Pontificating

St Stephen's Church in Aldwark

Yorkshire is England's Texas. Now I would like to share a joke I once heard. A Texan meets a Yorkshireman in a pub one day. The Texan boasts, "Texas is so big it takes two days to travel across our state by train!" The Yorkshireman pauses before replying, "Aye. We've got slow trains in Yorkshire too!"

Yorkshire contains a variety of areas, different people with different accents. There is no  single Yorkshire way of speaking - but many.

Some southerners think of Yorkshire as a place of industry and hardship where old men in flat caps lead whippets to old slag heaps and women in curlers hang washing on rope lines between grim terraced houses.

But the Yorkshire we were in from Sunday morning to Wednesday was very different from that. Take the village of Alne for example. So many big and characterful houses with gravel driveways, neatly trimmed hedgerows and roses climbing round doorways. Girls in hard hats riding horses. Range Rovers splashing through puddles. There in the middle of The Vale of York where the soil is deep and rich and you wake to mellifluous birdsong.

St Mary's Church in Alne

Life is comfortable there. In Easingwold - which is really a small self-sufficient town thirteen miles north of York, I counted five thriving pubs adjacent to the wide Georgian central area. Once this comfortable settlement was the first stopping places for horse drawn coaches heading north from York. "Easingwold" seemed like a very appropriate name - for life appeared easy there just west of  the Yorkshire Wolds that rise and fall on their way to Flamborough Head.

I went on two long walks with Tony and Shirley joined us on our second route. Because Pauline has had two hip replacements and a knee replacement in the last eighteen months, she ducked out - quite understandably. On Tuesday afternoon we joined her at the immaculate Aldwark Manor Hotel - for hot drinks and bowls of triple-fried chips with hummus and tomato ketchup.

Straight Lane near Aldwark

For me, one of the true joys of life is to walk in previously unknown countryside. I call it "virgin territory". Though the weather forecast was discouraging, we managed both walks in good weather, plodding along in the early summer on quiet lanes and paths that were for the most part little trodden.

The old market hall in Easingwold

You don't know how long the times ahead will be but there in the Alne area, putting one foot in front of the other and breathing in early summer air in the middle of Yorkshire, it felt simply good to be alive. And it's surely good that I recognise the preciousness of that feeling.

View from stately Beningbrough Hall