...]

‘Molly Fox’s Birthday’ – Deirdre Madden (Faber - ISBN 978-0-571-23966-5)  This was an incredibly, perceptive book to start my reading for 2010. Deirdre Madden is a gifted wordsmith who has the capacity to paint intimate scenes of life with a beauty and shrewdness seldom seen, nowadays.    The novel concerns itself with the world of the theatre, [...]

                                                                                    When William Scrots, the court artist appointed by Henry VIII in 1546, was commissioned to paint a portrait of Edward VI, there were many who felt that the future King of England had been mocked. The finished picture looked like a bad joke. The skull ballooned out at the back, the forehead bulged, the [...]

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and broke beyond repair…it doesn’t seem much of a tale to fit a play around, but actor, writer, director and Pantomime dame extraordinaire, Berwick Kaler, manages to do just that with a brilliance that no-one else could ever achieve. The pantomime, ‘Humpty [...]

             One of the little post-Christmas pleasures is writing ‘thank you’ letters. When gifts are received at any other time of the year, ‘thank you’ letters should be written within 48 hours, but for Christmas presents, we make the rule, in our household, that all notes should be sent by January 6. A warm, handwritten [...]

  I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go  into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God For that shall be to you better than light and safer than a [...]