Notes on York (April 25-28, 2025)

April 25 (Friday). Aberystwyth/York. 9.30 am: Either it was signal failure or a train breakdown. Whichever, rail transport from Aberystwyth to Birmingham New Street stations was cancelled as far as Machynlleth. A delayed replacement bus took us (passed the ancient woodland on the periphery of Artists Valley, at Furnace) to Machynlleth, but arrived too late to meet the connection. From there, by coach, for a further one and three-quarter hours, passengers were shuttled to Shrewsbury. 12.30 pm: On, then, to Birmingham to catch the train to York. Oh, that travel could be less eventful.

Derby, Sheffield, Leeds. Places of red-brick post-industrialism. Places I’d travelled to ten years ago: on university Open Days with my sons; for academic consultations about sound; to reckon on things that could not be; for rest, remembrance, and healing. Now I see the wisdom of it all. 4.30 pm: Arrived at York (where Richard ‘gave battle in vain’ (ROYGBIV), as every aficionado of acronyms and the spectrum will know).

After landing at the apartment, I set out to explore the nearby streets. Just around the corner there was a well-stocked Amnesty Bookshop – one of very few in the nation. Second-hand book retailers have a simultaneously broader and more specialised stock than do conventional ones. These publications that have already passed through the hands and minds or previous readers.

This shop offered a range literature from relatively recent paperbacks to 19^th-century, leather-bound volumes. I also came across several boxes containing transparencies of notable historical Italian architecture. Were they the disposed remnants from the slide library of a now defunct university art history department? Or artefacts made redundant by the onset of digitisation. (‘Video killed the radio star’, sang Buggles in 1979.) I suspect they were once part of Manchester Metropolitan University’s teaching provision.

6.15 pm: Dinner was taken at a vegan Chinese restaurant. The menu included dou fu (豆腐) and other plant-based substitutes for duck, prawns, chicken, and beef, etc. My dear mother-in-law took umbrage at the hypocrisy of Buddhists serving-up dishes indistinguishable in appearance, texture, and (sometimes) taste to the animals they refused to kill for food. It was all tasty, but I left the table with an unfulfilled pallet. (A Gregg’s sausage roll, please!, my stomach cried in vain.) 7.15 pm: The evening closed with a short walk along the city wall towards the distant Minster.

April 26 (Saturday). 8.30 am: A York morning.

9.45 am: Breakfast at Brancusi: fried egg, bacon, and a very fennelly sausage on toasted sourdough, accompanied by a 85% Madagascan hot chocolate. The restaurant was on Micklegate, which Nicholas Pevsner had the hots for, and regarded as ‘without doubt the most architecturally rewarding street in the city’.

10.30 am: I’d not been to the National Railway Museum (which is currently undergoing a significant expansion and refurbishment) since 2002, on the occasion of my younger son’s 5^th birthday. Today, I still see the exhibits through my sons’ eyes, and experience an excitement quite inappropriate to my age and otherwise serious demeanour.

I’m old enough to remember steam trains, and travelling the line from Brynmawr to Newport and Cardiff, Wales, prior to its closure following the Beeching cuts (1963-5). (I still have my ticket stub for the last train from Blaina to Newport.) The exhibition hall contained examples of some of the greatest achievements in British engineering. Fathers initiated their children in the mysteries and joys of locomotion, just as their father’s (who were among the family parties, in some cases) had done them. Polished brass and steel, rivets and bolts, pressure gauges and red-handled levers, green and burgundy gloss-paint, and strident hand-painted typography – these are things that you can get emotional about.

Mallard is my darling. It looks like a racing car made for rails. Indeed, the colour was inspired by Bugatti sports automobiles. The train was so named because the designer liked ducks. I sat in the broad aisled carriage of a 1964 Bullet train (Shinkansen), and remembered my travels through Japan in March and April last year.

There’s a detailed diorama of a countryside and an industrial scene, through which model trains traversed, much to the excitement of toddlers looking through the glass. Virtual reality cannot hope to compete. Model railways are, to my mind, a sub-genre of the English landscape tradition. (Has no one written a book about this topic?, I wondered.) The painted and meticulously constructed scenes are often composits of essential elements derived from landscapes that haven’t existed in this form since the mid-1950s. They evoke the same nostalgic and comforting world as illustrations in Ladybird books of the period. This is a railway system that you can control, where the trains are never cancelled, replacement bus services, unthinkable, and no ‘apologies for the inconvenience this may cause you’ announced. That said, the trains on my railway set — the track of which was pinned to a sheet of hardboard, painted uniformly with green paint (‘Model Railways in the Age of Abstraction’, would be the chapter title) — used to derail at an alarming rate, because I’d take the bends far too quickly.

I returned to my accommodation via the parish church of All Saints North Street. The earliest parts of the building date from the 12^th century. It’s notable for having one of the finest collections of medieval stained-glass in York. One, entitled ‘Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday’, is illustrative of a popular devotional poem known as ‘The Pricke of Conscience’ (c. 1340). The window is believed to be the work of John Thornton of Coventry. Several of the panels depict landscapes as a subject in their own right. (No saints, nor prophets, nor angels, nor damned.)

3.30 pm: Off to see Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) at the York Theatre Royal. I’ve seen it performed live once before, in London in 1998, when Krapp was played by Edward Petherbridge. Gary Oldman (whose acting I greatly admire) was the lone actor in the current performance. The props comprised an overhead light, table, reel-to-reel tape recorder, metal cans containing spools, a ledger of the recordings’ contents, and bananas, surrounded by a lifetime’s accumulation of hoarding. For reasons that’ll be clear to anyone who has followed my blogs over the years, Krapp and I have a lot in common. Like my Aural Diary, his tapes serve as the memory of things he has forgotten. Through them, Krapp engages his younger self and life, thirty years previous — the youthful idealism, earnest expectations, subsequent disappointments and loneliness, abandoned love and losses. The play is a tragi-comic essay on a wasted life that could’ve been different had he embraced the love he’d thrown away. I left the performance, my mind reeling (pardoning the pun).

April 27 (Sunday). A York morning: ‘Glorious … sun of York’ (Richard III). 9.30 am: A walk on a warm and bright Spring morning to York Museum Gardens for a cup of tea. On his first trip to the city, my elder son would insist on visiting the squirrels here every day. Afterwards, I walked to the Minister for a morning service, passed the York Oratory, which was going full-pelt with a 12-bell peal. 10.15 am: Having arrived early, I found myself gently ushered into what remained of Matins, contrary to my intentions. A church has stood on the site of the Minster since the 7^th century. The existing building was built in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. Photography is not permitted during the services. The interior has an exquisite ambience – a sonic reverberation that occupies and articulates the space like a consciousness.

11.00 am: Sung Eucharist was too overblown, self-consciously posturing, and theatrical for my tastes. I’m very low-church in ecclesiology. My Welsh Nonconformist roots keep me grounded. Am I an Anglican? Only by current association. (Although I was confirmed (without baptism) over twenty years ago. But that was an administrative requirement, to permit me to serve as Church Warden for my local congregation.) Anglicanism is too English, and mired in monarchy, aristocracy, English political history, and residual sacramentalism for my sensitive stomach. (I’m a republican, Welsh, an old-styled socialist, and an austere-type of Christian at heart.) But, there’s nothing to be compared to the English choral tradition and liturgy. Like the painter Samuel Palmer — who was, like me, nurtured in the faith within the Baptist persuasion — I was drawn towards the Church of England (and, later, Church in Wales) by the transcendentalism of the architecture, music, and The Book of Common Prayer. I invariably cough and suffer a headache at the smell of incense. Clearly, I wasn’t made for this environment.

12.30 pm: Bettys (without a possessive apostrophe) for lunch. Unexpectedly, a table was secured after only a short wait. Silver-service, waitresses with impeccable manners and proper uniforms, and politely spoken men in black suits who ushered customers to this or that table like bouncers of taste and refinement. I enjoyed the ‘soup of the day’ and two slices of gluten-free bread. The latter is always a sorry alternative for the real thing – wherever it’s offered. Such is my constitution.

April 28 (Monday). 8.30 am: A York morning.

9.00 am: I returned to the railway station ridiculously early, again, to begin the homeward journey. The train was made up of only four carriages, which had already mopped-up passengers from its cancelled predecessor. Choc-o-bloc, or what? ‘John! Imagine being on your deathbed, and how you’ll long to return to moments like this, however irksome.’ I secured a seat at Leeds. People were kindly offering to up their seats to passengers who’d been standing for some time. (Applause.) I’m appallingly old school, and surrender mine to any woman regardless of age, and any man who I judge to be either more elderly than myself, or otherwise infirmed.

12.00 pm: I broke journey at Birmingham to finished business at the Jewellery Quarter; buy a takeaway at the Chinese-Malaysian restaurant; and enjoy cheesecake and watermelon tea at my favourite Turkish café. An ice-cream van was touring the streets. In Japan, most mobile vendors play a tune to announce their coming and going. Only ice-cream vans do so in the UK. I suspect that it’s the last vestige of a period in commercial-social history when the likes of rag-and-bone men, onion salesmen, and knife sharpeners, would sing loudly and incomprehensibly songs advertising their approach. The queue for ice cream consisted entirely of adults from offices close by.