old york not new york
So, a certain friend of mine contacted me a few weeks ago to say ‘hey you’ve been in the UK for a couple of months now and we STILL haven’t met up, that’s just disgraceful. I’m between dissertations at the moment, so what say we hook up somewhere?’ And that’s basically how I ended up in York with Hazel and friends on June 17th for a night of Scrumpy-filled madness. For those of you who don’t know Hazel (who did a 2 week stint at the Malvern East house), Lucas and I met her in Thailand back in ’03 and we did ‘Nam and Cambodia together. Good times. For those of you who don’t know what Scrumpy is, details will follow.
York has been best described to me (by Hazel) as ‘a tip top good old English town’. What I mainly noticed about it was that there were more drunk people on the streets of a Saturday night than I have ever seen before in my life. What I mean is not that there were a lot of drunk people, but that they were MORE drunk than any people I’ve seen on a public street before, and ALL of them managed to attain the same ridiculous levels of drunkenness. I’m not sure if this is normal Scrumpy-induced behaviour or if it was just due to the York Races being on that day, but it was interesting nonethless. Another thing about York is that I didn’t actually realize what a popular tourist destination it is, but heaps of people (2 million a year even) flood there to see the city walls (built to keep out the pesky Scots), the York cathedral, which is beautiful, and built of white stone, and other miscellaneous buildings and Roman ruins. At any given time over 80% of the population are tourists. Sadly during my appointed sightseeing time I was really tired from a week of partying & watching the World Cup and ran out of steam halfway through the day, so we stopped at the Mitre pub for a cherry beer or two and didn’t really pick up pace again after that at all. The Mitre pub is apparently ‘the’ pub to hang out at, which was annoying for me as it’s really really small and all the seats were taken. The cherry beer was delicious though. I ended up falling asleep over a jug of long island ice teas at another pub in town before dinner, so went back to Hazel’s friends’ house for a nap. After delicious home-cooked burritos and delicious apple-flavoured tobacco sheesh we hit the pubs for Adrian’s and my first Scrumpy experience. Scrumpy’s is a cider you can really only buy in a couple of places, York being one of them, which is probably a good thing seeing as it is over 9% alc.vol. and it makes you crazy. For example, juuust for example, on his third pint Adrian in a pique knocked my full pint off the table and soaked my jeans. Then later he got angry at the other table of Scrumpy drinkers who had stared superciliously at him & made snide remarks when he was singing, but then started to sing themselves, so he slammed his fist down on the table with a bit too much energy and managed to get all seven of us with wet pants (except himself i believe). Then later when we left the pub we kept doing cartwheels and handstands except without having any sense of balance, we kept landing on our backs on the cobblestones. Anyway, the long and short of it was that Adrian ended up bashing up one of Hazel’s friends on the way home later that night so he got a concussion and there was blood everywhere all over his face by the time we caught up to them, and he had to get stitches. No, that’s not it, (at least I hope it’s not), Adrian claims that they were just running along the street together and Jo ran into a gate. He was so drunk he can’t even remember exactly what happened. Well, I’m sure Adrian’s version is the truth, but it was fun to wind Adrian up anyway.
Sunday was spent pleasantly with Adrian arguing over whether the onion or the potato is the most versatile vegetable. I think Adrian still plans to write an essay on that one in support of the potato to present to the naysayers, myself included, who dared voice their support of the onion. Sunday night our train ended up being delayed by a couple of hours, but we staggered home miraculously in one piece with rather much less of a bottle of absinthe than we had had when we arrived… and that was another crazy weekend in old York town! Hopefully I will be able to get photos at some stage from Hazel’s friend, but it will probably be a few months away, until then you'll just have to envisage the whole horrible saga in your mind's eye. Or something.