I’ve spent a decade dreaming of being published in a national newspaper.
On Sunday, that finally happened – online and offline.
(Except…it wasn’t in my own country). (more…)
moors
Thirsk: It’s Traditional To Stop
Outside the White Horse cafe in Thirsk, leathered bikers don’t quite know what to do with themselves. Like seasoned mariners experiencing land-sickness, they stomp around awkwardly, killing time. The sky’s glum but still empty of rain, so there’s time to dawdle. Looking unshaven – even the ones that probably had a shave this morning – they fill up on silence and items from the White Horse’s “Bikers’ Special” (I’m impressed by the apostrophe) and from the fish & chips menu. Over time it seems they’re arranging themselves in relation to the serving window, like iron filings around a bar magnet.
In a way, they’re a 300 year old tradition. In the age of turnpikes and stagecoaches, Thirsk was a major stop-off for coaches lurching their way between Britain’s most farflung cities. The three coach houses (two of which survive as the pubs The Golden Fleece and The Three Tuns) provided for some of the most famous transport services of the age, including the Royal Mail. Mail coaches could reach speeds up to a giddy, maddening 10mph, usually at night (the roads were clearer), carrying just a few wealthy passengers and staffed by highwayman-deterring guards that occasionally froze to death in the line of duty. Stagecoaches took it slower, covering a hundred miles a day and sacrificing speed for comfort – although that word probably meant something rather different back then.
A little shy of halfway between London and Edinburgh, Thirsk was a natural place to dismount and stretch your legs. Now it’s where you stock up on prepacked sausage rolls and biscuits before you hurl yourself over the hill and into the Moors. It’s not hard to feel a fascinating, generations-old air of stories interrupted, like that of a Heathrow departure lounge. Also, the fish & chips are really good.
I could have sat for hours. Next time, I will.
Soft and Prickly: Our Fickle Love Of The Countryside
When it comes to the British countryside, we don’t know which way to turn.
In the 17th Century it was something we feared – a chaotic, violent place where Nature, red in tooth & claw, vied for a taste of your blood with bandits, highwaymen, smugglers, murderers and the clinically befuddled. Mention the countryside to Thomas Hardy and he would flinch, mutter something about accursed heaths and reach for a quill. One did not tarry long abroad after dark.
Two centuries later, we can’t get enough of it. Red has turned to green. We yearn for slightly (only slightly) overgrown hedgerows and the susurration of sunlit leaves overhead. We salivate over delightfully quaint villages embedded in the side of hills like raisins in a plum duff. We long to hear someone say “ooh arrr”. Warm beer, nuns on bikes, little stone bridges only negotiable if you turn sideways-on. Grassy meadows – as if, left to her own devices, Mother Earth would render the whole world suitable for cricket with the minimum of tending. In short, a primal yet civilized refuge from the dull churning of modern life.
Neither view is correct or even fair, but that’s not the point.
