Moving to Leeds

This week I’ve been measuring furniture. Measuring furniture, buying new furniture, throwing old stuff out. Putting stuff in boxes, taking it out of boxes, and then putting it in bags. Forcing myself to pack stuff up for the clothing bank (I won’t ever again wear that size 10 bandeau top, with the cigarette burn obtained from a trip to Brighton with a university lover, circa sometime in the 2010s. Or that Bat Out of Hell t-shirt I bought to demonstrate my staunch and enduring belief that liking Meatloaf for larks is the apex of the good kind of irony+).

I’ve been preparing to leave the mists of the ‘wily, windy moors’, my exposed brick Victorian house and my Belgian sink, for an apartment in Leeds. The left side of my brain has been trying to convince the right side of my brain that the good thing about a more modern kitchen is ‘the simplicity of cleaning rituals’. Right-brain is ill-convinced. Right-brain tells left-brain that ‘atmosphere’ is more important than homekeeping. But there-again; right-brain has got me into more moral scrapes and ‘ problematic situations’ than left-brain in the past so it’s on permeant partial parole. It is permitted to engage in humbled, deferential input only, no ship-steering. ++

I’ve been living in Haworth for the past 18 months, give or take. It’s a cobbled-street village that sells lots of scented candles and artisanal knickknacks and has few practical amenities. It’s a toy town, with a steam train and a literary legacy and a lot of experience being used as a film set for period dramas, like Peaky Blinders, Emily and The Railway Children.

The village of Haworth, giving a dusting down and some new signage to be used for a TV drama for the Beeb about the novelist sisters.

Most famously though, it was the home of the novelist/poet Brontë sisters; Anne (pretty, compassionate, analytical and sociological), Charlotte (striking, talented, ambitious and astute), Emily (physically and intellectually formidable, hermetical and philosophical). So infamous is their legacy, that folk far-fling themselves from myriad glamorous and colourful corners (like Dewsbury) to steep themselves in the sister’s homeplace.

It’s been an oddly lovely experience to live in a village which is, in effect, a living museum. Strange to trail shopping bags from the Co-Op (smoked salmon, Chablis, cat food, jay clothes) and to be observed voyeuristically by tourists as though one were a kind of local ‘feature’.

The Bronte Parsonage where the literary family grew up, lived, wrote and generally also died (with the exception of Anne, who died and is buried in Scarborough). Their ghosts and legacy have been my neighbours these past months).

I’d wander into my gate and down my narrow gunnel and they stop and gawp and say out loud, without an ounce of embarrassment, “Hu! That alleyway is so quaint! Where is she going? I wonder where it leads..?!” To Narnia! Otherwise termed, my house. Where I keep all kinds of exotic biblio, like my kettle and my tube of Colgate and where I conduct quizzling activities, like watching TV and eating raspberries out of the punnet.

I keep meaning to buy the flowing red dress and floral headpiece donned by Kate Bush in her wonderfully weird popification of one the sister’s most famous novels, Wuthering Heights (Emily), so I can conduct errand running with the proper air of quirky romanticism. Alas, I never got around to it. In any case, much as I love Bush, and I really do, I slightly blame her for the song’s participation in the ‘fluffification’ of the Brontë sister’s image, along with other of the ‘lighter’ adaptations of Wuthering Heights, like Wyler/Olivier’s 1930s saccharine outing.

Lovely young ladies pick it up expecting a gorgeous ‘thwarted love story’ and find men bashing each other’s heads in on paving slabs, throttling puppies and gambling themselves silly. Oh, and its great Byronic anti-hero, Heathcliff, seeming to having a conjugal visit with a near-fresh cadaver++++. Sexy. Everyone is traumatised, angry and emotionally disordered, and basically almost everybody dies. Young and miserable. Summary of Wuthering Heights. You are most welcome. But it’s been written into the cultural consciousness as a bodice-ripper about a farmer’s daughter who isn’t allowed to run off with the stable boy !tragic! just like Jane Eyre is thought of as a book about a landowner who can’t wed a stable girl (or governess) !tragic!

Their vision rendered sweet and simple, their intellect emasculated, and so their gentle fame, and the cutesying of their village, has remained assured. If I had my way I’d get a severe eyed actress dressed in pre-Victorian garb, calling herself Ellis Bell and shouting into a megaphone at people eating open sandwiches on the terrace of the old post office… ‘violence is innate!’, ‘human’s are doomed to corruption!’, ‘god will not save you!’, but there again such a stunt would probably just be read as a bad ape of “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony” and“help! I’m being repressed.” If you understand these references (which you do), we are comrades, Sir. Most dear.

+

I had this harebrained notion (I get a lot of those) that I might stay here forever. That I’d become an old lady here. I’d learn every inch and bit of the moors and read every novel and poem the aforementioned legacy family committed to page. I might open a shop selling “things”. But I’m a bit of a wisp in the wind, a scuttle on the sea floor. My feet enjoy getting an itch. I also missed being within walking distance of “properly franchised coffee outlets” and German supermarkets, selling low-cost European cheese, Riojas and sourdough seed loaves. And movie theatres playing old horror movies on Sunday afternoons.

So, I’m going back to Leeds, to the suburban North part of the city, which houses a nice balance of leafiness and juxtaposition to the conveniences of a (minor) concrete jungle. I’m going to be ‘up and running’ from about the 20-23rd of May and available for appointments. In the meantime I’ve decided to add a trip to Cambridge to my month, just before my trip to Cardiff. There are a few days here and there where I will be in Haworth still, and I will be honouring the current dates here that I already have fixed. Hope to see you in the ‘jewel of the north’ (sorry Manchester).

KISSES, CORA LEIGH

LEEDS, UK INDEPENDENT ESCORT, DOMINATRIX & COMPANION

+Liking Love Island for jokes is the zenith. The bad kind of irony.

++I’m aware that neuroscientists hate this ‘right brain, left brain’ stuff, that the brain works much more holistically than this ‘left/right’ thing suggests. But the shit-munchers love a binary (me included) so it persists. Sorry neuroscientists.

+++And routinely forget their birthdays.

++++ It says he ‘lays’ with her the day after her death, but the euphemistic implication is there.