Robin Seaton
The first few weeks of any new year are apparently a time for doing things that will prolong the first flush of youth; joining the gym, giving up drinking and other such stupid pursuits. I’ve even engaged in some of these desultory activities myself in my younger days. However, in the first weeks of 2008 I seem to have been coming into contact with the elderly with more than usual frequency.
The first of these was my octogenarian next-door neighbour, a woman with possibly the most Yorkshire name in the world (I paraphrase somewhat to protect the good lady’s privacy): Edna Thrucklewaite. She may as well wear nothing but flat caps and dine on nothing but Yorkshire puddings and coal. She also happens to be the only woman in quite some time to give me her phone number.
The other day some friends and I went for a walk across Millennium Bridge, to Bishopthorpe and beyond. Aside from the usual youth social interaction with the youth; (”Got any fags mate?” “I don’t smoke.” “Bet they ‘ave, let’s mug ‘em to check”) we encountered an annoyingly cheerful old man who demanded to be referred to by the fairly inaccurate moniker of ‘Grumpy Gramps’, despite having a perfectly serviceable given name of his own – Joe, or something. A man with an impressive knowledge of Anglo-Russian relations in the nineteenth century, and their relation to Fulford street names, he claimed that, despite having spent thirty-eight and a half years going round the world with the army, he still knew twenty ways to get from York to Hull with a caravan. Twenty. Why, I wondered, why on earth would a man who knew nineteen ways from York to Hull (with a caravan) attempt to find a twentieth? After all, the two cities aren’t so very far apart; surely one or two of routes one through nineteen must have distinct advantages over the others – pubs with comfy seats, for example; cafes selling scones perhaps, or an absence of low bridges.
But this man’s insatiable thirst for knowledge had led him to search out new and innovative means of getting from York to Hull with the impediment of a caravan. Arguably, the most curious aspect of this already curious tale is the complete absence of a caravan from this man’s garden and driveway, suggesting that these days his knowledge sadly resides solely in the realm of unrealised potential. It seems that this man’s caravan had been disposed of in his absence, never to return. Alas, his twenty routes are destined to remain forever Platonic, ideal, never to be realised in our all-too frail and mutable reality, victim of a callous God ignorant of the joys of caravan ownership.
Still, as an example of practically applicable information, his search for new caravan-friendly routes between the Humber and the Ouse certainly knocks my most useful achievement of 2007; an essay I wrote last term on pictures of witches in Elizabethan England, into a bloody cocked hat. Which just goes to show that even if we’ve completed our annual visit to the gym, or drunk one pint fewer this week than last, all our achievements are as nothing next to the elderly and their compendious and arcane knowledge of the local highways and byways.
