I’ve been planning this post for a while, and it�s been an exciting experience for me. You see, the amount of puns or cliches I’ve got at my disposal for the subject line of this entry are immense. In the last couple of weeks we�ve been ice skating at Somerset house, and on a weekend trip up to York. This leaves me with possible subject lines of “Ice Ice Baby”, “Skating on thin ice”, and maybe even a reference somehow to the awesome Disney movie The Mighty Ducks regarding the iceskating. As for the trip to York, I’ve thought of wonders such as “Old York Old York!”, “Start spreading the news”, and “The grand young tourists to York”. The puns practically write themselves.

Due to the bevy of wordplay wonders that I’ve had to choose from, I can’t seem to think of one that I like best. It’s like trying to make the impossible decision of which one of your children are your favourite – although in the case of Cal and I, we all know that we are our families favourites – there�s no use lying, we can see it in your eyes.

Aaaanyway, on to the blogging.

You know how I start most of my entries with a rhetorical question? Well I’m going to do it again now. Do you know the cliche “A picture is worth a thousand words” ? I assuming you do. Well two weeks ago, Cal and I went with some others to Somerset house, a massive mansion type thing on the Thames to have a crack on the ice skating rink they put up there every Christmas. For better or for worse, I took an assload of movies on our camera while we were there, and, as an excuse to test out my newly fangled youtube plugin for the blog here’s the best one.

Now, if a picture is worth a thousand words, and this movie runs at 15 frames per second for 30 seconds�

1000 x 30 x 15 = 450,000

Congratulations. By watching that, you’ve saved me the hassle of writing almost half a million words. Who wants to high five?

As for York, we did take a few videos on the camera there too, but unfortunately the only good one we got was of me chasing around some geese and then getting a bit scared when they turned on me. Seeing as this makes me look slightly more stupid than usual we’re going to be doing this part the old fashion way (with the me writing things and you pretending to bother reading). Hooray for editorial control!

To get it over and done with, York is absolutely nothing like New York. While this did not stop me from thinking I was immensely clever by adapting and singing Sinatra’s “New York New York” to “Old York Old York” the whole time we we�re there, there wasn’t much in the way of similarities. York is fairly small, the only high-rise is a church in the middle of the city, and instead of being ringed by a harbour, it is surrounded by a old wall.

I guess living in London I sort of assume that every city in England is a roughly comparable size to the capital, but York is actually pretty tiny – everything is walkable – in fact, we did a loop of the whole thing in a bit over an hour. Not that it is a bad thing of course, just sayin’. According to the random Scottish dude I was speaking to on the train back to London York is famous for three things – Yorkshire Puddings, The high number of pubs, and Hens and Buck nights. I’m also going to retrospectively add Yorkshire Terriers to that list because I just thought of those too.

An artists impression of a Yorkshire Terrier

Thankfully Cal and I, and Raquel and Curtis, our traveling comrades experienced all three* of these wonders.

I’m sick of writing about this now, so to find out more you�ll have to email me. Union rates stipulate that I’m only allowed to write 256,000 words per blog entry, which I’ve well and truly exceeded. In light of this travesty I�m going to the pub. If Cal happens to come on and complete this entry then she is a Scab, more likely to produce poorer quality work than union trade (ie me), and shouldn’t be trusted. Just so you know.