Goodramgate

May 9th 2006

 

I have received a very interesting e-mail from John Laithwaite of York. As a regular reader of my blog and thus knowing my interest in charity shops he wanted to know if I was aware of the abundance of these bargain retail outlets in his home city. He wrote that he hadn’t counted them but that there must be at least forty, and of that number upwards of twenty are to be found in one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Goodramgate, close to the famous Minster.

 

He went on to point out that York is a prosperous city with a consequently large population of well-heeled citizens, and that this is reflected in its well-stocked charity shops, many of which are of high quality. He then listed them. I won’t mention them all but Help the Aged, Oxfam, Age Concern, SCOPE and MIND are represented, some of them with more that one shop.

 

The only fly in the ointment, John warns, is that York is a university city and as such is infested with a large proportion of students. Being students the vast majority of them are poor, and charity shops are an obvious attraction to them, offering as they do the chance to rig themselves out in decent clothes without causing too much of a dent in their beer money.

 

Consequently students are frequent and voracious users of the charity shops and this brings about occasions when a non-student charity shopper and a student make for the same item. The way to deal with students when this happens, advises John, is to poke them sharply in the ribs with the pointed end of a rolled umbrella, or, if they are particularly persistent, a cattle prod.

 

York is a lovely city, one of my favourites, and John’s e-mail reminded me that it had been far too long since I had last walked its impressive walls. News of all the charity shops to be found within those walls – especially in Goodramgate, which sounds to me like the Bond Street of charity shops – only increased my desire to pay it another visit, and soon. Charity shops were certainly not there in anything like that number when I last visited York, but that must have been about fifteen years ago, and charity shops on the scale you get them nowadays are a quite recent phenomenon.

 

I mentioned John’s e-mail to Atkins Down The Road. Atkins is an even keener patron of charity shops than I am, quite unable to turn down a bargain, and, courtesy of Help the Aged, probably the only man ever to venture out in broad daylight dressed in a bowler hat and a kilt in the tartan of the MacGregor clan. This he did when we went together to the 2000 Commonwealth Games at nearby Manchester and he wanted to see if dressed in that fashion he could get into the Lawn Bowling for nothing by telling the man on the gate he was the entry from British Caledonia. The man on the gate, dressed in an even more bizzare manner than Atkins, in the official Games uniform of multi-coloured shell suit and flat hat, took one look at him and let him in without batting an eyelid, although he might have been swayed by the fact that Atkins had taken out the insurance of carrying his bowls bag and slipping him a pound coin.

 

The upshot of this is that Atkins and I are off to York for the day on Friday May 19 with plans to avail ourselves of the benefits of the charity shops to be found in Goodramgate, followed by a visit to the Jorvik Viking Centre, where Atkins hopes to get in for nothing provided he can pick up a helmet with horns in it at one of the charity shops. If anyone would like to come along with us we have room in the car for another three, or if enough want to come we can maybe hire a minibus. 

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Razzamatazz

Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.) This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000…. My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas. A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road. I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things. Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.) This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000…. My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas. A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road. I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things.

3 thoughts on “Goodramgate”

  1. I was once jabbed in the ribs by what felt like a cattle prod, but was indeed an umbrella. Not in York but in Windsor many years ago. The ‘jabber’ was an elderly salesman in a particularly expensive tailors. He assessed, quite rightly, that I would not be purchasing so much as a handkerchief and ‘prodded’ me out of the shop. My spikey green mohican haircut probably gave him the incentive. I’d forgotten this. Thanks for prompting the memory. Incidently, as I was ‘prodded’ down the entrance steps a chap smiled at me as he went in. I believe to this day it was Captain Mark Philips. Despite smiling at me he was not, to my knowledge, prodded.

  2. I’ll take one of the seats, can’t wait, email me for pick up details.

    Are we going via Harrogate and Skipton?

    I bet they’ve got Charity shops to die for.

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