Postcard from Yorkshire: Malham Cove

Malham Cove is a spectacular limestone feature, best described as an inland cliff face with a spectacular limestone pavement on top. Not the sort of pavement one sees lining the side of a road, this one is full of huge cracks and uneven surfaces. Actually, it's just the sort of pavement one expects to see lining the side of the road.


One reaches the village of Malham by following what we now recognised as the standard issue succession of increasingly tiny twisting narrow country lanes, or 'roads' as they are known locally, until you reach a line of cars indicating the boundary of the village and a succession of people too tight to pay for car parking.

The car park is full of people with a uniform sense of excitement and a uniform of walking boots and waterproof hiking jackets in a variety of primary colours that presumably make it easy to locate one in a snowdrift or a heard of sheep. Foul weather gear was not needed today, as the sun was shining brightly enough for your average walker to be comfortable in a tee shirt. But, if you have sprung a couple of hundred quid for an anorak and a performance fleece liner, I can see the logic in wearing the damn thing no matter what the weather.

One does feel a little under dressed without a dog. Surely it is time for us to start emulating Japan which, I believe, has a thriving 'hire a pet' industry with the added benefit if you are Oriental that anything that disappoints by misbehaving can be turned into a snack. Behaving very well in the car park was a cocker called, what else, Jarvis. He was at that doggie adolescent age where everything is over-exciting and yet at the same time a bit daunting, leading to leaping around the place but with a note of caution.


The footpath meanders to the foot of Malham Cove where one is confronted with a sheer rock face, with water and free climbers dripping from it. Free climbers all tend to be very much of a type, wiry from climbing and very thin from either keeping extremely fit or crapping themselves on a regular basis because of the sheer drop and lack of big bouncy inflatable castle below.

The free climbers in question looked to be enjoying themselves very much, yet one had to asking, for safety's sake, one should perhaps spoil their fun and break it to them that the is in fact a sarcasm, cut into the rock,that winds it's way very gently to the top of the cliff and has a constant stream of tourists aged eight to eighty using it.


As one climbs, so the view unfolds and one found oneself looking for Aragorn and the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring. This is exactly the sort of landscape hat they would pass through, on their way to do something violent to an orc. In fact, one would be more likely to bump into HarryPotter, as this is where they filmed one of the scenes from the last movie, Deathly Hallows, when Harry and friends are on the run and camping. The scene, and the scenery, looks like CGI and one imagines that after huffing the camera kit to the top of the Cove, the unlucky hampers were wondering why the scene couldn't just have been rendered in a graphics place in Soho.

The reason was to be found in the gift shop by the car park afterwards, where a youngHarry Potter fan was entertaining the staff with a Harry Potter quiz. The hap was obviously thrilled to visit a place that was in a real live movie about the boy wizard and that in itself must give satisfaction to whatever burly rigger carried the camera and lights and to the runner who was constantly up and down the staircase with coffee.

No lighting was required on top of Malham Cove, up here the brilliant sunshine was reflected back from the snow that still lay on the hills in pockets. It was an odd sensation to stand in the snow in the sunshine with waterproof and fleece tied round the waist, basking in the warm sun as the snow crunched under your boots. It makes one appreciate why walkers walk, hikers hike and people go outside at all, especially here. The whole area is essentially an enormous breathtaking photographic challenge and photography always looses because even if you kit superior to the Hubble telescope, there comes a point where you put your camera away and just sit there, trying to take it all in, knowing that the best favour you could ever do to somebody when trying to convey the beauty of the area would be to replace your photograph with a small piece of card bearing an OS map reference and the phrase 'just go'.


Returning from our walk (less than a hike, but very much more than a stroll) we decided that a cream tea would be just the job. Well, one of us fancied a cream tea, I was very much in the 'chips for lunch' camp. While the snow lay in isolated drifts, I had still been walking in it and so decided that a hot lunch was more than justified and, if that lunch consisted of chips, so much the better. Not that I need an excuse to have chips, but chips being required is quite a different proposition to chips being desired.

Returning to the village by a footpath that ran alongside houses where locals sat in their gardens, enjoying the sunshine and nodding to visitors 'ow do', we happened upon the Beck Hall Hotel, where, beside a brook that, to the delight of the Yorkshire tourist board, was babbling and sparkling in the sunshine, happy groups of tourists tucked into their lunches while opportunistic mallards waddled from table to table on the look out for the odd dropped crust.

A waitress, a young girl of about twenty with the sort of enthusiastic energy that one only finds in the young or the chemically enhanced, rushed to greet us. Her welcome was fairly unconventional; 'Have I told you about our cake disaster? There's no lemon drizzle. We're right out of coffee and walnut and there's barely a slice of Victoria sponge to be had!'. All this in a sort of breathless rush. I was relaxed, as nobody had mentioned a lack of chips yet.
'Do you have scones?'
'Oh aye, fresh baked. Tea with those?'
'Yes please, and a bowl of chips, and a sandwich, with meat in it.'

Five minutes later the table was groaning with food and tea and ten minutes later so was I. The drawback of staying or eating in a hotel that is walker and pet friendly is that it is always going to be just a tiny bit scruffy, those boots in the hallway and the paw prints on the tile floor knock off stars from the rating. And let's face it, nobody expects somebody who runs a hotel catering for walkers or dogs to keep the place spotless, you'd have to employ somebody just to Hoover from dawn to dusk. What you get though is a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and, when it comes to food, an understanding that it is best served promptly and in the sort of portions that are appreciated by folk who have just walked from one edge of their OS map to the other with only a banana to sustain them. My sandwich came with crisps, salad and coleslaw. As well as chips. This wasn't a snack, this was a meal!

The mallards went hungry.

In praise of...J.K.Rowling

The sad death of Alaistair Cook some years ago deprived Britain of a fine diplomat, the world of a fine communicator and the BBC of not just a fine broadcaster but the presenter of a programme that was as much a fixture of Radio 4’s Friday night schedule as the Shipping Forecast – ‘letter from America’.

Cook’s distinctive style and voice have been replaced with the same sort of opinion pieces from others – last night it was the turn of Clive James, the amiable Aussie semi-professional fattie to talk to the nation. I only heard the last five minutes of his show but it was gripping – a discussion about how the deserved success of J.K. Rowling was a slap in the face to any aspiring writer who complained that they did not have success. The point, I think, was that inspiration and talent and hard work will out – so stop winging about the perceived success of what are considered to be pot-boiler authors and get writing, or stop moaning.

He was, of course, right.

Spoilers – go no further if you have not read the Harry Potter books and want to one day.

I’ve just finished ‘Deathly Hallows’ and thought it was a great book – it gave the fans what they wanted and it gave this fan EXACTLY what he wanted – Snape redeemed, Hogwarts finally used as a castle in the true sense and, best of all, Neville Longbottom revealed as the truly kick-arse superpowerful magician that he was hinted to be in the earlier books. And the epilogue is a fine touch.

Spoilers end

I thought the writing was great. I know that the cycle of books is finished, but think that there are still stories to be told about Harry Potter at Hogwarts – for me, the magic of the early books especially was the introduction of the wizarding world. It would be good to see some short stories from J.K., dipping into different years at Hogwarts, with Harry as the central or even tangential character – a stylistic trick pulled off with some panache by Terry Practchett in the books where Sam Vimes of Ahnk-Morpork city watch is not the main protagonist as in the early books but is seen through the eyes of others.

I’ve seen J.K. interviewed a couple of times and she always struck me as a serious woman. I guess that creative people are serious, and defensive about their art – their creations, as others are about their children.

Artists, writers and some musicians have this approach – those that are inspired and conjure something from nothing. Few actors do I think, relying as they do on everyone from the writer to tell them what to say to sound good, through the director to tell them how to feel so that can appear normal and finally, possibly most importantly, the lighting guy so they can look ten years younger and not quite so addicted to crack, fags and late nights shagging groupies in dingy night-clubs.

The latest Harry Potter book was, to understate, much anticipated – I think fans are already starting to anticipate J.K.s next book. I think the question is not will she write one, I think the question is, when?

Who is Kaiser Soeze?

Like it, loath it or remain indifferent to it, it’s generally accepted that the Harry Potter books are a publishing phenomenon. Speaking as somebody who started reading them before the hype really started (I read about them in The Guardian, the point of the article being that Bloomsbury had taken the unusual step of publishing this book with child and adult covers), I was quite pleased to see them become more and more popular and think that the midnight release thing is quite cool.

After a night on the toot, I was passing Tesco at midnight on the night of the last book’s release and called in, with all the other children high on sleep deprivation and excitement, to pick up my copy. What was fun about it was that the security guard at the store, no doubt used to wrestling people trying to shoplift frozen chickens to the ground for his £5.52 an hour, was standing beside the carton he had no doubt just ripped open with the style of the Queen unveiling a plaque on a new school, smiling and looking pleased as punch. The whole episode was quite charming.

The problem was always going to be the embargo and avoiding spoilers with the last book - with Bloomsbury unable to threaten a Howler or, worse, no access to the following volumes in the series, on anyone who released plot details and so on. The news reports that reviews of the book released ahead of its publication include spoilers, the question is…why?

The answer is, because the people who do this sort of thing are shits. There has always been the sort of people who take their seat in the cinema for a performance of a movie that hangs on a plot twist, and stage whispers that twist it to a friend - from Psycho to the 6th sense, I firmly hope that such people were battered to death with clubs crudely fashioned from popcorn containers and the legs of cinema chairs.

The collection of news to print in newspapers costs money, you have to send journalists to many pubs where they ply informants with drinks until the story comes out (trade secret - shorthand isn’t actually shorthand, it’s just a collection of indecipherable squiggles penned while pissed). So much easier just to flip to the last chapter of a book, piss all over the expectations and excitement of children and go down the pub.

I speak with authority, as the man who told his nephew, on Christmas Day, that Santa did not exist (oops!), that this sort of spoiler is a crass act. Whatever else the HP books may be, they are entertaining for kids. I can, however, understand why certain types would want to spoil that - it’s because the same defective character trait that led them to be the sort of journalist that hates the rest of the world, yet doesn’t realise how much more the rest of the world now hates them, and thinks they have scored a point. By spoiling things for children.

Do you know what they do to that sort of person in prison?