LIFE: York From the View of a Yorkshire Lass

When you grow up with a city as great as York just down the road, you somewhat take it for granted. All that history, culture, shopping, farmers market, train love. Yeap I was lucky. So I thought I'd share the things I love(d) about the city I've spent many an hour in growing up because I never really got around to talking about the place when it was all on my doorstop.

Do a ghost tour

Ghosts seem to like York, in fact it's the most haunted city in England. So as a result there are a lot of various ghost walks around the city. Ghost Hunt of York was one I took on a birthday many moons ago, it meets nightly at 7:30PM by the end of the Shambles (M&S end) and it's well worth your time. 

Walk the walls

Whether you call them the York City Walls, the Bar Walls or the Roman Walls, walking around the walls is one of the best ways to see the city centre and all it's history. From views of the Minster, towers to the Bars (historical Bars, not the drinking variety). It's about a two and a half mile walk around, there's lots of steps involved so it's not the most accessible way to see the city, but it's certainly one of the finest!  

Shop locally 

York has a great number of independent and smaller chains, probably too many for me to remember and name. But my favorites have always been: The Viking Loom (best local needlework shop I've ever come across), The Antiques Center (vintage treats), Lily Shambles (gorgeous jewelry) to Shared Earth to name but four.

Fall in love with trains

The National Railway Museum was the basis for this girl falling in love with trains. Capturing the history, the design to rail-road paraphernalia, the Railway Museum has it all. Take a ride on a Bullet Train or see them working on engines, I always left that place knowing something new every time. Plus it's free. 

 

Take afternoon tea

It's rather a cliché these days that to visit York you should eat in Betty's, but it's still remains one of my favourite places for afternoon tea. The trick is knowing when to visit, aka not when the queue is half around the block. Pop along around holiday seasons and they do some great window displays.

Enjoy an ice cream

Whether it's in the Museum Gardens or in Deans Park (right behind the Minster) sit on the grass and soak in the gorgeous setting. Both places are well worth enjoying a picnic in, great for people watching and there's always some wildlife roaming around too.

Insider tips;

Farmers markets are well worth a visit but go earlier before the coach loads of visitors are dropped off. Use the great park and ride and bus services that run around the city, York just gets more and more complicated to drive around. There's always been a lack of public toilets (it's important to know this stuff).  Take your patience with you, you're more than likely to be stuck behind slow tourist walkers throughout the day. The York Sightseeing (the big bus buses) have always been my favorite for the city bus tours.

Ever been to York? I'd love to hear your favorite things to see and do in the city!

Old postcards, happy memories.

Recently I've been branching out and selling some vintage postcards - I love not only seeing the places they have come from but imagining who posted or was intended to receive them. Ages ago I scanned in some of my grandparents old postcards we found after cleaning out my gran's house all from places they had been on holiday. They seem to have a prettier, idyllic sense to them in their modern contemporaries. I thought it was about time to share them.

If were a very early reader of LOTS you might remember the first postcard which was originally featured back in October of 2009. This postcard was sent to my grandad from his gran back in 1930 with the sweetest note written on the reverse; 

"Dear Arthur, 

How would you life to go rambling in this wood? 

That is what I've been doing, 

With love, 

Grandma" 

My great great grandma lived near Skipton in West Yorkshire and traveled across to the Humber to my grandads house in Hull. This sadly was the only postcard which had actually been sent, the rest below probably just collected for their memories.

Being a Yorkshire lass we often took drives up to the North Yorkshire Moors for walks ourselves so Beckhole and Goathland is a very familiar place to me. Other might know Goathland as being the set location for Heartbeat. I'm sure the sociologist in me would really enjoy analyzing images such as this for their portrayal of the rural idyll.

I'm sure this campsite is one in which my grandad took the family one summer in the late 1950s to late 1960s as I remember my mums comments about remembering the place when we took a family holiday in Dumfries and Galloway in 2010.

I would be lying if I had any clue where this postcard was from or even marks, but don't you just love that image? I certainly wouldn't enjoy driving a car that close to such a sheer face of a cliff! 

The week of the to do list. Part two.

You feel a bit of a spare part those days before leaving, your sorting stuff so you feel like you can't get involved with anything new. You end up window shopping and buying things you don't really need - like Superdrug's 3 for 2 on cosmetics [as if America doesn't do make up] buying Glamour merely for the Nails Inc [picture 3], walked my way around the walls of York [picture 1] and poked the National Railway museum [picture 2].

On Friday I went to Hull for a change of scene. Hull a bit of a weird city and it's one few people go out of their way to visit. It always felt a city that's lacking that extra vibe to push itself [probably merely lacking government funding]. What Hull is good for is lots of free museums of which there are eight. Mostly they are based around the Old Town in the Museum Quarter where you'll find the slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce's house, the Street life Museum [picture 4] and the Hull and East Yorkshire museum. If you ever need to pass an afternoon in Hull i'd really recommend them.

When I try to picture Detroit I always imagine it to be something similar to Hull - both were previous industrial hubs that have seemed to have lost their spark when their manufacturing lifeblood drained away. Nevertheless I don't know what to expect, I tend to ignore the looks and misunderstanding about why you'd want to move to Detroit but I tend to try and see over people's generalisations, people often become too believing of them without experiencing the place themselves. Here's to giving it a go.

LIFE: Crackles

Yesterday we went to the arboretum at Castle Howard which is part of the Kew Garden network, for £5 you get to wander around a vast section of international and British trees set in a gorgeous location of rolling North Yorkshire fields. Visiting became a perfect chance of capturing the oranges, reds and yellows of the autumnal leaves and another excuse to test drive the new camera. What I love most about autumn is the colours and the crackles of walking over fallen leaves and the colours they turn. The more I play and learn about this camera the more I come to love it, there's some things I don't fully understand - especially how it changes the f scale [it does it randomly] but I'm fully at home with using the manual setting; which coming from a point and shoot camera to going fully manual is, in my eyes a big jump.

Tomorrow begins my last week at work, five days and then it's bye bye Boots. I began there as a Christmas temp in 2009 after giving up on a job offer to be a university researcher [why?! - long story] then got pulled into the dispensary. Don't get me wrong it has its really good moments and I've learn loads about medicines  but it's not what I went to university [twice] for. I might miss the people but I won't miss the conversation. So our plans are starting to slowly fall into place. Joe booked our wedding venue yesterday while I was out wandering around so that's all nicely sorted - never pictured having a winter wedding and I hope it's dry and not too cold!

And today I finally booked my plane ticket so there's only 16 days left in the UK. Its starting to get very real and nervy lately and there's still lots to do. Next up is a hotel for the evening seeing it's an early morning flight. So my question to you, for your last night in the UK would you splash out for a cosy nicer bed or slum it to save money? Baring in mind I'll be checking out at like 5.30am.

B&W in the country

 Finding the black and white setting on the camera was a bit of an experiment especially when it comes to exposure but the way of learning about fancy camera settings and how to use them to your advantage is to get out there and play. Plus yourself and your camera and you'll find out and learn amazing things. Less then a five minute walk from the parents house is a country lane which throws you right back into the rural world. Off the lane is the allotments where the first and last photograph were taken, the parents grow some flowers there and the b&w tones down the flowers vividness. The dandelion was blowing in the autumn wind which made it catch my eye, I love how the light and the focus makes it look so airy and light, almost fuzzy. At the end of the lane is an old farmhouse, it's slightly lost amongst the back gardens of new homes and opposite is a huge field full of old farm equipment graveyard, old combines, rusty old parts and creaky old out buildings. Moving from this to the outer suburbs of Detroit will be a huge move methinks!

An Hour in the Gardens

The hours at work got changed around on Wednesday because we had to have some random team meeting - it was all surrounded in mystery yet wasn't exciting at all. Same old same old. So work didn't start till ten yet had to still get the same eight am bus to work which left an hour to entertain myself in York's museum gardens. The trees are on the very verge of turning and falling, one of my favourite aspects about autumn is the colouring of nature. I thought i'd give myself a challenge to try some more landscapey/building photographs but as you can see my macro flower shots always sneak in. I'm have plans of getting some of my shots printed off and framed arty for our flat, perhaps they'll give me some more inspiration of a morning. 

YORKSHIRE: Combines

Bank holiday Monday was spent trying to avoid the tourist crowds at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire - the location many recognise as the backdrop to the TV drama Brideshead Revisited. The quick drive past the end of the car park revelled it was over flowing with tourists so we carried on driving up the road to the free quiet little green car park - come lay by over looking the top of the estates lake. There was a short little walk along one edge of the lake only got too after walking through a mass of adult and this years swans - this was just a tad scary, especially when one of the swans started hissing. I think they've been known to attack people, there was even some cute little duckings on the lake too all swimming in line. 

We spent ages watching the combine harvesters bringing in some of the crops, the tractors kept rushing back and forth as the combine worked up and down the field. It really does bring home, that with August ending Autumn and the colder months are on our doorstep hence digging out the old SC&CO hoodie - totally unfeminine and non pretty but needs must. It's a shame, it seems like another proper summer seems to have escaped the UK. Is it wrong to say i'm wishing for spring already?!

YORKSHIRE: Robin Hood's Bay

 

Yesterday we went to Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast. It was a my Saturday off and I wanted to drag the parents somewhere. As a coastal resort Robin Hood's bay is very picturesque, with lots of flower boxes, red tiled roofs, quaint little shops, yet its very much a second/holiday home town. It's also the start/end of the coast to coast walk so its always full of tourists or walkers. But there was also a load of Harley Davidson bikers and Morris dancers there yesterday.

The coast along this part is apparently known for it's fossils, not that I would ever know if I had come across one and has lots of rock pools. You have to be really careful with this coast however because the tide can turn really quickly. When we first arrived the two boats in the bottom picture where a long way from the tide, thirty minutes lately there were a long way from the shore. The tide comes in quick and it comes in deep!

Dad treated us too an ice cream - I went for the creamy lemon flavour, it wasn't very lemony but it was tasty all the same! I also seemed to be the only tourist wearing a shirt, I've taken a liking for the tulip style skirt - they slim over my hips somewhat, just annoying how they puff out when you sit down! I also aired my brand new H&M bag. It was the mustard colour that attracted me and the price at only £14.99 and I know a number of bloggers have picked up and wrote about it's appearance in the new A/W catalogue. I brought mine with the excuse that it will fold down really easily to pack into my suitcase.

Hope you all had a nice weekend! Joe got us a nice queen size bed and i've been sorting out a parcel of things to relocate to Detroit. I hope it's not tempting fate too much!

YORK: Tower Gardens

On August 5th 2010 me and Joe got engaged. It's amazing to think a whole year has gone by since Joe proposed on a bench in the Tower Gardens by the River in York - named after the famous Clifford's Tower [bottom picture]. We'd spent the morning travelling back from Manchester Airport and were all excited about our little weeks holiday together as tourists in York, I know I wasn't properly blogging at the time, so none of these ever really got mentioned sadly. We'd planed a trip on the night cruise on the river boat and ended up, killing time just walking along the river and sitting on a bench watching the boats cruise up and down. It was then that that bench became christened as "ours" just as Joe asked me to marry him. We'd return to to same spot in March this year only to find it was no longer there! Perhaps another winter river flooding caused its removal.

I hadn't been back to "our" bench until the year anniversary [if we can call it that] of our engagement, the idea of it always felt so odd going there without Joe, but I wanted to visually capture the gardens, the river, all the boats and the warehouse [named as the Bonding Warehouse] which we use to talk about while sitting on our bench or on the cut down tree trunk by the edge. I think every time we head back to York we'll always pop in and visit our spot, it has so many happy memories of our time together and beginning our future. I just wish Joe could have visited it again with me.

YORKSHIRE: Dalby Forest

So after the complete downpour upon the Yorkshire Moors (the story got slightly sidetracked by the visa letter appearing) we decided to hop over to the other side of the road and into a different valley to visit Dalby Forest - a Forestry Commission forest drive with pull ins, walks, mountain bike tracks and visitor places. Even though the majority of things are outside there's at least a tourist information centre to shelter from somewhat. Luckily the weather was totally different, even with the odd tiny shower we managed a good (yet steep) walk into the forest, caught sight of a gorgeous selection of butterflies and bees, wild flowers and bird song.

You could spend hours walking around the numerous trails, you can even hire bikes and have a tour around which I could imagine being excellent fun. Sometimes its just nice to stop and just hear the peace and quiet and watch the birds fluttering around. While it does get popular on the summer weekends and during school holidays on Tuesday it was nice and quiet, easy enough to escape the rest of civilisation.

Today I spent the afternoon printing off the countless visa forms I need to fill out. Last count was eight forms. Gah but i'll probably write much more about that in the near future!

YORKSHIRE: The Moors

So yesterday (Tuesday) was my day off and with the parents still having their second week of the holiday I really wanted to go up onto the Yorkshire Moors. I'm  not really sure why, maybe it's because of its remoteness, the chances of playing with my camera and catching some wildlife. The English summer weather had other ideas of allowing it however. 

We decided to go up by Levisham railway - a stop along the North Yorkshire Moors Railway just north up the road from Pickering. We arrived just after a shower - long enough for me to grab the above pictures (the only pictures) and have lunch. I'm trying to get better at my landscape shots. As you can all probably tell I love my macro flowery pictures yet I never seem to manage artsy or interesting landscape photographs -  it's something I need to work out.

But then the skies greyed over and the heavens well and truly opened. The next hour was spent watching the rain running down the car windows and the Moorland sheep getting wet and hiding by the stonewalls. At that point we gave up and went to Dalby Forest but that's a post for another day!

Isn't everyone else totally fed up with this "summer" weather?!

YORK: Treasurer's House

I ended up going for a wander right up the other end of the main touristy part of York on one of my lunchtime walks. I eyed up having a lazy sit in Dean's Park behind the Minster but it was a tad windy so I had to keep moving. On the way past i'd spied a notice on the wall by the garden entrance to the Treasurer's House claiming a wander into the garden was free. With a camera in my bag how was I going to turn that down?! 

While it was breezy outside, the sunken walled garden was a sun trap and gorgeous one at that. While it's not large - you could wander around it within five minutes, its worth a look around the edge of the lawn, one kept in by gorgeous English bedding flowers, statues, climbing roses and sweet little benches both wooden and stone. 

Until the late 1500's this medieval building was as the name suggests, home to the treasurers of York Minster although the current stonework is said to maintain little resemblance to the original building. One of the most infamous tales is regarding a occurrence from the cellars. Harry Martindale was undertaking maintenance work alone down in the basement in 1953 when he claims to have heard a horn sounding twice, ignoring this until a horse appeared through the wall of the cellar, to be followed by a marching band of Roman soldiers. Although cut off at the knees (apparently reflecting the level of earth in Roman times) they marched through the wall and into the cellar tired and dirty. It's a tale that is retold on countless ghost tours you can partake every evening around York and to some, this tale alone proves apparently to many the existence of ghosts because of the level of detail Martindale could describe regarding the clothing of the soldiers - only data proved years later with greater historical insight.

There's a few little gardens, parks and churches hidden away in York, hidden just an alley or a wall away from a street packed with tourists yet its amazing how many get walked past without anyone ever knowing. I think I want to be extra nosey and find them all!

Fish 'n' chips

One thing I'll miss about the UK will be being able to eat Fish n chips out of either their newspaper wrappings or the joyous polystyrene boxes on a chilly summers day at the seaside. I'll miss my fish and chip shops - chip butties use to be my treat at university on random Friday nights with a bottle of Irn Bru. Love has to be even given to the crazy wooden fork that never seems to pick any kind of food up. Sadly the typical blowy English summer weather came back while we went to Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast today - typical when its my day off the sun hides itself.

YORK: Cliffords Tower

I heard on the old local news how Clifford's Tower in York was the one local attraction that had increased it's visitor numbers in the past year. Figures showed that the tower was up 3 per cent in visitor footfall which is worth considering especially against the National Railway Museum a place me and Joe loved messing around playing like children at was down 16 per cent during the same period. So I thought was the perfect excuse to post some of the happy pictures from when me and Joe was there seeing I kind of gave up blogging around the same time.

Even at night the tower is worth a look especially when its all lit up like this.

The site upon which the now only the ruins of Clifford's Tower stands became the principle site for defending the city of York, especially against anti Norman attacks and later continued to play a crucial role in serving as the royal seat for governmental control during the medieval period. If you want to see York was a different view Clifford's Tower offers a totally different 360 degrees picture of the city and for £3.50 per person adult price it's more then worth a look-see. After a steep trawl up some stone steps you can climb up to the top of the tower and walk around three quarters of the top - from which you can see from brilliant view of the city from the Minster, to hills and Moors in the distance. On a sunny day the sights are glorious.

The only thing that is slightly lacking about the tower is there's nothing else much to really see - apart from the views and a couple of boards to read, that's all and a tiny shop so don't expect huge touristy things to see and do.

Hockney

Bigger Trees Near Warter - image taken from the York Art Gallery

David Hockney is considered as being one of Britain's most renowned of artists. Working since the 1950s, through pop art up to the present day his images and work have questioned, pushed; and challenged the boundaries of acceptable art alongside pop culture and more increasingly natural life. 

His (semi) recent work is a series of landscapes around East Yorkshire. It's a quiet little unknown spot in the world, rather forgotten behind its fellow Yorkshire siblings of north and south Yorkshire, but it holds a quiet beauty that's rarely known to the outside world. And now, thanks to Hockney it'll be known to a few more. Hockney himself has been quoted as stating East Yorkshire as having "the sorts of wide vistas you get all the time in the American west" and it's the first time this work has been shown outside of London.

Being a lass from East Yorkshire, and a country gal at that, I thought i'd pop along and have a little looksee while I was in York today shopping. 

Its not until your stood right before it that you see what the talk is all about. The piece measure 12 x 4.5 metres, this statistic doesn't give credit to how large it actually is until your stood before it, its so large the little daffodils on the floor of the piece seem pretty much size sized, and the huge trees tower over you. Comprising of fifty individual panels joined together it captures a countryside  hanging on the eve of spring between Malton and Diffield - if your an insider to East Yorkshire it was painted by the turn off for Millington (the village where I first lived) and Warter. Its the greens and the use of trees and how they tag along the side of the road with the farm yard buildings creeping in that make it very much East Yorkshire-like. It's very much my landscape that I get just out of town. Even the colours alone make it right. 

Landscapes began inspiring Hockney since the 1990s while living in California, but it is through his repeated visits back to his native Yorkshire and swapping the sunshine state for life in Bridlington, did Hockney began capturing a naturalistic version of the landscapes around him. Especially of trees - tree's Hockney considers to be much like people - always different.

It's a shame none of the other images of these collection of Hockney's East Yorkshire landscapes where showing alongside this one. It somewhat isolates it, hanging slightly out of context of its wider landscape. It would have been the perfectly opportunity to showcase Hockney's contemporary work to a new, younger audience alongside those who know his older pop works and introduce a modern take on landscapes and of East Yorkshire. Nevertheless Bigger Trees at Warter is large enough literally and figuratively to hang alone.

You can see Bigger Trees at Warter till June 2011 at York Art Gallery.

YORK: Heart of Yorkshire

Rumour has it, well the Pullman Bus Tours state that if lovers kiss under the "Heart of Yorkshire" officially known as the Great West Window they'll stay in love for the rest of their lives. Me and JJ were all up for trying that!

Its only when you play at being a tourist you realise how much the Minster dominates the city. But its expectantly pretty at night, all lit up. Was the perfect spot and sight on the slow wander home back from our floodlit boat trip. I went for a peek inside the Minster last week - I kind of wanted to get away from the world and be quiet for a bit. I might not be religious but you can't mistake the beauty inside such a place. 

Hope you all have fabulous weekend, i'm back to sorting and mending the crocheted blanket while fixing up me and Joe a scrapbook of our holidays and messing with that wedding wrap I blogged about ageeees ago.

Nomnomnom at Betty's chocolate

I know, Valentines Day is just over so the shops start to plant the ideas of Easter and chocolate into our heads again. But my my, I stumbled upon these in the Betty's [York shop] shop window and how utterly gorgeous and yummy do they look?!?!

A rumble in a flea market

So yesterday me and the parents went for a look see around Pickering [North Yorks]. Its a cute little market town with lots of wonderful [although some rather expensive] antique shops and a flea market - which is always great for those of us who are thrifty/vintage at heart.

Anyway, this weeks treats ended up being;

Finds from left to right - vintage cut glass with tin lid trinket box [£6], Mary Ann and The Scapegoat both republished by Penguin Classics in 1962 [£1 each], unstamped 1950s red and gold powder compact [£8].

I could have brought oh so very much more!!

Sat in a cabinet stuffed with random finds, this glass cut trinket box was labelled "very old trinket box". With that subjective kinda label its hard to date it really, apparently there is the thought that the sharper the glass, the older it is. Well this glass is sharp so it matches somewhat. Whether this assumption is true or not i'm not sure?

The top is rather dinted, yet rather then seeing it as a distraction I tend to see it as something that adds charcter to it, as some part of its hsitory. You can't always expect old things to perfect.

Of course being a magpie to compacts how was I not going to treat myself to another. It was rather weird actually seeing loads of them in one place, and being able to see them before it was purchased seeing I'm so use to buying them blind on ebay. In a way having the background and the knowledge from Ebay it helped a lot in knowing what to look for and the prices.

Compacts aren't that rare, some names are, some shapes are [ie Stratnoid, Bakelite, half moon] and in the wider scheme of things the market is full, full, full of Straton compacts. At least 70% of the compacts at the flea market were Stratton's - they are great if your just collecting them for the fun of it, not so great if they want to charge you £9 or more for one. - its often questionable if they are worth it when you see how cheap they can go on Ebay. You just have to careful of what your buying and to a point I stay away from them.

Saying that I often get attracted to some of the lesser none or even nameless compacts that I find, ones that although might not be branded offer something eye catching. Red itself is a colour rarely found in compact design and I was even more so attracted to this compact because of its size - one typically smaller then the norm, its amazingly good clasp and its "tap flap" influenced stiffer.

It's got an amazing gorgeous shape to its mirror it has a design that I can't even try and explain. The stiffer itself is edged in the metal of the compact, which makes me come to think its influenced by the 1930s design of tapping the stiffer to get a fresh and light dusting of the powder to then be used upon the face using your puff. I may be wrong. Either way its a refreshing and different inside to a compact.

The two Daphne du Maurier books were from the little Pickering bookshop just opposite the North Yorkshire Moors Railway [which if you ever get the chance is a must to go on-board a working stream train!]. du Maurier is one of my all time favourite authors and i'm working on collecting them all if I can in the older either Penguin or Pan editions.

Do you have any vintage finds you recently stumbled across? Any bargains to speak of?

My day off in the snow ...

I guess I slightly went back to being a little kid today on my day off. Luckily in a way it was my day off, with the state of the weather today I fear I may have been slightly stuck getting to, and from work. Word is that it is only going to get worse, yet again!

It's been snowing pretty much on and off for the past three weeks. Most of it went over Christmas only to return in vengeance this week as you probably noted with my blog the other day.

So after a wander to the shops, I had a bit of a play in the snow. I wanted to make a snowman [or in this politically correct era, snowwomen] but with only one pair of gloves I had a fear of making them soaking wet and being glove less for days!

Just what a girl needs to keep warm - thick big biker boots, skinny jeans, a huge warm coat and plenty of snow kick around and mess with!

If you forget just how slippery the roads are and how darn cold it was it makes a very pretty picture!

The snow on what was a week ago our Christmas tree. Yeah i'm a sucker for love and romance ... but just a little message to my guy.

Then you look out the window at going on 4pm and it's started to snow rather heavily again. The roads are back to a state of "treacherous" and buses being super duper held up. I have no idea if i'll be making it to work tomorrow. I'm wondering if its even worth the "risk" even trying. But sometimes I fear they don't believe how bad it can get weather and road wise out in the countryside especially since the government and councils are decreasing by 25% the amount of grit/salt they are using on all roads. So unless your living next to a motorway I think your pretty much screwed!

Gah, stupid snow! Hope it doesn't stop or hazard your weekends too much folks!

All pictures my own

"Do you remember the winter of 2010?!"

I get a job, ok I have to turn into a manic commuter everyday and live on the buses for an hour in the morning at 8am and back at 6 in the evening. All goes well, till the weather takes a turn.

With wintry cold easterly winds from Scandinavia blowing over the normally icy cold north sea today was a day when the "big chill" or "big freeze" as the BBC is terming it, hit the UK for the "last two decades" Lately its been -8 or perhaps somewhere closer to 0 degrees when I've been leaving for work. Today it was a warm -0.5 degrees - the day started well, it wasn't too slippery on the footpaths to the bus stop. The bus, for once was even on time - the day was getting even better.

Then you hit the main road, a road which can be treacherous at the best of times especially during the onslaught of rush hour, add in slushy conditions and never ending flakes from the greyest of Yorkshire skies and its never going to be a good sign. After taking 50 minutes to do a part of a journey which "normally" would take around 15-20, I wasn't even half way to work.

Doing the rough maths I probably wouldn't have reached work at that rate for another two hours. But at which point do you turn back? Do you risk carrying on when the road ahead was at a total stand still? With cars turning around in the middle of the road, the dual carriageway down to one lane, and a trail of slush on every inch of the road it wasn't looking good. While the bus follows the main road, this is one still in the middle of what became a bleak and cold countryside vista. A lovely picture it probably would have made on the front of a Christmas card, but not when your trying to get somewhere.

So I get off the bus after consulting a) the bus timetable for a bus back home and b) asking the mothers advice on "what do I do?". I wasn't really concerned about getting to work, I knew pretty well the bus would have got to work in the end just maybe one, verging on two hours late. It was the "what the hell do I do if the buses stop because the weather has got worse and i'm stuck in York with nowhere to go and noway of getting home?" I decide to turn around and leg it home.

I get off the bus in the vain hope of catching the next one home. An hour later after its timetabled time, the bus hadn't arrived. I felt like a total idiot standing by the side of the road by the bus stop sign, watching lorries slip and slide, endless police cars going pass with their sirens on with people looking at me as if I was some crazy person. To be honest - I probably was.

The end of the story is me having to be picked up by my dad after being pretty much stranded. I know its good to have a day off work and that snow can look pretty, but sometimes its just the most annoying thing!

So much for global "warming"!

Least this postman isn't wearing shorts like the one I saw yesterday braving the chilly winds. Hopefully your either set for the "big freeze" or free of the white stuff! [Images taken from The Guardian and the BBC]