June 15, York

 Back in 1190, there was a  pogrom in York.  I am not sure that is the best way to begin an account of the day, but since it is bound to crop up, why not just get it out of the way.  I don't know what York looked like back then, but it has some beautiful spaces today and tons of tourists.  The best way to see such a city is to get out early in the morning while most people are still abed.  You'd be surprised what a difference that makes.  

York is about 1/2 hour from Leeds by train, making a day trip very doable.  Alex Allain would not miss this for the world because he could practice the piano right in the York station, if this guy—whose picture will not move to the middle— would give him a turn, that is!

The first thing I did was walk a portion of the city wall, only a portion either because that is all there is in the direction I chose or I could not find the continuance.   Now, I am not 100% sure about this, but I think cattle grazed on the open side of the wall where the grass is.  If they didn't why on earth not!

Speaking of pianos, before being interrupted by the city wall, I must say that there are a lot of harpsichords or clavichords in York.  Here is one at the Fairfax House, a Georgian townhouse open for viewing:

And sheet music, too!

Among other objets d'arts at Fairfax House was a writing desk that was decorated with exquisite inlayed designs of died ivory (something is wrong with that word order!):

Each of the designs was slightly different one from another, which, at first glance, one might not notice.  Very clever!  (Sorry, no examples for you to compare.)

Fairfax House has the most enthusiastic volunteers one could hope to encounter!  They will tell you anything and everything.  Overall, though, the rooms are too cluttered with such doodads as stuffed mice and fake flowers...lots and lots and lots of stuffed mice!  (Whatever for?)

York has a Cathedral, The Minster, which, apparently, costs £30,000.00, yes, thirty thousand pounds, a day to run. 

The Minster even has its own YouTube page (or does one say channel?)!

It, York, that is, not the Cathedral, also displays several fab animal topiaries:

Most of them you are not allowed to sit on, but this fellow may be the exception:

When animals are not grazing in the keep or being converted from shrubs to lions and whatnot, they are put to use advertising woolen scarves:

Phone booth repurposed as a defibrillator depot:

Once an Abbey..... before Henry VIII  went on a rampage:

The York Castle Museum has the most unusual time line ever!  For example, here you see poor Margaret Clitherow being pressed to death:  Euuhgh  that is so gross! (Remember to click on the photos to enlarge.)

And Robert Aske being hanged: 

As opposed to conventional hanging, this kind of hanging made the poor wretch suffer for days.

And that Joseph Hansom was from York:

I learned that corsets could not be laundered because the stays , no matter what they were made of, would disintegrate: 

And the blurb insisted that Victorian women, contrary to popular knowledge, did not wear skirts to cover their ankles, rather the length was above the boot line.

 The best exhibit was a take off of  Tipu's Tiger who lives at the Victoria and Albert in London.  While the real Tiger has a music box inside, this one, if fed a £1 coin,  moves about and roars, after a fashion, and the woman rolls her eyes and kicks her feet.  Not as impressive as the original, but amusing.

Back in Leeds, I picked up some Chinese food, less than not great.  In fact, most everything I have bought including fruit and vegetables has been of a most inferior quality.  Ah, well.

June 13-14, 2026. Departure and Arrival

 People ask, "So...how was your trip?" Then they brace themselves, dreading that you might actually go ahead and tell them.  I am going to do just that.  First there was Raj, who was to drive me to JFK.  I had to tell him my my address on three different occasions during the booking process, and even though he had been given all the details about the flight, terminal, and so on, he didn't remember any of it.  This is not good for a person such as myself, who assumes EVERYTHING will go wrong.  Well, despite my fears and anxiety, Raj actually did show up on time. Traffic to JFK was hardly an issue, and Raj gave me an abbreviated version of his life story, which made me want to blurt out, several times, "You have got to be kidding!"  (I did not so interject, however.)  Just for staters, he is from Pakistan, so you can imagine there is some drama there.  

Since I was flying fancy style, check in was a breeze and I even got through security with my grapes and hiking poles, though I did have to remove my hiking boots as I was a "random" person to be checked.  Frankly, I think it was because they did not expect a person of a certain age to be wearing heavy-duty, leather, above the ankle, Zamberlan boots.  Accommodations on the plane were disappointing, but the crew were great and I slept the whole way on 250 mg. of Zolpidem, thus, the inability to move more than 5 centimeters in any direction was irrelevant.

Manchester, reputed to be the worst airport in England, has undergone some serious renovation, at least terminal 2 has, and that is what mattered in this case.  I retrieved my suitcase, went through passport control and customs all in about 15 minutes or less, would you believe?  Finding the pickup driver....not so easy, but was in the room of my hotel in Leeds within 90 minutes after the flight landed.  

First to do: shop.  Bought the usual staples but unfortunately, I am already sick of the lox and cream cheese thing.  I may have to branch out.  Then I went on a walking tour only not really.  I used the itinerary of a walking tour of the city, but did it without the guide and a group os people all of whom are routinely asked, "Where are you from?"  (Is that supposed to be a bonding question?)  Here, not in order, is some of what I saw: 

At the Leeds Art Museum:  Arp

At the Garden: Roses 

At the town hall, a plaque that did not make me weep:

And, no, I did not know.

Some assurance that this might be an OK city in which to get sick:

But, OTOH, fear that you can't ever get away:

Woah!! You can get a heart attack and use wi-fi ALL AT ONCE!

Back at the museum, a flash back to the Car Graveyard in the Hamden Plaza.  One can really contemplate that shredded tire or do they spell it tyre here?  Is that creative or what ?  Who knew that a hunk of handrail + two wrecked tires = art!

Here are some shmattahs lying on the ground, right?  NO, THEY ARE NOT!   It turns out that one is supposed to lie on one of them and, so positioned, contemplate the painted glass ceiling (sorry, no picture), and then view all the photos and memorabilia around the room. They are  all part of the composition of an artist paying tribute to her recently deceased father.  One would never know this unless they had the good fortune, as I did, of having the security guard give them a whirlwind tour.

Let sleeping dogs lie:

Or Not:

especially if that is a cat.

This is one of Jacob Kramer's (his family fled Ukraine in 1901) most famous early works, ‘Hear Our Voice, O Lord, our God’ (1919); it shows the tortured face of a Jewish woman during a pogrom.

A brief stop at the Royal Armouries Museum where I will return on Tuesday:

August 10, Home

 Having become an expert, in one day, at taking The Tube, I decided to take public transportation to the airport.  It worked like this:  Walk two blocks from hotel to Baker Street Tube station, take two   v   e   r   y       l     o     o     o    o    n    g   escalators down to the bowels of London, board the train on platform 9, disembark at Paddington, wind your way through tunnels and up escalators and along more passageways to Paddington Station proper, find platform 7, get on the train, get off the train at Heathrow Central, follow the signs to Terminal 3, which may have been a longer walk than the two blocks to the Tube.  And what about paying?   A flick of your watch at the stile as you enter and then exit the Tube Station. As for the Heathrow Express ticket, you can buy that on-line.

Check in for the flight was easy as was security, and the flight was just fine.  Food was terrible.  Landed almost an hour early!  Passport control fast. (Global Entry is the best.)  Bag drop fast. No customs at all.  Found person who was picking me up without  difficulty.  Traffic from JFK light on a Sunday afternoon yet.  All totally astonishing!  

 Best parts of the trip were the days with Alex and Alex and then with Max.  Except for the HEAT at the beginning, lucky with the weather, which is a huge factor when you are walking between 12-17 miles a day.  Some of the stages were beautiful, some were dull.  Navigation apps worked 100%.

Most accommodations were fine; a few were standouts and a couple were "I wish I did not have to stay here." There was a mix of hotel, bed and breakfast, and AirB&B.  Overall, I prefer hotels, except when they are self check-in, in which case you have the disadvantages of an AirB&B without any of the advantages (kitchen, e.g.).  

Luggage transfer, all arranged ahead of time worked perfectly.  

Biggest challenge: when there was not a good grocery store close by.  

Offa's Dyke: harder than I thought it would be, but some stages were lovely.  The downside of Off'a Dyke is that there are not always accommodations near the path.  This means either complicated taxi arrangements or several miles on asphalt to get to a place to stay.

Shropshire Way:  Bag the most northern stages completely.  They are dull, there is too much road walking, and some have significant detours. The southern segment is quite nice. But because the Shropshire Way is not a National Trail, it is not all that popular, so the route is poorly maintained in places.

Overall, a good experience, say, B+  AND I am glad to be home!

August 09, London

Today, like many days, was divided into two parts: morning and afternoon!   When one rises and shines at about 4:30 a.m., even a leisurely cup of "coffee" along with something to eat and spending time reading Daf Yomi only gets you to about 6:00 a.m.  Where to go?  Either  explore city streets or a park.  I chose the latter, so off to Hyde Park once again it was.  

Henry Moore:

Couple on a bench:

Hyde park has special horse lanes: wide swaths of sand:  Here are a couple kicking up some dust:

Oh, tally ho! I say, is that the cavalry racing along?

You can almost hear the trumpets even though they are not in the picture.

This colorful avian creature has a fearsome itch:

Some are prettying up; some are having a chit-chat:

And this one is so don't bother me!

Sir, do you have a reservation?  No?  Oh, I see.  Well there seems to be only one spot available at the moment.  Will that do?

There was a triathalon happening in the park, which, I realized later, is why some  of the runners were jogging along wearing bathing caps.  Here is a group getting ready for, or just having finished, the swim portion:

In the park is an Italian Garden.  An Italian Garden has to have at least one fountain:

Already in the neighborhood, I decided to give the Victoria and Albert another go.  Good move! Now, to get to almost anywhere at the V&A, you have to walk through the long sculpture hall. where  this bust of Dr. Anthony Addington by Thomas Banks caught my attention:

We are told that despite the life like appearance of the sitter, the bust is based on a death mask cast directly from Dr. Addington's face after death.  (Uhhh, not life-like looking to me!)

Time to make a bee line to the jewelry collection:

As you might guess, there were many, many dazzling pieces.

Darling, with my black sheath, shall I wear the blue?

or the green?

Some pieces were actually practical, like this silver and ruby Spanish hair comb:

And some—though not many— utterly charming:

Behind this tiara is a sad story.

When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria was so devastated, she could not go out or do anything, to the extent that she could not even fulfill her royal duty of being present for the ceremonial opening of parliament for FIVE YEARS! Finally, in February, 1866, when she could summon up the strength to officiate, she wore this modest tiara that Albert had designed for her:

Some pieces were, uhh, ugly:

and/or strange:

I will call that one Spaghetti with Olives.

Bouquet of stems of yucca, wheat, lavender, rosemary and poppy.

How it was meant to be worn we are not told, but it might, or might not, pair with these shoes from Harrods:

What is clever about this necklace is the way it opens and closes:

You see that green heart in the center?  It splits into two, right down the middle!


The display did not stop with wearables.  There were, for example, jewel encrusted boxes:

And goblets such as this one that has a lid affixed in such a way that seemed to render the goblet impossible to drink from: 

All jeweled out, I hunted for the Jacobean and Tudor rooms, but could not find them, so I retraced my steps to Harrods to buy something good to eat.  Whilst first perusing (again) their jewelry section,  I engaged in conversation with a man who worked at the Cartier display. When he found out that I could not gain admittance to the exhibit at the V&A, he showed me  photos of some of the items on his phone.  I could see why you cannot get a ticket until September.  Why not take a peak to get a taste.

Food supplies acquired, it was time for the afternoon plan.  The info on Google Maps made it clear that the only way I could get back to the hotel to drop off my food supplies before heading to the zoo, was to take a TAXI, which, like the tube, I had never done before. It worked out just fine!

A thirty minute walk through Regent's Park got me to the zoo.  As did Alex in 2023, I saw a coyote in the park:

A few highlights:

Emu:

White-naped mangabey:

:
Uhhh..black, yellow, and white lizard?

Dyeing (yes, dyeing) poison dart frog:

Comment from little boy looking at these frogs, "One of them is hitching a ride."

An observation that more accurately applies to this youngster and his mom:

Ethiopian mountain adder:

My favorite of the day was this camel:

But the one to worry about was not even in the zoo: