Bloody Prince Phillip!
The visit royal ruins my trip to the
minster
24 July 2000:
Bloody Prince
Phillip!I
got up at a decent hour and M drove me to the local Harrogate station. I had to
take a local train to York. En route I continued to read
Christopher and His
Kind, and I loved the scenery out the window. At
one point we crossed a river on a high bridge, and as we entered Knaresborough,
I saw a tourist's dream--houses painted with harlequin chekerboards and neat
slate roofs. It almost seemed like the houses were like this for
centuries.When I got to York I purchased
my ticket to London from the GNER agent. GNER runs a much better train line than
Virgin. I decided to get back to London early, so I bought a ticket for the next
train, and devoted the next 50 minutes to visiting the Minster. It's just an
eight-minute walk from the train station. It's a lovely walk; you pass the old
walls and cross a lovely bridge, and the main street to the Minster gives a
wonderful view of the cathedral.When I
got to the Minster it was
closed!According to the volunteer
guides, the Minster is closed for three days due to an impending visit from The
Queen and Prince Phillip. Bloody hell. So I trek back through the streets of
Eboricam, back to the train station, which is a grand old Victorian affair of
the 19th Century. When I told Cousin B all this, he said, "It's got to be the
quickest trip to York on record!"
So
I hopped onto the next train. The GNER trains are fast and on time. We were at
London's King Cross within two hours. I spent the second hour talking to a very
nice blonde New Zealander after I offered her a
biscuit.I spent the next few hours
running from shop to shop. First, the Body Shop. Afterward, I popped into Gay's
the Word, and said hello to Jim, the manager. he always makes good
recommendations. Unfortunately, he didn't remember me at all from my visit last
year. So I had his acquaintence but he didn't have mine. No matter.... we had a
lovely chat. Then, I was off to a store near Seven Dials, for work purposes. It
was a quiet afternoon and they had time to entertain
me.I was running late as per usual, so I
tried in vain to find a working phone box in the Covent Garden section of
London. There were only two I could find. One had a young woman perched within
and she clearly wasn't going to leave. The other had two Japanese girls who were
not on the phone at all. They were waiting for a call "in 20 minutes," so I
harassed them into evacuating the phone box while I called my cousin N in
Borehamwood in just under 50
seconds.Good old Thameslink... they
never, ever come through to take a ticket. It's amazing they are making any
money at all. I buy tickets from time to time, but why? Plus, when I get on in
West Hampstead, there is no way to buy a
ticket.I walked from the train station
to my cousins' house. I was only a wee bit late. The children were wildly awake
and vying for my attention. The youngest had had quite a day: Prince Phillip
"officially opened" his school, which he'd been attending all year. Everyone in
the family but M was allowed to go, as he was not a student at that school.
Bloody Prince
Phillip! Ruined things for
both of us
today.
M
is learning to ride a two-wheeler without "stabilisers" (training wheels), and D
is very very very interested in all sorts of snakes. They went to the library
today and took out a horrendous book that horrified their mother,
N--Crime and Punishment through the
Ages, or some such. Full of blood, gore, and
torture.N drove me back to her parents'.
We had a nice supper of chicken fillets with rice and peas and salad, and
afterward, we took a good walk around
Radlett.B and I watched an interesting
doco on the origins of syphillis, originally blamed on the "New World," but then
there was a pre-Columbian discoverey of syphillis damage to skeletons found
where a monastery in Hull once stood. This was followed by the final episode of
Stephen King's Storm of the
Century, which was riveting yet awful. B cried
out "What a cop out!" when it ended. Then I spent about two hours doing my
packing up before retiring for the night.
Posted: Mon - July 24, 2000 at 01:51 AM
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Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:04 PM
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