Meat and potato pie and sticky toffee pudding

I was meant to be working on a new version of Cinderella for one of my publishers on Friday but the sun was shining for once and I needed a break from finishing the proposal for the horror novel I'm doing. So I turned the mac off and took my friend Pam to lunch at Bettys in Ilkley. {The missing apostrophe there isn't a typing mistake, by the way. Bettys might do parkins and fish and chips and they bake their own bread on the premises but they don't do apostrophes. Why? According to the staff in the York outlet it's because the company is Swiss. Bemused? So was I.]

On the train in Ilkley I spied a giant pie on a seat. I'm not kidding. There was a huge pie with a very elaborate lattice-work crust sitting on a teacloth on a seat. It turned out to be the property of a man called Glyn Watkins who was sitting on the seat opposite, guarding it. Mr Watkins is a great fan of the Bradford-born author J.B. Priestley who wrote a clutch of incredible plays and one of my favourite books ever, Bright Day. [I bet Mr. Priestley wouldn't leave the apostrophe out of Bettys even if he were Swiss instead of a Yorkshireman.]

Apparently Mr Priestley made a BBC broadcast in September 1940 in which he mentioned seeing a little shop in Bradford which had in its shop window 'a giant, almost superhuman, meat and potato pie..out of that pie there came at any and every hour when the shop was doing business, a fine rich appetising steam.]

Priestley thought that the shop had been destroyed in an air raid so imagine his delight when he realised his fears were, in fact, unfounded and saw the pie again in the same shop. He describe the incident with glee..every puff and jet of steam defied Hitler, Goering and the whole gang of them. It was glorious.' He described the incident in his book Postcripts, published by Heinemann in 1941.

Mr Watkins had baked the pie in honour of his hero. Or got someone to make it for him anyway. I didn't have time to ask him beacuse he was off selling tickets for a J.B. Priestley night at the The Yorkshire Deli in Ilkley. It's to celebrate the great writer's birthday, and there are going to be readings from his work as well as a pie for supper, with ale and sticky toffee pudding for afters.

I am a huge fan of J.B. Priestley myself. We did Time and the Conways at school and I was blown away by the fact that he played around with the timeline so that you knew what was going to happen to the characters in the future. I went on to read all the plays of his available at my local library in Valletta, Malta and when I moved to England I managed to see a lot of them performed. So I hope there are some tickets left for Mr. Watkin's celebration in Ilkley.