If you like historical landmarks, beautiful scenery and the great outdoors it’s hard to beat the windswept and variable vastness of today’s post. Having set feet in every English county (and significant swathes of Wales and Scotland) I can safely say the gargantuan Yorkshire massive is one of my very favourite areas of Britain.
Indeed, it’s a four country quadrumvirate so huge that just one of its quarts, uppermost but under-populated North Yorkshire, is still bigger than next largest county, Lincolnshire. Or Thatcherland to some.
Historically, the white rose region was even bigger with the grand old Kingdom of York stretching from coast to coast — in other words, from Bridlington to Blackpool — before Lancashire and Cumbria were even thought of.
How could this beautiful bucolic area not be a fave? From sandy beaches to rolling hills, it has scenic views everywhere you turn. Plus, in very simplistic terms the three most significant Davids in my life all had deep connections to Yorkshire.
1- My father’s mother grew up in Hull, as did Mick Ronson.
2- Ronno’s old chum Bowie said his father hailed from Doncaster, or Tadcaster. Or maybe both.
3- My longest relationship was with another D from the Leeds/Bradford conurbation, and I enjoyed him taking me round to scenic little pockets of the North, South, East and West, particularly Whitby, Skipton, Saltaire, and of course, the Dales and the Moors.
Though I have a love-hate relationship with Britain generally, I loved how Yorkshire is such a proud land with a strong identity steeped in rich history, including a cornucopia of castles, archaeological finds and quaint villages that are stubbornly fixed firmly in the past.
On a personal pilgrimage, we discovered the original villages whose names were stolen by London sorts to create three of the capital’s areas where I spent most of my time as an adult living in the UK, namely Clapham, Kilburn and Richmond.
One time we wandered up and down the narrow, cobbled streets of Whitby, with its the dramatic abbey ruins and Whitby’s windswept headland and paid pilgrimage to Bram Stroker and his haunts: the harbour town providing him with atmospheric locations for a Gothic novel and a name for a vampire — Dracula.
Crossing a bridge in the town late one night a large girl wound down the window of a car and asked me if I wanted a blowjob. Had I not been with the boyf I probably would have had accepted, just for the sheer brazen novelty of it.
Oh, the things we do for penis.
In the rather more sedate blue rinse haven of Harrogate we hissed at an embarrassingly self-conscious shifty looking fella who walked past us at Betty’s Tea Rooms. With good reason — it turned out to be the coughing major, Charles Ingram, who coughed his way out of a fortune on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Response? “He isn’t!”
We managed to squeeze in a few telly turns too, including the grand splendour of Castle Howard as seen in Brideshead Revisited, the original Woolpack from Emmerdale and the sheep colony of Goathland, made famous by Harry Potter and Heartbeat. Hi Mum and Dad! (cough).
Years later, in a rare visit back to Blighty in the summer of ’17, I even found myself on a job — playing Freddie Flintoff’s groomsman in a TV show called Love, Lies and Records, filmed, bizarrely across the road from D3’s old home at Kirkstall Abbey. This was obviously when he still looked like Freddie the bowler boy, who walked with a slight limp even before that horrific car accident.
“Do you work out in Australia?”, Fred asked me. I struggled to keep a straight face at the alpha maleness of his smalltalk, but he actually very good company and filled his sharply cut tailcoat. And the trousers. Ahem.
Aye, they’ve got in all oop in Yorkshire. Just don’t call it God’s own county. That wouldn’t be cricket.
Steve Pafford
