Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Harry, Jenny, Kaz, Ian (chair).
Apologies: Gill, John, Karen, Lesley, Michele, Pip.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
Matters Arising
Ian reminded the meeting that this was the last-but-one of the year. The last meeting of the year would be on 7 December 2023. The first meeting of the New Year would be on 18 January 2024. Ian thanked Jenny for organising the Christmas Meal this year. Up-to-the-minute details will be emailed to all members as part of the customary reminder sent the day before the meeting.
Members’ Readings
Harry — handed-out a copy of the next instalment of his seafaring memoir, which he read aloud. Before doing so, he read out a critique of the piece generated by an AI under development by a US firm for which he volunteered to help develop it. The AI can now recognise the genre of the submitted piece, and doesn’t try critiquing it as if it were a novel. Every day, and in every way, it’s getting better and better.
We are now in 1960’s Hartlepool. Newlywed Harry has been promoted to chief radio officer on the SS Marwarri, and is waiting to join the ship as it steams home. His wife Beryl will accompany him, and is busy stitching the clothes she will need for the cold Atlantic as well as the tropics.
The piece now becomes a potted memoir of his deceased father, his fine garden and the shed he built himself, both of which have inevitably fallen into disrepair. At his mother’s request Harry dismantles the shed, marvelling at its workmanship (his father had been a ship’s rivetter) as he reduces it to firewood and fuel for a bonfire.
Ian — read a poem Playing At Soldiers, recalling conscription into his boarding school’s Cadet Corp.
Adele viewed this as a bitter poem, and asked what exactly was the focus of the bitterness. Ian could not recall why he wrote it, but suggested it may have been a combination of the dissonance between religious vows made before Gentle Jesus and the enforcement of volunteer extra-curricular military training (his school’s teaching order was not a military order), and the elevation of war over peace during peacetime and its defence as an acceptable means of solving both international disputes and social problems (“get hooligans off the street and into uniform”). Some discussion ensued.
Kaz — read out two untitled poems and an entertaining short story:
Poem 1: A Salvation Army visitor converses with her hostess. The piece delivers a convincing chat over trivia in rhyming couplets, a feat which Ian congratulated her on.
Poem 2: a poem of loss and hopelessness by a PTSD-afflicted ex-soldier.
Story: the heroine prepared a fine meal-for-two for her awaited date. He arrives with another woman on his arm, and the couple proceed to dine as guests with the heroine acting as waitress and chef.
Jenny — continued reading from her period novel in-progress based on the historical figure of Mary Eleanor Bowes, the heiress of a vast fortune from the Durham coalfields. Irish soldier-of-fortune Andrew Stoney has married heiress Hannah, whom he met at the same time as Eleanor Bowes. But his dissolute lifestyle is running him deeper and deeper into debt because cannot get his hands on Hannah’s fortune until she has borne him a male heir. For the seven years of their abusive marriage he blames Hannah for a series of miscarriages and ill-treats her shamefully, to the contempt of the largely indifferent staff of the couple’s stately home.
Adele — read a further instalment from her Covid Diary. It is now 23 March 2022. Boris Johnson relaxes all covid restrictions, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has entirely displaced everything covid from the news. The manager of Charlie’s care home has locked out residents from the common room for hygiene reasons, but this measure is fiercely resisted by inmates and their families since it no longer has any substance in law.
25 March sees the author and husband off to the Lakes for a break at an excellent B&B with a relaxed attitude to covid.
1 April: free covid tests have been discontinued. Covid tests for those who occupationally need them are now £2 a pop, which increases the burden on poor people. Charlie has covid again. In the UK, 4.9 Million are currently infected. In total, £27 Billion has been spent on test-and-trace, roughly the amount normally spent on providing GP services to the nation.
Members spent the rest of the meeting discussing the contradictions and absurdities of the entire Covid Emergency and the government’s handling of it. Ian asked what exactly constitutes the end of the Emergency (if it has ended), since quite clearly nobody’s told the virus. PM’s diktat? Cessation of interest by the news media? A more acute emergency supervening (the shock of Russia invading Ukraine on UK food and energy prices)? Maybe Adele’s book will offer an answer.
The meeting closed at 1:05 PM.
Whitby Writers Group 