It's Getting Harder To Breath

Writing articles for this site may be a labour of love but it's  beginning to feel like  climbing a mountain in the Alps;  for a long time it seemed like gentle exercise, with the easy trotting out of  personal memories of Sleetburn and Ushaw Moor, followed by a hold on Vicar Welby's family chart; at 8,000 feet the sun came out and enabled me to bring Yale University to Moorites and burners of the sleet at no financial cost to them.

But now  the air is scarce and I find myself surfing [always dangerous on a mountain] the net for suitable topics and feeding google with the likes of: Christmas in Ushaw Moor; violence in Ushaw Moor; Sleetburn WI; death in Ushaw Moor etc; It can work of course, and did so with the unidentified flying objects article, but often it comes to little. Thank goodness for the Harwood collection - that came from a surf.

My needs now are  threefold: oxygen, hope and goodwill. I cannot climb this mountain without sherpas and consequently your valley - or rather mountain - needs you. Goodness knows whether there will be anyone striving for the  glittering prize, but one can only hope so. It's not like recruiting for the navy in earlier centuries - I cannot hit you over the head with a truncheon and demand an article; that would be violence in Ushaw Moor or even death in Ushaw Moor and that is not what I want at all. What I want is an oxygen mask and some fellow keyboarders to push well chosen words out of the valley and up the mountain.

I must not become another statistic, another death, owing to oxygen starvation.

WB