Weekend Writing Prompt

'Yet stop I did: in fact I often do'

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Friends

I’ve been deep in research recently on a new writing project. This week I’ve been out and about church visiting over the Yorkshire wolds; windows down as I drive, feeling for the sensory experience. Research is not always books and libraries and archives. Sometimes it is stepping from a bright sunny day into the cool reverence of a church, or a barn, or a country house that creaks and wheezes with old floorboards, old banisters, old stairways.

I want to share with you this Philip Larkin poem, which kept coming back to me as I was buzzing about in my crappy old car traveling over the chalky wolds.

I’m never sure how I feel about Larkin. I did my biomedical degree at Hull uni, and my wreckage of a PhD too, and his presence in the uni was enormous