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 the Walls After many weeks and a few unexpected complications, my Lovely Wife has joined me in Strensall for good. In anticipation of her arrival, I have been studiously avoiding doing things that we would want to do together. For instance, I've been in York since September and have not yet set foot in the Minster. Now, however, the Lovely Wife is here and so we cry havoc and let slip the dogs of sightseeing! I had decided even before she arrived that the first thing I thought we should do together was the walk the walls. York has the longest medieval town walls in England (says the tourist site) with a wall-walk length of 3.4 km. I say 'wall walk' distance, since there are chunks of the walk which cover spots where the wall used to be and where now there are things like roads. So the walk is 3.4k, the walls themselves are a bit less than that - or so I read the various bits of guide-bookery. They are still quite impressive and make for a pleasant few hours walking. Friday looked the day with the best weather, so we caught the bus into town to begin our inspection of the walls. We started at the Bootham Bar, about which I have written previously in passing. We proceeded clockwise along the walls, stopping about halfway for a pint. We skipped the Richard III museum at Monk Bar, since we think we'll do that when guests are in town over the summer. Likewise, we didn't stop into the castle or Clifford's Tower using the same logic. It's hard to explain quite what is so charming about walking the medieval walls. The views are spectacular, to be sure; you get to look into the back yards of the Dean of the Minster and of some of the other large and expansive estates tucked just inside the walls, as well as into the yards of many more modest houses clustered just outside. There's more to it than that, though. It really is a walk through history; you step along thousand year old walls, past a thousand year old church, and find yourself facing a thousand day old shopping mall. You look out across what used to be the King's Pool, a moat-cum-fishpond that William the Conqueror created by damming the Foss, and see cars streaming into the Morrison's parking lot. You can pop into the Black Swan, a pub where some of the new bits are 16th and 17th century, which is now conveniently near the Bishopthorpe Road Car Park. If you try, you can get that sense of timeslip. Face one way, and imagine what it was like living in a medieval city; face the other and find yourself wishing they could widen the highways and add a bit more parking. Well, we didn't find ourselves doing that second thing very much, to be honest. But as for the first ... as we were finishing up, I leaned against the battlement and looked out over the railway station, and drifted back. It's a relatively high point on the wall, so this was where I would have stood to watch the traffic coming in through the gates, bringing goods or raw materials. This was where I would have stood watching for attacking Englishmen, perhaps Parliamentarians - the Scots would come from the other direction. On the wall, in the chilly wind, it didn't seem so long ago. The last bit of the walk is not along walls, but goes across Lendal Bridge, a relatively new bridge across the Ouse, built in the 1860s. The Ouse was running high, the water was just a few inches below the promenade, the 'Dame Judi Dench Walk'. While we are not getting the kind of hammering that the south and southwest are getting, it's still pretty wet up here. When I went back across the bridge on Monday, the water had risen another couple of feet. It's a little hard to see in the picture, but those rectangular white things at water level are the backs of the benches ... Hopefully we'll dry out before the guests start arriving for the Summer. Luddite'sLog, 12 February 2014 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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