just like old times

It was half term again this week so I took the customary trip back to my mum and step dad’s in North Yorkshire for a few days of being spoilt and pampered.  Mum and I went to York for a day’s shopping and a very brief walk on the walls.

It’s funny.  When I was a teenager I knew York like the back of my hand.  My friends and I would get the train over on a Saturday morning and spend the whole day there, finding all the vintage shops, eating tuna melts when they were still a novelty and not something you could get in Sayers, hanging round by the river and later, as we got older, going to the cinema for afternoon double bills, finding a seat in the Cross Keys so we could play pool on the purple table and going to this funny club, the entrance of which used to flood in bad weather to the point where you had to cross a gang plank to get in.

Now when I go back I hardly recognise anything.  There used to be a ton of little second hand shops and those incense-smelling hippy shops that 13 year olds love.  Now they seem to have vanished.  The last one I knew about had closed down when we went this time and those that are still there are more expensive and less, well, grotty.  Is this a sign of getting older, that I’m lamenting the ‘good old days’?  Surely in a student town there should be enough interest to keep a vintage clothes shop going?  Have I suddenly and become out of the loop?  Or does everyone just get their clothes from H&M and Topshop now?  Crikey…

Some of the good old things are still there though.  Like silly street names, the Minister, the Army and Navy store and dogs that want to get in every one of your shots x