Were they expecting a wall ?

It's true. Only idiots take the train on a Sunday. Our scheduled service to Aberdeen  was cancelled  and we took a later 'express' that got stuck behind a commuter train into Edinburgh. We progressed north at a snails pace. Thankfully, there was a fast ScotRail heading north twenty minutes after we got to Waverley. In the end our three and a half hour journey took just under six. 

The train we take from York was busy. We got the last two seats. 'The Font' in one carriage, me in another. I sit at a table with three ladies who inform me that 'Things like this wouldn't happen in New York'. The other passengers ( mostly intelligent Americans of a certain age with a few Dutch and Spanish couples thrown into the mix ) took the delay in their stride. A gentleman from Georgia observes that there's a large white horse carved into a hillside just north of York. Everyone by the window takes a photo even though it's in the far distance. I follow suit  :https://getlostmcr.co.uk/trails/kilburn-white-horse-hike  The gentleman from Georgia tells a woman from Utrecht who's sitting across the aisle about the strengths of Jon Ossoff. By the time we get to Durham inhibitions are fraying and it's like travelling with a group of old friends.

We've never been to Alnmouth. From the train the village and harbour look as though they'd be worth visiting. There's supposedly a good restaurant in nearby Alnwick but when Googled it turns out to have one of those fifteen course tasting menus that take five hours to plough through. Why chefs think this is a selling point is beyond me.

Everyone takes a picture of the border as we cross it. Some of the passengers thought it memorable. Others weren't impressed. Perhaps they expected a wall and floodlights and guard dogs ? The unhappy New York ladies discover the buffet car is out of sandwiches. They wonder if they'll get a refund. One lady observes that she'd want at least $25,000 in compensation to cope with all the stress the delay has caused. " It's worse than flying Southwest ".

Back here this morning there's no doubting we're no longer in England. It may be the last day of summer but the wind has an unforgiving bite to it. 'The Font' is wearing five layers this morning. A few hardy dog owners sit outside the coffee shop ignoring the elements and chatting affably to one another. The pavement is dusted with the first of the fallen leaves. 

The light has that watery fragility that signals long nights and short days are on their way. It's now dark by seven thirty. Light and climate play a big part in shaping national identity. In the coffee shop they're playing this. It used to be popular. When was the last time you heard it ? :https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=8jTZDaTVvDc

For the hipsters amongst us an insight into NYC night life. Today being in bed by eleven has an allure that only grows greater with each passing year :https://www.insidehook.com/nightlife/hanging-sza-bc-new-york-hottest-nightclub

Non-fiction book sales collapsing :https://dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-nonfiction-book-market-is-collapsing

Thoughts on less peaceful train stations : https://snyder.substack.com/p/a-meditation-on-train-stations

Cognition and lucidity :https://psyche.co/ideas/terminal-lucidity-when-dying-dementia-patients-regain-awareness

Why Europeans are fixated on America :https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/09/europe-afd-far-right/688706/

Never travel on a Sunday .

The hotel dog sits at the garden gate and observes us as we head off for our morning 10,000 steps. He watches us go in silence. Hotel dogs can become quite blase about comings and goings. For them it's all part of the job.

We've stayed a bit longer than we originally planned but later today we shall be heading North to Scotland on the 'fast' LNER service. I've always said that anyone who travels by rail on a Sunday, when the train companies repair the tracks, is mad. We'll soon find out if that's true. Let's hope any delays are 'manageable'.

The Minster is quiet. The colder weather means the tourist numbers have thinned down. On top of that Sunday morning visitors are nervous that they might get caught up in a religious service and tend to delay their visits until later. We pretty much have the place to ourselves apart from some quiet American couples who are consulting a well thumbed Pevsner guide. This is the time of the year when those in the know arrive in the UK to enjoy the combination of better pre-equinox weather and off season hotel rates.

The 15th century sculptor who carved the Kings on the altar screen presumably thought he was making them look like old testament prophets. On the far left William the Conqueror certainly looks the part whereas Rufus in the adjacent niche looks out at the world with what seems to be abject boredom. Maybe that's a trait of old testament prophets ?

In a little church facing Bettys tea room a memorial stone to two maiden sisters who each died at the age of 98. They'd lived through the reign of seven successive monarchs. That was considered memorable by the standards of those days. Come to that it would be memorable at any time. If they'd lived a little longer they'd have seen the American colonies opt for independence.

I'd always thought Lowry just did 'factory' pictures. Unusually, this one in York Art Gallery shows his trademark match stick figures milling around the Castle.

The sounds of the Western Isles :https://substack.com/home/post/p-213973149

Scroll down. The B&W photo of the original makes the dogs face much more understandable :https://x.com/Chori__Vegano/status/2100980883633078435

Our local professors weekly update :https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-203-a-week-which-demonstrated

The old window.

The church we're looking for is found hidden in a side street behind the 1970's era Radisson Hotel. On one side is an empty lot left by the Luftwaffes bombing of the town in 1942. A few doors further down the street is a gastropub called the Whippet Inn which is popular with young officers from the Parachute Regiment entertaining their girl friends in somewhere that's convivial and 'reasonably' priced. Not, you would imagine, a neighbourhood where a rare unique medieval window illustrating the end of the world is to be found. 

The windows were made and installed around 1410. An extremely turbulent time in English history when the truly awful King Richard III ( untrustworthy was the best chroniclers of the time could say of him  ) was deposed by Henry IV. This was a shocking development in an era when Kings ruled by divine sanction. Plague, political violence and rebellion added to the unsettling mix of events. People found it hard to keep up with the speed and enormity of change.

There has been a church on this site since well before the Norman Conquest. The current one has bits from the 11th and 15th centuries with some makeshift repairs from the Civil War and some bizarre Victorian restoration work on the roof that, as you can see, is heavy on gilding.

The window we've come to see is set off to the side of the church in an unremarkable little corner. The signs of doom that precede the end of the world are set out in 15 panes that run from left to right. 

Underneath each pane there's a description written in middle English. This was highly unusual at a time when you could be executed for owning an unapproved English language version of the Bible. The descriptions were there for a tiny elite who could read and write while the garish glass images with their tales of politics, climate and pandemics were for the illiterate masses. To see written English on stained glass must have been the equivalent of being introduced to AI.

Here is a description, with some good photographs, of the weird and wonderful window :https://www.exploringbuildinghistory.co.uk/all-saints-york-pricke-of-conscience-window-morality-in-stained-glass-15th-c-style/

Floods bring sea monsters that walk the land. Fires devour fruit trees. Stars fall from the skies. It's all very Hollywood.

The family that were the benefactors of the window are shown on the very bottom level. Their faces seem to show they were suitably impressed.

The whole place is very human and domestic in scale. We're there for the better part of half an hour without anyone else so much as peeping through the door. I'd reckon not one in a thousand, possibly ten thousand, visitors even know it's here. A DaVinci Code thriller could be written around it.

Dinner last night was excellent although the wine list was again dominated by exotic offerings from lesser known parts of the Balkans or Latin America. This presumably appeals to a younger and more adventurous palate.  We opt for a Pouilly-Fuisse which is usually  a safe standby but which, this time, isn't. 

A quiet town.

The view from the street outside the hotel can't have changed much in five hundred years. There is something rather special about York. Life in some cathedral towns outside London moves at its own pace. That's true here. History is woven into every nook and cranny. Come first light clerics can be seen hurrying around on their way to open up the Minster or prepare for Matins.

The hotel we've chosen does indeed have three columns in its downstairs vault. As to whether they're Roman or not I wouldn't like to say. To all but the most expert of eyes one column looks pretty much like another. However, the claim that it's the oldest British building in continuous use seems justifiable.  'The Font' loves the sound of the bells right outside the bedroom window. Angus thinks you might very soon tire of their quarter hourly chiming. 'Tire' may be an understatement. I shall render a judgement tomorrow after another night of atonal four bar snippets of 'Jesu love of my soul'. Thankfully the bells stop sometime after dinner.

The food last night was good. The wine list by contrast was a disappointment. The mark up on the bottles was at least four times, possibly five. Outlandish. A 2019 Pauillac at an eye watering  £195 was the only Bordeaux on offer and not even a good one at that.  We opt for glasses of what might politely be described as a zesty Argentinian Malbec. 'The Font' makes do with one and I don't finish my second. We toy with the idea of drinking a bottle of champagne with dinner but decide against it as being the wrong solution to the problem.  Tonight we'll eat in the hotel.

In the Minster garden a bench with a life sized Paddington bear on it must have been photographed a million times by the European school kids and Chinese tourists that throng the place in the summer. Today, we're alone apart from two or three groups of bored looking and uniformly blonde Swedish adolescents waiting for the Minster ticket office to open. The Swedish teenagers fool around. A verger tells them to be quiet and sheepishly they all say 'sorry' in unison. 'Sorry' has become one of those catch all words that every European knows. Inside the Minster there is one of those slightly embarrassing pre-opening announcements where visitors are reminded that this is a house of God and to behave accordingly. It is suggested that everyone say the Lords Prayer in their own language. To our surprise the young Swedes do. Who'd have expected to hear 'Helgat varde ditt namn' being recited in 2026 ? The teens don't seem to suffer from the self consciousness of older folk.

Two workmen are touching up heraldic shields. York is the sort of small city where this sort of civic activity is not unusual. They work at an 'unhurried' pace and to a standard that hints they're happy to be stewards of the place.

Half an hour later , after we've had a reasonable coffee, the workmen have moved on and are touching up another shield.

A woman lifts her dog up onto the bench and plonks it unceremoniously next door to Paddington. She arranges the dogs fur and then proceeds to take a picture. All the time she keeps up a steady stream of conversation with the mutt. The poor thing sensing this strange ursine presence next to it needs some reassurance.

We thought we knew York but there are so many treasures we didn't know about or had passed on prior visits. This plaque in a church restored after being wrecked the Baedeker Raids refers to the church as 'she'. There is something rather other worldly about the concept of a building being so well integrated into a town that over a millennium or so it develops a persona all of its own. 

It is a little jewel box of a place unnoticed by tourists. Purists might argue with some aspects of the restoration , but not us. It works well and emits warmth and friendliness in that way some old buildings do. It also follows from this, and is equally true, that some buildings don't. It is undoubtedly a 'she'.

The old place battles with pigeons.

Later today we will head off in search of the DaVinci code window about which more tomorrow.

Late arrival.

The train usually runs on time. Today it didn't. We are now belatedly in York which is delightfully quiet.

Tomorrow we go to see an exhibition at the York Art Gallery and then will try to find the world oldest stained glass window depicting the end of the world. This is something we'd never heard about but it appeared in two completely unrelated and non-architectural books we've read in the last three months. People in the 1400's were convinced their times were 'tumultuous'. Tonight we stay in a hotel built in 1080 and incorporating columns from the Roman military camp. I have high hopes for the restaurants wine list.

Observations

Driving into town we see a remarkable rainbow. We see a lot of rainbows but this one is a classic. The smoke from the Canadian wild fires has returned and is refracting the light in unusual ways.

One solitary and rather dopey looking bee on a garden chair . I'll delay trimming the lavender until I'm sure they've all definitely gone for good.

Pumpkins appear in Starbucks. Presumably identical plastic pumpkins have appeared in every Starbucks in every corner of the globe ?

We're off to York for a few days. Someone at Stanford recommended this as something light to read on the train.

The stand is now going up for the Dunhill golf tournament. The inhabitants of the super expensive apartments will (once again) have their views blocked.

Having seen this mornings rainbow I can believe this :https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-atmosphere-just-set-a-water-vapor

AI is in the news a lot :https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/can-ai-productivity-grow-fast-enough-to-justify-big-techs-spending/

Blue skies

The students continue to enjoy the good weather. So do we. There is a big golf tournament on at the start of next month. Last year it poured down from start to finish. There can be little as dispiriting as watching a golf match in torrential rain. The organizers will be hoping that this year will be sunny,

Strange signs appearing around town. I'd never thought of gum as being an issue here.  The target audience may not be a local one. ' We bin our gum' doesn't sound like a very Scottish sentence construct. Outside Tesco's there are three young men with Ghost Buster style backpacks blasting away at ingrained Wrigleys.

We see a motor home with Canadian plates down by the harbour. How do you ship a motorhome from Canada to Europe ? There must surely be easier and cheaper ways of seeing Europe.

At 8:40 Starbucks is as busy as Grand Central with students trying to get their morning caffeine shot before the nine am lectures. Prior to 8:00 when we start our 10,000 morning steps the town is completely empty bar the usual dog owners out with their pooches. 

The fountain is working again. It is turned on mid-morning and turned off again at dusk. This seems a suitably Presbyterian solution to the running costs. It looks well restored and brings a touch of grandeur to that end of the shopping street. Civic involvement works. I notice the sponsors of the upcoming golf tournament have been sponsors of the restoration work.

The skies remain blue and parking, for the moment, easy.

We get the first leaflet reminding us that the British Open golf tournament will be held here in July next year. If you think 10,000 students flooding into a town of 15,000 is a big uplift imagine what it's like when 200,000 golfers make this their home for a week.

Second day surprises

The BBC breakfast news leads with the death of the PM's father. After that there's a slightly confusing story about mail in ballots , the mid-term elections and the Supreme Court. I wonder how many listeners will follow the ins and outs of Americas constitutional intricacies.  Further advances by Houthi forces and the news the American  Presidents son had his wedding  'after party' paid for by a Russian oligarch end the bulletin. We wonder what a wedding 'after party' is and how much one could possibly cost. From the way it's reported I'd guess we're talking big money and minimal good taste. The days of the bride and groom slipping quietly away from the festivities seem to be a thing of the past.

The farmers youngest son is out ploughing the potato field. Local seagulls feast in the freshly turned soil. Two weeks today and he's off to Cambridge. The farmers wife seems (much) more excited about this than he is. The insouciance of an eighteen year old is a marvelous thing.

Driving into town we pass the garage. The price of petrol has risen sharply with diesel now at £2:02 a litre. A few days ago it was £1:89.

At first light a trailer was towed along  the dirt track that leads down to the heron pond. It's been parked in a corner of the cabbage field.  I'm assuming this means that the spare part for the hugely expensive cabbage cutter has arrived from the Netherlands and that harvesting is about to begin. If so we can expect to see the cheerful crew of Tajik and Somali seasonal crews starting work sometime later in the day.

Day two of the new semester and classes. The freshers still mill around in groups. Some of them are discovering that the lecture theatre they went to at nine yesterday morning isn't the one they're supposed to be in at nine today. A frisson of nervousness can be sensed in the air. By the end of the week they'll be on top of things and day two timetable surprises will be forgotten.

The enthusiasm of a new semester means that youngsters are out trying things they've never tried before. There is the unusual sight of a group of paddle boarders testing their balancing skills in the shallow waters by the Aquarium. On the other beach the rowing teams are out enjoying the sunshine.

The last of the poppies are wind burnt and long past their best. A hardy few survive.  In this mornings sunrise they look rather grand.

European find this whole measles thing hard to comprehend. Who is telling the truth ? :https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2026/09/03/zero-that-is-the-official-american-measles-death-toll-for-2026-here-is-what-rfk-jr-s-cdc-leaves-out/

Human or machine ? :https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/126

Marriage as a minority pastime:https://theconversation.com/why-do-people-get-married-these-days-290978

English education is getting better - Scottish is going in the other direction :https://alexanderhthompson.substack.com/p/its-the-screens-stupid