A Winter Meander

In all the Port­land Street Ped­es­tri­ans merry wan­der­ings, I doubt there is one which has ever covered so little ground as this — all within the mil­it­ary HQ of the Roman Army of the North — about as far as the aver­age legion­ary had to walk from his bar­racks to the latrines.

Start­ing at the would-be-ancient but actu­ally rather new Lamb and the Lion, in the shadow of Bootham Bar. One of those hard wood pubs, and kept rather dim, but with sev­eral sep­ar­ate rooms, some quite snug. On a few mod­est yards, to the Hole in the Wall, where there was a nice pint of Jen­nings. The food menu looked good too but there’s some­thing unhomely about it. We escaped before the quiz and headed for the Guy Fawkes, omit­ting the Three Legged Mare and the York Arms on the way — noth­ing wrong with them except being well-known already. The Guy Fawkes, long estab­lished as Young’s Hotel, had found a new pop­ular­ity, aided no doubt by late-night Christ­mas shop­ping, so we headed past the Min­ster and the upside down column from the old HQ to the Cross Keys.

There’s a school of pub­lic house man­age­ment that believes that the bright­est pos­sible light­ing is an encour­age­ment to dis­cern­ing topers. This school also finds the hand-pump a bit of an intru­sion, pre­fer­ring shiny pipe­work and illu­min­ated let­ter­ing rear­ing up over the bar. At the Cross Keys both these mis­con­cep­tions were in evid­ence, though the one draught beer on offer, Santa’s Tipple, was accept­able enough, with just a hint of what may have been reindeer droppings.

We were on safer ground at the Golden Slip­per, which was keep­ing its Deuchars bit­ter excep­tion­ally well. We might well have settled down for another were it not for the juke box, which had some regret­tably loud offer­ings, so, hav­ing sent a scout ahead to see what room there was at the Royal Oak, we ended up in the back bar by the fire, very cosy and with the light­ing level just right for the first time all even­ing. A nice glass of Jen­nings Cum­ber­land Ale fin­ished off the even­ing most acceptably.

One import­ant dis­cov­ery of the even­ing was that the ori­gin­ator of the ponzi fraud was our very own George Hud­son, the Rail­way King, back in the 19^th cen­tury. So Mr Madoff has York to thank for his (until recent) success !