York and a Pub crawl

 When you live in the middle of the country (there, or thereabouts) you develop this naïve view that everywhere should be relatively easy to get to. After all, this is Northamptonshire I'm talking about, not some geographic extremity such as Suffolk or the Gower Peninsular or Dorset even.  I had chosen to be based, for convenience sake, in a very central position and as such assumed when I moved here that all points north, south, east and west should be but a short and timely step away. Whenever I want to go north, west or east by train however, I realise that this is merely an idealistic notion and the reality is that there are any number of barriers that prevent you doing your duty as a ‘green’ citizen. To get to York from Market Harborough on a Saturday morning I would have to change twice (once at Leicester and again at Derby), and because of these changes the journey in total would take nearly three hours.  Much as I like a good pub crawl, three hours for the pleasure is just too much of an ask. But I had at least made an attempt to follow my conscience and go green so didn’t feel too guilty as I jumped in my car to drive the forty minute carbon-loaded journey to Peterborough because the train from there goes straight up the East Coast Mainline and would get me to York in a bit over an hour.  It was a beautiful autumnal morning as I left, bright and clear with the special golden hue that the sun creates as it moves through a lower arc in the sky at this time of year. I arrived in York looking forward to meeting up that evening with my CAMRA chums Rich and Mick who were going to give me a guided tour of the best real ale pubs in the city.  I hoped we would be conducting quality checks at regular points along the way.  Finding accommodation near the centre that didn’t cost an arm and a leg had been a feat in itself.  York is one expensive city for hotel rooms and you truly don’t get much for your money.  Even the most modest chain-brand three-star hotels were charging well over a hundred pounds a night and demanding a minimum two night stay to boot.  The 4* Dean Court Hotel which has an enviable position right next to York Minster deigned to allow me a one-night stay (as if they were doing me a really big favour) but on the proviso I stayed in a suite and stumped up 210 smackers for the privilege.  As I intended to spend as little time as possible in my hotel room and as much of my money as possible on beer, I cast aside this less than generous offer  realising at the same time that what options I had were rather thin on the ground.  Especially if I wanted to stay central but didn’t want to spend a fortune. Starting to toy with the idea of calling off the trip (as much as it might pain me) and doing one last google search I came across the Coach House Hotel on Marygate in Bootham and just a stones throw outside the city walls. Giving them a call I found I could stay for one night in a twin room and as a single occupant I was offered a discounted price of £60.  Now that’s still quite a lot of money to stay in an attic room above a pub in my book (it may be called a hotel but in reality it’s a pub with rooms) but knowing it was about as good as I was going to get within the budget I had set, I gave them my name and duly paid the deposit.  I arrived in early afternoon, dropped off by the bus at York Theatre Royal and walked a couple of minutes to the hotel.  In fact, in ten minutes or so you can walk from the railway station to the hotel via Station Road and Lendal Bridge and then down by the river and in even less time than that when the footbridge over the river is open.  But I didn’t know that until later when I’d got a much better feel for the physical layout of York both inside and outside the city walls. The welcome at the Coach House was warm and friendly.  The place looks and feels like a traditional pub.  Two small rooms at the front are set with low beams and form the bar and restaurant with dark wood tables and wheel back chairs.  Three leather sofas make up a ‘lounge’ for staying guests just off the very small reception and a few modern touches and bright scatter cushions stop the place from feeling like it’s in too much of a time-warp. Asked if I was the “single lady” I agreed I was and I was shown to my room on the second floor up narrow staircases and round a corner or two and in which I found myself slightly disorientated when after a quick turnaround I came back down again.  My accommodation up high in the attic used to be the pub flat and two single beds run end to end along a narrow room with a separate shower room and toilet. Everything was basic but clean and tidy.  Just as the website suggested, you could see the Minster from the bedroom window, the day was still bright and sunny and beckoning me out to find some new adventures in a city rife with history.  Dumping what little luggage I’d brought with me I took one more look out of the window to check the direction of the Minster which is where I intended to head to get my bearings.  Carefully descending the stairs and smiling to the woman at reception I walked out through the pub and onto the street.  Marygate is situated off Bootham and at the other end of the street you have the River Ouse and the museum gardens. Depending on where you want to go in town you can take either a left or a right out of the pub.  With the Minster in mind I headed left and up to Bootham where I took a left again. This is where my finely honed navigation skills let me down. 

Bushman Medical Volunteer - Namibia

Photos of the five week trip as a medical volunteer to Namibia can be found in the gallery.  To read all about the experience go to bottom of the page and use the page numbers to navigate to the start of the blog. 

European Masters Swimming Championships 2009 - photographs

Photographs of the swimming and of Cadiz and Seville can be found in the Gallery.  I hope you enjoy them.  Downloading copies should be straightforward but if you get stuck or need a higher res then email me.  Don't forget there is a second page of shots for the swimming. 

European Masters Swimming Championships Cadiz 2009

Having come back back with a free dose of Spanish Flu (or Gripe cerdo - swine flu) everything is a little slow at the moment.  All the Masters photos are downloaded but not resized to make them easy to upload and download from the web.  Bear with me.  They will be there by the end of the week.

Adios Market Harborough, Hola Seville

There are some mornings you wake up and you know that today is going to be a perfect day.  A beautiful sense of peace and tranquillity pervades as you stretch your lithe and rested body out across the crisp white Egyptian cotton bed sheets and trail your fingers lightly across the handmade velvet bedspread.  You swing your legs lightly to the ground and feel your toes disappear into the plushness of the Iranian silk rug picked up for a snip at some Arabian souk  and …… no, I don’t have mornings like this either.  At 01:00 Friday, with less than 12 hours before my ride pitched up to take me to Stansted Airport and my flight out to the European Masters Swimming Championships I was still staring vacantly at my computer screen knowing that the words and colours somehow ought to mean something, but my brain had stopped translating them into anything resembling English some time before.  The luxury of hitting the ‘off’ button and ignoring the consequences until I came back though immensely appealing just wasn’t an option because I had the second of two reports to get finished for the European Commission in Brussels.  With the titles ‘Non-legislative Initiatives on Gender Equality within the UK Workplace I  & II’ you may well have some sympathy with my plight. Four hours into the write-up and frankly I’d stopped caring about equal pay and crèche facilities and any desire to burn my bra was long since past. What I wanted was bed. And to pack.  Ideally in reverse order. But both these things were fast receding as possibilities.  You don’t need to know anymore dear reader other than it was a very late night and an early morning and when I did pack it was with rather more speed than planning and I didn’t remember the stringent Ryanair weight restriction until it was all too late. But,  here we are in Seville (or Sevilla – pronounced Serveeya – we’re going to be educated together over the next few days) fresh from a Ryanair flight which left ten minutes late and arrived twenty minutes early.  The early arrival balanced out the rather low opinion I had of Ryanair brought on by my experience of their on-line booking system.  Now call me shirty, but when you say on the booking form you don’t want travel insurance, doesn’t that mean you DON’T want travel insurance?  And having stated this preference more than once during the booking process wouldn’t you then expect NOT to be charged for it on the final payment screen?  Enough to say that Ryanair drove me to the edge of customer sanity and nearly into the arms of EasyJet which is saying something.  But anyway, here we were in Sevilla, on a balmy evening with the real world behind us and just ready for dumping our bags and heading out for some Iberian adventure.  For the two nights we had in Seville we’d chosen a hotel in the heart of the old quarter, close to the Cathedral which turned out to play a rather larger part in our short stay than we might have expected but more of that later.  We took a taxi from the airport (Spanish for taxi = …. Taxi.  That’s my kind of translation) with no idea of how long the journey to our hotel would take or how much it would cost because that is what happens when you visit a country whose language you speak only in the most rudimentary fashion.  But luckily the journey proved to be uneventful and acceptably priced (Eur 31 for a twenty minute or so taxi ride).  Hotel El Rey Moro was about a five or six minute stroll from our drop-off point at La Plaza Alfaro - a small local square paved with cobbles and flanked by three or four storey townhouses with ornate wrought-iron balconies and trailing geraniums. It all felt very Spanish.   We had a quick look at our rooms (small and orange), signed ourselves into the police register (apparently this is normal, we’re not wanted by Interpol or anything) and headed out on the town.