York, Day Two

We spent a second night at the camp site near Acaster Malbis last night and a nasty cold night it was too. With rain.
(Before I forget I came across two more peculiar village names today, both within spitting distance of York and of each other: Askham Bryan, and Askham Richard. I kid you not!)
Fortunately the pub is only a few yards down the road, so we stayed there both last night and the night before until about 9.30. It was warmer than inside the tent.
Both of us had a dose of homesickness last night, and debated whether we should change our air tickets and fly home on the next available plane. Hang the expense, we said.
Came to our senses, but it took a bit of time.
This morning we were going to head south again, still trying to get to the elusive other village of Crowle (and Mamble) but two or three cellphone calls to places south didn’t encourage us much (one was actually closed, in spite of being listed as open all year around), and Celia’s tooth was playing up again, and she finally got an appointment for 4.30 this afternoon, so that kind of put the kibosh on going anywhere today.
Plus our nephew rang and said he was coming to York tomorrow, and would we like him to take anything excess back home with him? Would we! It’ll be nice to meet a familiar face: think that’s part of our homesickness. I keep saying to Celia that I want to meet somebody, anybody that I know from home. But we haven’t so far, which I’ve found disappointing. It’s not as though such a thing is an impossibility: last time I was in England, on the second day, I met someone I knew, in London. And when Celia was over here, twenty-plus years ago, with our daughter, there was a similar occurrence, one that was even more amazing. My daughter went out with some of her English relatives, to Milton Keynes, and they met my cousin from New Zealand…

York, day one

Spent most of today in York, which turns out to be a pleasant city, with no apparent excess of traffic. Celia had to visit the dentist first thing, and got an appointment for 11.40 am. She’s had a painful toothache on and off for about a week, and it was time to deal with it. Fortunately the dentist diagnosed it as a problem of the gum receding and exposing too much of the tooth. Some particular dental gel sorted it out, and the problem was resolved with a small fee - smaller than we expected.
It’s always complicated having to go to the doctor or dentist or whatever while on holiday - especially in another country. So we were relieved that this particular issue was dealt with relatively easily.
The inner city of York still has its old city wall mostly intact (or well restored) and you can walk for more than three kilometres along it. The pathway is quite narrow, and now has a metal fence alongside to stop you falling off, but it can’t have been much fun in the past if people started rushing along it in a crisis - knocking somebody from your own side off the wall would have been a common hazard, I’d suspect.
On our initial sortie into the city this morning, we found that the first street we entered inside the wall had no less than six op shops almost in a row, plus the SPCK bookshop (a Christian bookshop for those who don’t know the magic letters SPCK), and a National Trust shop. Too many riches!
We did a quick tour round York Minster and then had to go back to the car and find the dentist again. After that we came back into town, found Sainsbury’s supermarket by accident, bought some lunch, ate it in the carpark, and then went for our second trip inside the wall.
Now we had more time to explore. After dealing to the op shops, and the SPCK, and the National Trust (where we found that the toilets were very convenient), we went on and checked out The Treasurer’s House. This is a place near York Minster which was restored (rather oddly) by a former City Treasurer. He seldom lived there, apparently, but used it to house his collection of paintings and treasures. It didn’t strike either of us as very inspiring. Many of the paintings looked rather like copies by lesser hands than paintings by original masters, and the antiques and such weren’t up to much compared to the usual NT standards. Or maybe we’ve just had enough of those sorts of places for the moment.
Anyway, on to York Minster, that extraordinary cathedral in the centre of the city. It’s large - very large - and yet, when I walked around inside it didn’t somehow appeal. Maybe it’s overwhelming, and doesn’t inspire much reverence. Having to pay to get inside it, and having guides all over the place telling people at the top of their voices what this was and what that was, and having crowds everywhere, rather took away from the sense that this is really a church. It seems very much geared towards making money. Though admittedly the money is being put to good use in the sense that there’s been an enormous amount of restoration done. And things look very good inside. Maybe the grand scale doesn’t appeal so much to me. We went inside a much smaller church just down the road (York, like Norwich, has a church on every corner) and you felt that God probably did visit the place more than once in a blue moon.

Towards York

We had another look at Crowle this morning before we left the area, but couldn’t get into the Library because it didn’t open till 2 pm, and couldn’t get into the church because there was no local vicar any more. Did get into the Regen shop (a kind of charity shop, though I’m not clear what group it was supporting). Picked up another couple of pair of cufflinks to add to the dozen or more I’ve bought since I came here. One of these was of Big Ben (though it took the shopkeeper and me a while to work it out).
Thought we’d take a look at Scunthorpe, which is close by. It’s been highly redeveloped in the Centre, with new shops and pedestrian malls everywhere. We thought that was all there was, but some of the older buildings remain. Plenty of op shops, of course, but not a lot else that was exciting.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned a chain of shops over here called Poundland. We first came across one of these in Kentish Town, (in London) and they have a remarkable variety of goods, many of them top quality. How they manage to get to sell them at a pound a piece is something they know and I don’t, but they’re obviously very successful. They’re nothing like the $2 shops in NZ, which mostly seem to sell el cheapo stuff.
Anyway, after an all-you-can-eat lunch for £4.95 each in a Chinese restaurant, we moved on towards York. We haven’t quite got to York yet, because by the time we got here it was getting late enough, and we wanted to get our tent up somewhere. The place we went to first said it was booked out, although there was little evidence of it at that point; they helpfully sent us next door (there were at least three camping grounds in a row) and the man there led us on his bicycle to our pitch which is next to the river that flows through the strangely-named village (another dormitory one, I‘d guess) of Acaster Malbis - sounds like some sort of odd wine, doesn‘t it? Seems as though the Acaster part relates to the word, Castra, which means a Roman camp. Those Romans must have been everywhere...!
Before we’d got the tent up completely we were visited by a duck and her family of eight ducklings - nearly full grown. They even made their way into the tent checking out whether we had any food hanging around. Bloomin’ cheek.
Celia has had a toothache for the last few days, and we’re definitely going to have to find a dentist tomorrow: she won’t be able to carry on treating it with Panadol.