A day trip to York

I've got an interesting relationship with York.

I went there for university in 2010 and at first couldn't believe my luck. I'd wander around the city centre so grateful that I'd moved to such a beautiful city.

I met some great people and have some really fond memories of parts of my time there.


However, my whole experience there wasn't rosy, and by the time I left in 2013 I had a very different picture of the place.

My mental health had taken a bad turn and that combined with other factors meant I left university in a pretty wobbly place.

I'd retreated into my shell and the Sophie who set off to university was not the same person who emerged at the other end.

I'm so proud of my degree (English Literature) and there are parts of my time there I loved, but York ended up carrying the weight of some very tricky memories and a lot of struggle, anxiety and sadness.

Since graduating in 2013, I've only returned once for a couple of hours, where I pretty much went to one coffee shop and left again.


Last week, I returned to York.


Despite the fact the weather on the surrounding days was awful, Friday was bright and breezy with not a drop of rain.

We wandered the streets of the city centre and the Shambles.

We went to the Castle Museum, to stroll down the Victorian Street and explore the prison.

We tasted our way through York's Chocolate Story.

We ate great food.

We visited York Minster in all its beauty.

We tracked down my old favourite cupcake shop and met the new, lovely owners.


I fell back in love with York all over again.


I've replaced those memories of struggle and defeat and retreat with happiness.

I've restored my first picture of York: a beautiful, historic city full of so much character and wonderful people.


It was more than just a day trip. It was a day of correcting those memories which had got a bit tainted along the way.

It was a marker of how far I've come over the past couple of years.

It was one of the best days out I've had in a long time.



Sophie x


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing fiction as a way to move forwards.

Image
Last week I shared a bit about the writing course that led to me writing my short story, Aftershock. Today I thought I'd share a bit about what it was about, and the process of writing it. I had planned to write it slowly, leaving myself lots of editing time and really making use of the month or so we were given. In fact, I wrote most of it in one sitting, on a single afternoon when I most definitely should have been doing other things. The words just kept coming and I didn't want to cut them off. I based my story on something that had actually happened to me, as one of the things recommended on the course was that it could be easier to get inside a character or situation if it was something you knew and understood. I share a lot on this blog and I'm incredibly open about my journey with anxiety and depression, but one of the big things I haven't spoken about was something that happened to me in October 2016, when I was living and working in London. It h...
Read more

The Reading List #7

Image
The weekend seemed to fly by and I didn’t get around to finishing my reading list post, so here it is now. I’m still going through my period of pulling lots of books off shelves that I haven’t read yet, so the wide mixture of books continues… The Sea, John Banville I read two Banville novels at university and was more than impressed, so was excited to find this gem on my parents’ bookshelf. In ‘The Sea’, art historian Max returns to a place he holidayed as a child, following a personal loss. The novels flits between two periods of his life - the then and the now - leading to themes of childhood discoveries, maturing, and loss. The time periods almost blend into one another, yet there is something distinctly separate about them too, so it is not confusing. It reads almost like poetry, and is utterly beautiful. Any literature fans, or fans of superb writing and narrative, need to give it a go. A Small Part of Me, Noelle Harrison Christina’s mother, Greta,...
Read more

The Reading List # 5

Image
Weekends are the perfect time to catch up on reading, so here’s the latest instalment of things I’ve been reading recently. Fatherland, Robert Harris It is 1964, and Hitler is nearing his 75 th birthday, having been victorious in the Second World War. Detective March finds a naked dead man in a lake, and this begins to unravel a huge conspiracy. The premise of this book was so interesting, and it certainly delivered. There is enough fact weaved in to make the events believable, and the atmosphere and architecture of this 1960s Germany is conjured up well. The book is realistic in that there is still plenty of discontent in the country, so it was a rounded picture, and then in amongst it all was a gripping detective story. This is well worth a try. Revenge Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger Ten years after The Devil Wears Prada ended, Andy is co-running her own successful wedding magazine. Her life has changed a lot, and is the usual rollercoaster of emotio...
Read more