My recent trip to York was marked by two images - or scenes, if you will - that I can not forget.
The fist I saw at night looking through a large bay window. I had just arrived on a cross-country train. I was walking around with my bags and my books and nowhere to stay, looking for a place. The street was deserted and the only light I could see was spilling from that one window. Inside, an elderly man with long, white hair, thin as cobwebs, sat with his back being waited on by a not-so-elderly woman. The walls were incredibly, impossibly, tall and they had been completely covered in a crazy jigsaw puzzle of paintings and old photographs, with elaborate, gilded frames.
The second I saw walking to the library from the inn where I'd spent the night. The sun was only starting to rise, everything had that fresh, bright light of Winter mornings and there was a long lawn by the roadside. The dew on the grass had frozen overnight. It looked almost blue: much bluer in fact, than the sky, which was still a sort of pastel tangerine. At the far, far end of these gardens was a large brick building. Very English. Very old.
A parking sign near me indicated it was a hospital. I almost couldn't believe it. I can't quite remember what I said to myself.
"If I ever get really sick, I hope they send me just there," I think was it. Or maybe it was "I have to convince someone to put me in there for a while." Something along those lines.
I described the place to James later; a friend, York local and our guide to the city's churches and high-street shops.
"Bootham hospital? It's a mental institution," he said. "An old asylum."
I really ought to have seen that one coming, I suppose.
(-One flew East, one flew West, one flew over the Cuckoo's nest...)
