Editor’s Pick of the Week: Crime writers discover murder is easier than parking in Harrogate

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Harrogate is awash with famous authors this weekend for the annual Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. Val McDermid, Elly Griffiths, Irvine Welsh, Kate Atkinson and Mark Billingham… they’re all in town.

The opening night awards event at the Old Swan celebrated their ability to construct the perfect murder.

But one of the biggest cheers of the night came when the broadcaster Mark Lawson, who hosted the event, opened by saying that “parking around here is definitely murder”. Clearly he wasn't the only one struggling to find a space. Welcome to Harrogate!

We also reported this week how much North Yorkshire Council has generated in parking fines. Interesting that Knaresborough, despite being smaller than Ripon, raised more.

But even parking in Harrogate is likely to be a doddle compared with Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland, where 278,000 spectators are expected to watch The Open golf championship over four days, ending tomorrow.

The players include Harrogate professional John Parry, who probably didn’t have to queue up to park like the paying punters. John is having quite a season, and it got even better when he made the cut to qualify for today and tomorrow’s final two rounds. Phenomenal stuff.

Even the most skilled author would struggle to think up the many plot twists involving the Harrogate Station Gateway psycho-drama.

In the latest development this week, the cost rose by another £2 million to £14.6 million — almost double the £7.9 million budgeted to begin with.

We must be up to chapter 72 now. Goodness knows when or how this long-running story ends.

Exciting news in Ripon, where some locals still haven’t got over the closure of Vanora’s Bakery on Westgate.

This week saw the opening of not only a new deli, but also a new greengrocers alongside it in The Arcade. Our man in Ripon, Tim Flanagan, provided this sneak peek.

Finally, a tetchy week for politics saw the current MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough and his predecessor disagree over who was responsible for securing funding for Harrogate District Hospital. And Tory cabinet members on North Yorkshire Council accused David Skaith, the Labour mayor of York and North Yorkshire, of pro-York bias when he divided up transport funding between North Yorkshire Council and Labour-run City of York Council.

Some of the funding was for — you guessed it — the extra money for the Harrogate Station Gateway.