If you had a free round-trip ticket to anywhere, where would you go?
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For the best value, I’d go somewhere really far away – maybe somewhere near New Zealand. But I like to be near home. I’d like anywhere in the UK, but today I just thought of York. When I went to see Gremlins in a cinema in Cork City in December 1984, there was a little short film about York. So, on my visit to London in the summer of 1985, I decided to take an overnight coach to Cork. It was due to arrive around 6 AM, but it actually arrived at 4 AM. I didn’t know what to do at that time, so I thought my best bet would be to make for the railway station. I remember smelling chocolate from the Rountree factory on my walk – maybe I got a bit lost. Anyway, I did a walking tour and a coach tour around the North York Moors. I remember passing the location where much of Brideshead Revisited was filmed – Castle Howard.
Next time I visited was on my honeymoon in 1988. I remember taking a ghost walk then. And I always love visiting the Railway museum. We went back in 1990 and 1991. I visited on my own in 1995 and then we brought the kids in 2003 and 2005. Next time we went was 2016. So anyway, I’d like to visit again sometime. I like many of the towns near York too. I remember visiting Scarborough, Hebden Bridge, Haworth, Bradford, Halifax, Harrogate, Holmforth, the Yorkshire Dales and so on. And there’s much that I have yet to see.
There’s so much that I love about Yorkshire – and the accent – though people often laugh at my Cork accent too 😀.
On my 1985 trip, I remember hearing that York Minster had been struck by lightning the year before. It hit the roof of the cathedral’s South Transept around 2:30 AM, triggering a massive fire that became one of the worst cathedral blazes in modern times. Some believed that it was God’s response to the Archbishop of Durham, who questioned whether Jesus rose physically. But a later Archbishop of Durham, NT Wright, a New Testament scholar, vigourosly defended the physical resurrection and became renowned for doing so. He’s writtens several books on the resurrection, some popular and some scholarly – tough reading, but it’s nice to see an academic defending the physical resurrection of Jesus. Over the last few hundred years, so many scholars have tried to reinvent Christianity to make it more “credible” to the modern mind.
Here’s a video claiming that God stuck York Minster. I was expecting it to be someone at the fundamentalist end of the evangelical world, but the guy seems to be a Roman Catholic. And the second video features NT Wright. And YouTube is full of defenses and debates about the resurrection.
And you have plenty of songs about the resurrection too – here are four:
