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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Urban Horses I live north of York proper, and while the King's Manor where I do most of my work is in the middle of the city, the regular campus is way over on the other side of town, two busses and an hour away - at least until I get a bicycle sorted out. The upside of that is that I do get to spend a little time getting familiar with the general layout of the city. I mean, the NYC subways are great, but they're almost like magic portals; you walk in here, you are in a dark, noisy place for a while, and then you walk out there with no real sense of distance travelled. On a bus, you get to see where you're going. Sometimes that's not a huge benefit, but other times it can be pleasant enough. One of things riding a bus in York does is give you a feel for just how much green space there is in the city. Once you get outside of the old medieval walls, there are parks and even fields aplenty. And livestock, of course, livestock in a proximity and in a matter-of-fact way that I haven't seen since elementary school. Allow me to explain. Growing up, my brother and I were fortunate enough to go to an elementary school that was experimenting with some, at the time, rather eccentric ideas in education. We were on a year-round schedule, for example, with nine weeks on and three weeks off, four times each year. The class-rooms were open-plan. And, of course, we had a farm. It wasn't planted with fields, but we had pigs, and donkeys, and a horse, I believe, and chickens, and probably other stuff that I can't remember. There were rabbits, but I think they were wild rather than part of the farm. All this in suburban Denver. All this gone now, sadly. Since that time, when walking past a horse on the way to school, in the middle of urban (or suburban) sprawl was an almost daily occurrence, I have never seen the same sort of casual acceptance of urban livestock until I moved here. Sure there are dogs and cats aplenty in NYC, but only rarely do you see horses, and when you do they are either attached to carriages in Central Park or underneath policemen. On the other hand, there was a woman riding a horse down my street as I was coming home Friday. Then there are the horses in the picture. There they are, in a field, next to the road, a couple of hundred yards away from the campus (off to the right), and much closer than that to the houses behind them. They're each tied to a stake but otherwise they're just sort of ... there. Across the street from a block of flats. Well within the ring-road. (By the way, that thing in the back right is a water tower, I believe.) All this provides, for me at least, a significantly greater sense of connection to the land than I've had in a long time. It's a reminder that there is a county outside the city walls, outside the bubble of the city. Living in NYC, or Denver, or even Boulder, it's all too easy to become insulated, to forget that the town or city, any town or city, is situated within a landscape, and not far away (for some value of 'far'), that landscape reasserts itself, whether it's the apple trees of the Hudson valley, the fields of the Colorado plains, or the foothills of the Rockies. Or, of course, the meadows and pastures of North Yorkshire. Cities depend on the country, the 'agricultural hinterland,' but the line between town and country seems to be less clear in the UK, at least to my US-bred eyes. And that's a good thing. After all, I like horses. Luddite'sLog, 20 October 2013 © 2013 Jeff Berry

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