A poetry project was just in time for Le Grand Depart – the start of the Tour de France – in Yorkshire at the weekend.  The True Grit Poetry Cycle, led by performance poet Kate Fox and Leeds Young Authors, produced writing and performance poetry on the theme of True Grit to mark the big cycling event, at workshops in Bradford, Harrogate, Hull, Leeds, Sheffield and Thirsk. On Friday they uploaded videos on YouTube with some of the poems they had made. Joe Hakim, Mike Watts, Joe Kriss, Carolyn Booth, Barsa Ray, Robin Stidworthy, Alyx Tamminen and Amelia Dawson-Kavanagh are among those taking part in the vidoes. You can watch the videos here. In her poem, filmed in Whitby, Kate Fox focuses on the Yorkshire thirst for tea: “We don’t like to make a fuss, we’re sensible and stoic / We measure out our life in teaspoons, our cuppa consumption, that’s heroic.” She told Write Out Loud that she would be tweeting poetry films connected to the areas that the cyclists were passing through during Saturday and Sunday, and added that she hoped the project "gives a taste of some of the direct, honest, diverse voices of Yorkshire and its true and gritty places". The project is part of Yorkshire Festival 2014. Kate and her husband Alfie Crow have even dashed off a 35,000-word novella, 'Tour De Force', set during Le Grand Depart which will be uploaded by Scarborough's Valley Press on to Amazon and available to read on Kindles by Monday evening. The novella follows a journalist and vicar as they race against time to uncover thieves who have planned a robbery during the road closures, interspersed with the story of how the Tour de France unfolded in Yorkshire.