We are in York, parked just at the side of the city walls, and I am not going to write very much because I want to read my book.
I have got a new book brought with me for this very moment, and I think I would like to start reading it before my eyes start to close, which moment is not very far distant.
We are three. We were four, but as soon as we arrived in York Lucy decamped to go and explore the town’s drinking venues with an old school friend, leaving the rest of us vaguely feeling that it must be thrilling to be neither too old nor too young for such adventures.
We do not mind this in the least, it was, after all, the reason that we thought we would come to York. Her friend is a nurse. They assured us before they left that between them there was no kind of night time crisis misadventure that they could not address perfectly adequately, and we would not need to worry. Hence I am not doing, although I am vaguely concerned that Lucy might not be able to find her way back. You never know with Lucy. She can have terribly vague moments, especially when she has been drinking.
Instead, we marshalled the dogs into obedience and went for a walk around York.
We have been here lots of times before, so it does not really qualify as exploring, and actually we did a lot of the sort of conversation that starts with: oh, look, do you remember..?
The dogs were very good, considering they are not on leads. We started off by walking along a stretch of the city walls. We should not have done this, because there are big notices everywhere warning you that Dogs Are Not Allowed, but we took them anyway, and they did not wee on anything or jump off the edge, and we didn’t see anybody so nobody complained.
The walls have got a one-way system now, to make sure that you do not have to walk past anybody. This is not in case you fall off the edge into the stinging nettles at the bottom, but in case somebody has a disease and you walk through a cloud of recently-breathed fatal molecules before they have chance to blow away in the fresh air.
We thought that this was nonsense and thought we might walk the wrong way on the way home to see if anybody would arrest us, but in the end we didn’t because we came back a different way.
It was a pleasing sort of walk. York is a splendidly medieval sort of place, and it is nice to gaze philosophically at things and wonder about all of the thousands of people who have passed there before you.
Roger Poopy dashed about happily and was really good at coming to heel when he was supposed to. His father was not nearly as good. This was not because he does not want to do what he is told, but because he is going a bit senile and loses track of what is going on around him. We had to stop snd wait for him several times whilst he flapped about anxiously, having stopped to sniff something interesting and then lost us. Once he thought that somebody else might be us, and was very upset to discover that they were not.
We have still got him so it all came out all right in the end.
We have eaten splendidly home-cooked things for dinner, and we think that tomorrow we might go and look at the museum. We had wondered about going to visit various grandparents whilst we are in this part of the world, but they have got a busy schedule of hospital appointments and bat flu commitments, so we will be heading across to Blackpool instead, maybe tomorrow or the next day.
The picture is Oliver and me on the steps of York Minster, with Roger Poopy being anxious not to be left out.
