11. York
      CC site
      30^th March-1^st April

Over the Humber Bridge - £1-50 toll and worth every penny. What a great bridge, towering over the Humber Estuary just west of Hull. The river is very wide even here. Lots of people walking across the bridge, taking their Sunday constitutionals. More scenery here on the bridge than anywhere else around here.

New Feature

From now on I'm going to tell you what my MP3 player was playing at 12:00 on the road each time I move sites (I hook it up to the van stereo). And to-day it was 'Mother's Little Helper' by the Rolling Stones.

Not much to say about the journey (about 40 miles). I think it's through the Wolds; certainly the road undulated in a woldish sort of way. More trees and hedges. The site is about 3 miles from York and is set on a stud farm. The two mares looked to my untutored eye like racehorses and were beautiful chestnuts.

Sat in the Sunday afternoon sun and read my book. On Monday I cycled to the Park and Ride and caught the bus to the city. Now, anyone who knows me will not be surprised to learn that my first target was the National Rail Museum.

This is just so magnificent that I felt I was floating on air. When you enter the main hall there is a strong but delicate scent of machine oil which turns the head as not even the finest perfume could. I think the last time I was here was about 35 years ago; it was great then but it's improved. Can it get any better? I'm not going to bore you with the minutiae of steam locomotives, but here are a few tit bits.

In the cab of 'Evening Star', the last steam locomotive built for British Rail, there are two seats, one for the fireman and one for the driver. The driver's is padded, while the fireman's is wooden (albeit carved to fit a bottom); a pecking order, always a pecking order.

The ex-GWR 'King' class express engine never reached its full potential speed because a single fireman couldn't keep up with its appetite for coal. ('GWR' is short, by the way, for 'Great Western Railway', but railway aficionados (a.k.a. train spotters) regard it as the paragon of railways and accordingly call it 'God's Wonderful Railway'.

The EM1 electric locomotive, which was designed by Sir Nigel Gresley to haul heavy coal trains over the Pennines because the crew of steam engines on that line used to pass-out from smoke suffocation in the Woodhead Tunnel, was made from re-cycled military tanks.

In a section called 'The Warehouse' is an enormous collection of railway bric-a-brac; station name boards (including Llanfair PG), locomotive name plates ('Marmion', 'King George V', 'Christ's Hospital') , express train head boards ('The Master Cutler', 'The Irish Mail', 'The Atlantic Coast Express'), lamps, signalling equipment, stained glass windows from station waiting rooms, and on and on and on. What caught my eye, though, was a huge number of models and rolling stock of all scales labelled with such detail as “Built by Mr Arnold Bulbtoilet, 1949-1956 and donated to the Museum by his family”. How nice.
 

Royal York Hotel

There was a horrifying exhibit devoted to crashes, including the celebrated Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 which brought to the world the sublime poet William McGonagall. The peak of his poetic achievement is “The Tay Bridge Disaster”

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

And so on..........

 I was there for four hours and it seemed like 4 minutes. And it was free! Of course, I made a small donation. Again I noticed that, as Paul Theroux said, everyone around old steam trains walks around with a gentle smile on their face.

York itself has so many attractions. The narrow mediaeval streets, the city walls, the seductive dark old pubs, the river (Ouse) and, of course the Minster. Who could but love a city which has a street called 'Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma Street'? I saw the end wall of a terrace of houses on which was painted the advertisement 'Nightly Bile Beans keep you bright-eyed, health and slim'. Was it an original? Is there anyone alive who took Bile Beans? What were they?

 

Some English Kings (and old ladies)

The next day I went in again, this time to see the Minster. There was a serious fire a few years ago, but the damage seems to have been repaired. I had a nice chat on the bus with a lady who came from Newcastle but who moved to York twenty-five years ago. We were both singing the city's praises, and the only negative she could think of was the tourists. “They do get under your feet a bit”, she said. They certainly do; they were queuing outside Betty's Tearooms and it's only April .

For me the best bit of any cathedral is the choir, but at York I love the Astronomical Clock. There is also a superb collection of carvings of the kings of England from William the Conqueror right up to Henry VI. There is a strong family resemblance between many of them, but I suspect that it's just that the sculptor had a limited repertoire of faces.  

 

The Choir

I was glad to see the Royal Station Hotel still in its splendour, although it has been re-named “The Royal York Hotel”. I stayed there for a happy weekend treat with my family thirty-odd years ago and it was like being in another world and another century. I remember I managed to flush my contact lenses down the drain in the bathroom.

Cycling past the farm next to the site on the way to the Park and Ride I had seen a fox and a pheasant in the farmhouse's front garden, standing facing each other, twenty-five feet apart and totally motionless. I watched for a bit but I was concerned for the pheasant’s welfare and tried to startle them by clapping my hands. No response, I tried again. So I wrote the pheasant off as either deaf or daft and in either case deserving removal from the gene pool and carried on cycling. When I returned, the pheasant had fallen over but the fox was still staring at it. I couldn’t resist and cycled up the drive to take a closer look. Of course, you guessed it, they were made of plastic. The pheasant had simply blown over. Doh! The first thing I did was to look all around me to make sure nobody had seen me. I thought I did hear sniggering coming from somewhere though. 

I very much enjoyed the first episode of the new “Endeavour” series on Sunday night. If you don't know, it's about the young Morse. He's a much more attractive character (he's not always on the pull every week for a start) and is a much better detective than his older self. I spotted a great little clip. At one point he goes to visit someone and stands at the door in front of an array of brass nameplates with bells. The bottom one says “R. Duck”. Ah-ha, Raymond Duck, from “Withnail and I”, Uncle Monty's theatrical agent. 'Raymond Duck, a horrible little Israelite, four floors up on the Charing Crorss Road and no job at the top '. Someone's having a laugh! Marvellous!

And so it's farewell to York, a civilised place.   

 

                                                               A fox and a pheasant