Short stories: Huddersfield Lives
There are many jokes about Huddersfield, a grim northern city, in which I had both the fortune and the misfortune to be born. Its name derives from an Anglo-Saxon or Viking warrior whose name was Oder and who owned a large field, hence Odersfeld or Huddersfield. The town which never became a city reached international fame in the 1950s Guinness Book of Records for being the foggiest town in the whole world. It could be a myth, but it fit the facts. My usual muse is comedy, but for the Huddersfield Lives stories, the aesthetic was pure gloom and doom, relieved only by a mild insertion of ironic humour. All the stories are based on my own experiences and are in essence true despite radical changes in the characters to protect personal identities. I am hoping to extend this project to include comic and neutral stories, based in Huddersfield.