shewhomust | We didn't mean to go to York

We meant to go to Boroughbridge; in fact we did go to Boroughbridge. But we meant to lunch there with the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers' Association, and since crime writers from all over the north of England would be gathering there, we planned to combine a pleasantly sociable lunch with a useful discussion of the CWA web site, and how to improve it. This is why we left home this morning without checking our e-mail, and so never received the message that the lunch had been cancelled because of the snow, a band of which was moving northwards, had already deposited six inches on the lunch organiser in Lincoln and was heading our way - we met it around Darlington.

By the first week in January I was already bored with having to cancel social events because of the snow; I won't say any more about that now. But at least we could salvage some part of the days plans, because one of the people we should have been meeting lives in York, and

durham_rambler had thought to charge the mobile phone and bring it with us (no, you can't take that for granted; we are of a generation to whom the mobile phone still comes under the heading of 'living in the future').

Which is why we had an unexpected trip to York today, and lunch in a pub called Brigantes in Micklegate, which we liked very much - good food, wide range of interesting beers, free wi-fi, friendly staff - even before I checked its web site and discovered that it is located in a Georgian building which was the birthplace of Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803 - 1882) who not only invented the Hansom Cab, which he patented in 1834, but also designed Birmingham Town Hall.