Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	Carbon Leaf
Entry tags:	food, kirkgate, kirkstall, metcalf family crest, mom and dad, sweet shops, thirsk

Freezing that frame....

Heeeellooooo my darlings! 

Eating organically, fairtradely and more recently locally is really important to me. So right now I'm ecstatic to proclaim that I just found a full cream milk that comes from the Yorkshire Dales - organic, local and yummy!! I have to walk farther to get it, and pay a couple pence more, but I'm pretty excited!! Also, I''ve just stocked the fridge with Fairtrade organic OJ from Spain (not local, but as local as you can get for something like oranges) and I'm drinking organic coffee that I just made with this incredibly nifty little device - it's like a personal coffee maker that you don't need to plug in or anything, you just put hot water and grounds in it and press this little filter thing down... a gift from the Parental Units!! THANK YOU!! ITS AWESOME!! IT WORKS PERFECTLY!! YAY!!! PERSONAL CAFFEIENE SOURCE!!!

My parents have been here for the past two weekands - the first weekand we went down to Thirsk, a little town in the Yorkshire Dales. It was amazing!! Even older than Leeds, and there was a big farmers market full of big burly men with thick accents selling produce, socks, books, and so on.  We wandered around the town, eating tea and cakes and buying sticks of pure licorice from this amazing little sweet shop with walls lined with old fashioned sweets - actually, thats something that is everywhere around  here. Sweet shops where you can pick out handfulls of licorice whips, mints, fruit gummies, chocolate wafers and countless other treats. Me and my dad didn't realize, however, that what we were eating was PURE licorice extract in stick form - no wonder it tasted a wee bit strong! :P  
So Thirsk. Thirsk is no ordinary, random town. Nor was the sweet shop. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with stories from a man named James Herriot, a vet in the Yorkshire Dales. I dreamed about going to Yorkshire to visit him, and to see where he was from, and just meeting him and wandering around. I was devastated when I realized that a) he was dead, and b) England was really, really far away, and my allowance as an 8 year old didn't QUITE cover the plane ticket.

So!! Thirsk is the town that he wrote about. He wrote stories about the sweetshop. He may be dead, but I still got thrills wandering around the cobbled streets and walking into the red door of his house. (which is a museum now). They even had his old car, the one he wrote abotu in the garden!! So exciting!!   

Also in Thirsk there was a REALLY old church, the yard full of gravestones with the writing worn off of them, stones being consumed by moss and vines... and a remote corner of the church, I found the Metcalf family crest! Thats right.... we have a crest!! And guess what it is....oh you won't. COWS. I kid you not. The great Metcalf legacy is in cows. http://www.heraldry.ws/html/metcalf-new-england.html

Oh yeah. :P So we were pretty excited to find that there - I'd read about our family being from the York area, and I knew what our crest was, but I'd never even thought abotu finding it!!


Anyways. My parents just left on a bus back to London - I'm sad to see them go. I miss them dreadfully already. I'm ok with living on my own out here, and with missing them,  I'm having the time of my life, but it still makes me sad at points. This weekand we spent in Kirkgate market, watching the butchers yell at each other about who has the best sausages and hams, admiring the beautifull glossy fish laid out at the seafood stalls next to huge prawns with their legs still attached, and scrumptious looking rainbow trout, shimmering and glassy eyed. We bought licorice and toffees at the sweet shop and a plant of some sort (I keep forgetting what its called... it sounds like a STI... chlamydia  or something... :P). 

LASTLY!! Lets talk classes. I'm still loving them! Except Ethics, which is a BITCH. The homework is definitely increasing, but most of it is pretty groovy and interesting! Language is absolutely amazing - just learnign where all of our English words come from - Romans, Vikings, Normans, Germanic tribes....they didn't just conquer parts of England, raid a couple of villages and so on. They CREATED the English language!!  English is fascinating because it really isn't a pure language at all - its been cobbled together from so many random sources - this little island has been tramped on by so many different cultures with so many different languages. I love it! And watching how the language mutated from Old English to what we use today - wow. Just wow. But enough about that. :) 

NOT LASTLY! HAH. Tricked you. :P We also went to Kirkstall Abbey today!! A BRILLIANT old abbey - huge, epic, soaring, gray, moldy, creepy.... quite old and perfect for visualizing seiges and archers and maybe even dragons.... (Anyone who tellls me that abbeys are for peacefull monks and there are no dragons... I'll slap you with a fish!! No crushing of dreams!! :P)

It just struck me that this entry is mostly about food. :P Hmm. Well, I LIKE food. So there.