dorks in york

Gary Oldman in Krapp’s Last Tape was fine, not amazing. We wondered if he is too used to the screen instead of creating a stage presence. When he came on, he dramatically blew dust off a notebook and I kept thinking of the person having to replace the fake dust every night. Still, it is always a meaningful play if you tend to rumination, regret. I am turning 39 at the end of the year, the age of Krapp on the tape he listens to. We learned from the usher that there was a banana count backstage and Gary Oldman was on his 43rd banana. I liked the wispy way he said ‘spool’. I am looking forward to the Samuel West version which he is slowly recording the tapes for, to be performed when he is older in 2036. I still bought a Gary Oldman Krapp’s Last Tape tee shirt, maybe I will impress someone while out running in it.

With two friends, I stayed in an old house in York with lots of books on organ tuning, and metaphysical poetry. It was tempting to spend the whole time in the house reading while munching on the the big bags of dutch liquorice I got from one of York’s many sweetie shops. We went to York Minster, where a heavy metal band was setting up for a concert(we tried to get tickets but it was sold out!) had scones and English breakfasts and walked the city walls. My worst habit is laughing uncontrollably in bad commercial art galleries. We went into one with ‘celebrity art’ (who knew Billy Connolly was a Jeff Koons style sculptor) to escape a busker singing Snow White songs and I rudely giggled and we were passive aggressively accosted by the owner. I need to not go in them, and I need to be polite, but one could argue my laughing is just a visceral reaction to the worst excesses of bloated capitalism and the art world.

It is much easier to get away with doing so in vast antique shops however, so I had a good laugh at this which cost more than some roman coins and Ancient Greek cloak buckles for sale.

In Betty’s teashop there was a group of influencers with a table covered in various ice cream sundaes. They were debating and practicing the best way to spoon the desserts for the camera as the ice creams melted. I ate a fat rascal. I bought a remainder book on ancient Alexandria from a bookshop, a cathedral church magnet and one of my friends bought a quilted, floral vest. We walked the York city walls which is quite a glorious thing to do. For one supper, I had a savoury chestnut pie with chips in a very old pub, and some Old Peculier which was much stronger than I thought.

Besides Krapp’s Last Tape, the other main part of our visit was the Railway Museum. You cannot go into most of the trains on display, or see well into their windows from the ground, it was more supposed to be an experience of sublime in train form I suppose, looking upwards at their massive steel bodies. I wanted to peak into the very old ones, with lovely table lamps.

We found a second room I enjoyed much more as it had model trains, crockery and menus from old trains, chairs, old ticket machines, all jumbled together.

These two models made one friend think of that line by Alasdair Gray about the inside of a vagina being like a plush victorian railway carriage.

Back home I am trying to organise my bookshelf alphabetically so I stop buying the same books twice, which I accidentally did with Dorothy L Sayers and Zbigniew Herbert recently. I think I will put biographies (at first I thought to put the biography of an author beside their works but decided not to esp as I have different biographies by the same biographer and its nice to see them together) and poetry separately and non-fiction if the author isn’t super well known to me and its more about the topic but I want say all the non-fiction of Orwell or Nabokov next to their fiction or if a poet has a substantial amount of prose they will go in this general section too which I will call ‘the author section’ ie where I want to find an authors oeuvre easily by name. I will also have an anthologies section. I still don’t know how to import my books from Canada cheaply I feel moving objects around was cheaper in victorian times, and so I have bought some books I know I have copies of there, a weird repeated existence.