Carlisle here we come…

One of the many downsides of the pandemic has been the impossibility of seeing friends. This week, after almost a year and a half, I finally got to meet up with a bunch of fellow Crime-and-Publishment-ers in Carlisle. It was absolutely lovely, but it very nearly didn’t happen at all.

With help from Irene Paterson I’d arranged it for Monday lunchtime at our favourite cafe, Cakes & Ale. I was all set to travel up by train, and really looking forward to it, if a little nervous about being crammed into a railway carriage full of strangers for over an hour. At the moment, everything is by advance booking only, so on Saturday evening I sat down to order my tickets – and found to my horror that every last seat on both the outward journey and the return had already been sold.

To say I was upset was an understatement, but Other Half sprang to the rescue, donning a cape and driving me to Carlisle on the day. He spent a couple of hours mooching round and discovering interesting bits of the city, while I plonked myself at a table in the cafe’s surprisingly pretty garden and caught up with everyone again.

Not all of the group were free at such short notice, but we managed to rustle up seven: myself, Irene, Linda Wright, soon-to-be-published Ann Bloxwich, AliceMae Jamieson, John Langley, and the superstar of the group Mike Craven, whose books are now so popular that he’s had a brand of coffee named after his main character Washington Poe.

No hugs yet, but it was super to see people face-to-face at last, and be able to talk for a couple of hours (while still leaving time for tea, coffee, soup, sandwiches or cake – though not all at once). Here’s hoping we can do it again – without having to wait another year and a half.

I took my camera to get a nice group shot of us all and forgot to take the snap! So here’s a picture of the garden instead. Hard to believe this is right in the centre of a bustling city.

Body Breaker launch

Thursday was the hottest day of the year so far – 28c and hardly a day I’d choose to go travelling by train.  However, I piled on the sunscreen, wore my coolest clothes and set off for sunny Carlisle (not just a figure of speech for a change) for the launch of Mike Craven’s latest crime novel ‘Body Breaker’.

In spite of the heat, it was a great event.  The evening started with a meal for about 8 of us at the Old Bank pub in Carlisle city centre.  It’s a ‘gourmet’ pub doing a nice line in chops, steaks, grills, fish’n’chips etc; I hadn’t been before but thoroughly enjoyed my whale (sorry, haddock, the portions were huge) and chips.  I’d happily go back.

After that we all piled down the hill to the Old Firestation where Mike was holding his combined book-launch-and-birthday party.  The launch was really well attended – I’m hopeless at counting crowds but would estimate around 100 people had turned out – and was highly entertaining.  Mike’s an amusing speaker anyway, and he’d invited fellow crime writer Michael J Malone along to act as question-master.  The two are great friends, have a neat line in banter, and spent the rest of the evening quietly killing each other with quips.  The audience, myself included, loved it!

Mike answered a wide range of questions on everything from how old he was when he started writing, to researching golf courses in Cumbria.  (The novel opens with a grisly discovery on a golf course.)  And once all that was over, there was cake.  Birthday cake.  Or book launch cake.  Or, well, you decide.  Either way it was delicious. (Apologies for the blurring, by the way.  I wasn’t seeing double, but apparently my phone camera was!)

The only slight annoyance was getting to Carlisle station at the end of the evening and finding all the trains up sh*t creek, and absolutely nothing open – no shop, no café, no bar, no information desk, nowhere to get even a bottle of water, on a blisteringly warm night.  I thought I might have to book into a hotel in the city for the night, but luckily (and unusually) my train was one of a tiny handful still running, so I made it home after all.  And was really glad I’d gone, melting stickiness (and not just from the cake) or none.