york, cow dung, and pork fat

we spent yesterday in York, walking on Viking, then Roman, and currently English ground. (who will it belong to next?) The vikings called it Jorvik.

the town was flooded, at least the parts closest to the river. the rest was just drenched, as were we. we drank hot chocolate next to a castle, beside an ice skating rink. we still got the laughs, minus the sore bums (why do the dads always take the hardest falls?). i had my first pasty: it was steak and stilton and damn good. it warmed me and filled me for several hours. i'm a fan. it's tied for "favorite english food" with the steak and ale pie i had the other day at a little pub among the cow pastures. the taste is still in my mouth (and the cow shit still stuck on my shoes).

we went to a folk session tonight. heard some amazing ballads, one guy sang about an old gypsy woman who was white as the bone and fiddled to turn day into night. couldn't remember the chords and words to anything but our ol' standby, so we sang some You Ain't Goin' Nowhere for the Yorkies. had some pork scratchers, didn't know they were pork rinds.

i finished the 2004 bob dylan book today. i guess it's called chronicles: volume one. it has 14 pages of "praise for chronicles: volume one" at the front, then 114 pages of namedropping, but once you get past that it's a worthwhile read. some of his sentences remind me of his songs. imaginative man.