Mutually Assured Distraction

As much as I'd love to be wandering the Jordanian desert with a tea towel over my head and cannonballing from wadi to wadi right now, my mummy (and every airline) said I'm not allowed.

Unbeknownst to me, I'd booked a flight from Jordan to Cyprus all while it'd been raining Iranian missiles in not one but both of those countries following the death of a certain supreme leader. So after realising my knowledge of world affairs had been being propped up by poorly edited internet memes (those of which I've since opted out of), I decided I'd best do some adulting and install the BBC News app. Within five minutes my phone started popping off with 'breaking' articles reporting the best looksmaxxing techniques, so anyway long story short that's why I refuse to pay my TV licence and fund the beeb.

You join me instead zooming north, as I floor it up the M40 towards Birmingham Airport in the kind of panicked driving usually reserved for people who've just remembered their own wedding. Screeching into my Car Park 5 bay with millimetre precision and a handbrake turn, I decide to finally read my pre-paid parking ticket, wondering how on earth they'd know not to charge me again. Then the penny drops. I've entered my postcode where I should've entered my car reg! Fuck!!

I stress call the parking company as I'm crammed onto a train and up against girls drinking buzzballs while the operator apparently starts reading War and Peace over the tannoy. Amid the clamour, I'm assured it's fine, which I don't believe, but there's nothing I can do about it from a train to Leeds so I file it under 'future me's problem' and watch the Midlands dissolve into the North.

York greets me with a bajillion cobbles and a bajillion-and-one bargains (i.e. a kebab shop). I thrust my money at the cashier, professing my disbelief that I've just bought a banquet for the price of an Oxford pint, he looks at me oddly. The following morning, I head straight for York's parkrun at Knavesmire, a route which tracks the oval horse racecourse. A few furlongs in, I fall into a full gallop. Blinkered into the flat grassy expanse, I pass the herd, throwing in a whinny and neighing enthusiastically with each overtake. I can only hope they interpret it as eccentric charm rather than cause for concern. Still, lucky no-one bet on me (I came 190th).

Next, I hail the world's least chatty taxi driver over to the York Cold War Bunker, one of thirty built across the country in the 60s. Tucked incongruously in a suburban residential street, you'd walk past it entirely if it weren't for the blast doors (much like Lidl in Temple Cowley). It housed sixty Royal Observer Corps volunteers (civilians, essentially) who were to batten the hatches and monitor nuclear fallout across Yorkshire in the event of apocalypse. The operations room is the centrepiece: a tremendous map of the UK plastered in plotting gear, Perspex display boards above, teleprinters below, and a nuclear sensor named after a dinner lady: AWDREY, for Atomic Weapons Detection Recognition and Estimation of Yield. I spent the tour sidling toward the map and trying to bite my tongue while the guide attempted to explain the concept of radiation to me: a nuclear scientist.

From there, I chugged over to the National Railway Museum, where hangars of giga-big steam locomotives sit oiled up erotically between hordes of screaming toddlers and their exhausted parents who are just relieved to have finally found a free family outing. I stared at the plaques and nodded thoughtfully, pretending to know anything at all about coupling rods or front bogies. That said, I loved it! From the Mallard to MagLev to mouldy carriages, maybe I'm a train enthusiast after all, all it took was just not having to take 400 pictures of Thomas sat on each and every one.

I round off the afternoon with a lap of York's greatest hits: an antique centre stuffed with megalodon teeth, tacky porcelain, and tasteful Soviet wristwatches I can only drool at through the glass casings; followed by a gander down the Shambles, a bustling medieval street crammed with market stalls selling overpriced flatcaps and overcrumbly fudge; then the city walls, which being built in 70 AD, offer a pleasingly elevated view over the Roman fort walls of Eboracum (and, of course, PureGym).

The gothic towers of York Minster impale the skyline, then their £20 entry fee impales my bank account.
Inside, the nave goes on for what feels like several postcodes. Lofty vaulted ceilings amplify the reverent chorus of a robed ensemble and pipe organs resonate with a low pitched thrum as cold blue light bleeds through thickened glass depicting miracles in vibrant colour. Below in the undercroft, layers of historical lasagne peel back to reveal sheets of Roman foundations beneath Norman stone, itself beneath Gothic ornaments, all separated by the béchamel sauce of roughly a thousand years each. Constantine the Great was proclaimed Roman Emperor on this very spot in 306 AD. He then had a fairly quiet career. With the aptly named Storm Dave puffing his cheeks and threatening to gust, I head for the exits.

To finish the day an animated Italian family served me the best pizza I've ever eaten in England, which I'll not be elaborating on further. Some things are too sacred to write about.Read more