I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
I wish that man would go away.
Hugh Means
On the weekend just gone, we caught the train up to York and explored it for a couple of days. It’s part of our small program to Take Advantage Of A Situation We Never Imagined We’d Ever Have, (finding ourselves in Europe, or indeed, outside Australia at all). A program that will take on a new level of logistical sophistication, we suspect, once the Baddelim clan increases by 50% - hence a certain keenness to try and get one or two trips in between now and D Day.
York was amazing, as some later entries will try and impress upon you.
However.
Our arrival proved to be the equivalent of an extended hands-on tutorial concerning the English approach to street signs.
We arrived around 5:30pm. We had the address, located in Bootham Crescent. Remember that. It is going to be important.
We had a map, and had located Bootham on it - a nice large street not far from the city centre. It was about a thirty minute walk there, so we skipped the cab and went for the exercise option.
That was possibly a mistake.
We proceeded to walk through York and try and find the street. That took some time, because as Watching the English had warned us, street signs aren’t always clearly marked out in England. Having found the road we thought we needed, we looked for the number of our street. It wasn’t there. The numbers went up close to it, jumped passed it, and then reset back to one again.
That didn’t phase us. Watching the English had a whole section of the book just dedicated to the English approach to street signs, numbering systems on streets and the fact that English people generally don’t like having their number being all that visible (if present at all). It also didn’t phase us when Bootham became a different street. Watching the English had prepared us for that too. Apparently it’s quite the done thing in England to change the name of a street constantly. We just looked around and cast our net in wider and wider circles.
We were phased, however, when, in our attempts to find the elusive street number in Bootham, we discovered two more streets each called Bootham. One was Bootham Lane and the other was Bootham Terrace. That was when we realised that we were on Bootham Street. Our street, as I’m sure you will remember, was Bootham Crescent. No relation to Bootham Street at all, really.
Watching the English hadn’t warned us about this. I suppose it wasn’t really trying to give an exhaustive guide to English street naming protocols, so we can’t blame it. I do feel that someone should have warned us that the English will merrily have multiple streets all with the same name. Perhaps it’s just the social welfare mentality in me.
We discovered no less than six Bootham Pick-The-Synonym-For-Street/s either by stumbling over them or (in increasing desperation) finding them on our map. But no Bootham Crescent.
In the end I followed the clues from our trusty (albeit now demonstrably non-exhaustive) guide to surviving here and went to the one place where I was sure the rules on social interaction would permit me to ask where Bootham Crescent was. The local pub.
It turned out that we had (of course) passed Bootham Crescent early on in our journey, only ten minutes after we had discovered the existence of a plethora of Boothams. It had been the only street that we weren’t able to find a street sign for, and so passed on by.
At seven pm, one and half hours after arriving in York, we finally stumbled (quite literally) into our B & B in Bootham Crescent.
The next morning we discovered that there was a street sign indicating that this was Bootham Crescent.
It was attached to the side of the corner store. It faced Bootham Crescent (and so faced away from us as we walked towards it). It was six meters off the ground. (You may need to click on the image for an enlarged version).
The only way we could have seen this sign is if we had developed a sudden urge to crane our necks behind us and above us simultaneously as we passed the street. For anything like the purpose of a sign I would take for granted—like informing someone what the street was in time for them to take action—it was completely useless.
The other day, upon the corner store
We met the sign that wasn’t there.
It was there every day we were in York.
I wish it would go away.
And if it hadn’t been six meters off the ground, I probably would have burned it. MDB
1 comment:
The street that didn't want to be found: sounds like there's a story in that!
Your posts sheds a whole new light on Diagon Alley.
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