I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Walking Tour of York Sixth Stop, Stonegate As explained here, as part of my teaching last year, I gave my students a walking tour of York. This is the sixth stop on the tour. Here in York, streets are gates, gates are bars, and bars are pubs. That is to say that Stonegate is a street, Bootham Bar is gate into the city, and the Black Swan pub is what might be called a bar in the US. This usage of gate comes to English by way of the Old Norse gata, and York is full of gates. Stonegate runs more or less along the line of the old Roman Via Praetoria, and the remnants of the old road are still there, albeit a couple of meters down below one's feet as one walks along the road. When Eboracum was a Roman settlement, one end of the road ended at the Principia, the headquarters, which is now the Minster quarter, while the other end was at the Porta Praetoria, now somewhere near St Helen's Square. In later years it served as the home to printers and booksellers - at the top of the street is a small statue of Minerva resting on a pile of books, and near the snickleway that leads to Barley Hall there is a model of a devil to mark a printer, apprentices to which trade were known as devils. If you look closely at the picture, you can see a banner spanning the street some distance down it, and you might be able to read the words "Ye Old Starre Inn." This pub has almost no street frontage at all, being reached by a passage between and through two other establishments - a snecket, in fact. It was the location where the York Society of Magicians met in the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Luddite'sLog, 1 February 2016 © 2016 Jeff Berry

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