It may be the 21st century, but York is still very much a city of the past, from the great stone gates, decorated with arrow holes and golden coats of arms, to the medieval churches which lie comfortably on nearly every other street corner. Even odder than these sights in themselves is how easily they fit in with their modern surroundings - cars pass underneath the gates as easily as if they were on a highway, and the churches share block space with electronics stores and pizza restaurants. The old and the new rest in incredible juxtaposition to each other.
This was the world that we walked through on our way to find the parade - up, onto the city walls, then to the bridge across the river Ouse (pronounced, rather unfortunately, as 'ooze'), and into the heart of the old city - the Minster's enormous towers looming out of the clouds ahead, its spires dwarfing even those of Big Ben and Parliament; uneven brick roads underfoot; increasingly narrow paths and streets as the buildings pushed in, leaning closer to each other like a society of gossips all sharing some great secret. Over the passing clamor of traffic - both street and pedestrian - triumphant fanfares of brass, the confident rattle of snare drums. We moved deeper into the city and found the band, dressed in long, black coats and golden helmets - topped with magnificent red plumes - that looked distinctly Roman-inspired. They stood in the square for a few moments, playing a brief concert of rousing military and folk tunes while spectators milled in a giant circle around them, before setting off in step down the street towards the park, the crowd in tow behind them like the Pied Piper's rats. They marched into a roped-off area of the park, where they stood for another ten or so minutes, playing - how their hands were not freezing, even in gloves, is beyond me: their resilience was astounding - before the 101st regiment - British, of course - marched stiffly onto the field, in front of three enormous cannons which looked more like anti-aircraft guns than anything designed to fire a cannonball. After a speaker gave a short speech announcing that it was the 58th anniversary of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's ascension to the throne, the general roared out orders and the soldiers scurried around to the guns, loading them with blanks before firing off a 21-gun salute. Even with blanks, the sound emitted from these things was incredible: the general would yell, "Gun one: fire!," there would be a second of silence, silence like a vortex, like a void, when one would almost lean in with anticipation, and then, all of the silence would be sucked in with a hiss, and then, then the explosion, a thundering, resonant sound deeper and louder than any gunshot, filling the entire world for a brief second with its violent announcement, and then echoing off across the river like a skipped stone. And then: "Gun two: fire!" And: "Gun three: fire!" And so on, for seven rounds, while the crowd and the band and the local government looked on.
After lunch at Pizza Express - which was kindly covered by Dave, by which I mean kindly covered by Lewis & Clark College - we huddled together in a group out on the freezing street until our tour guide arrived and attempted to give us a tour through the streets of York. I say "attempted" because though she did a rather excellent job of leading us around - first back into the park, to the skeletal remains of an abbey; then down to the City Art Gallery; up to the city walls, which led us around the perimeter and deposited us near the Shambles, the oldest, arguably narrowest street in York, filled to the point of overflowing with shops and bustling people; and then, finally, into the towering Minster, impossible to overlook and impossible to ignore, but more on that later - no, she did an excellent job of leading, but, for being a professional tour guide, she needed to attend a few classes of Projecting 101, as unless you were standing directly in front of her and reading her lips, it was impossible to hear - let alone understand - a single word leaving her mouth. Near the abbey in the park, there was some building used by the University, about which I caught something involving some tiny window, but she either wasn't allowed to tell us what it was or didn't know; she also related a lengthy tale in the Shambles about Margaret Clitherow, a Roman Catholic who was caught hiding priests in her house and was pressed to death - which is basically what it sounds like: they took her to one of the bridges, laid her down, and placed increasingly heavy stones on her until she was crushed to death - becoming the first female Catholic martyr of that period. The rest of what our guide said was all lost to the gale of sound of passerby and traffic. But she led us, eventually, to the great Minster, which is where I shall continue tomorrow.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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