All I knew about Harrogate before I arrived there for Day 3 of the Bettys Tour 2019 was that it's a spa town which has two branches of Bettys, is the hub of the Bettys empire, and once hosted the Eurovision Song Contest. The last time I visited was to go to a concert at the Conference Centre as a student in York. The concert was fairly dull and Bettys was full, so I arrived very much hoping that my second visit would be more rewarding.
Bettys Tour 2019: Ilkley
Ilkley is a gem of a place, located on the banks of the River Wharfe in the Yorkshire Dales, and overlooked by the famous Moor rising above it to the south. Nothing says Yorkshire to me quite as much as Ilkley Moor does, so when I arrived at the station for Day 1 of the Bettys Tour 2019, I was ready for an espresso shot of Yorkshireness and wasn’t disappointed.
Bettys Tour 2019: The Bettys Matrix
For those of you who are interested in the logistics of the Bettys Tour 2019, my intention is to sample elevenses and afternoon tea in every branch of Bettys. Six branches, two visits per branch, 12 visits in total. A simple enough task you might think, but factor in the need for a balanced assessment across all branches, two types of afternoon tea (excluding the champagne option), the fact that I like fat rascals and curd tarts equally, plus the need to build in some time for sightseeing and recovery, and the scale of the operation starts to become apparent. The risk of a timetabling clash is simply too great to play this kind of thing by ear. Hence the need for the Bettys Matrix.
Bettys Tour 2019: Time for tea
My Bettys Tour 2019 is fast approaching. After a short period of acclimatisation at the Doncaster base camp, where my fancy London ways will be thoroughly beaten out of me by my dad, I shall set off for a week of Yorkshire-style purification and self-discovery, stopping at Ilkley, Harrogate, Northallerton and York for elevenses and afternoon tea at every branch of Bettys, with a spot of sight-seeing thrown in for good measure. I'm hoping to see some of the many things that any self-respecting Yorkshireman should have seen by my age, but to be honest my main focus is on curd tarts, fat rascals, tea loaf, parkin and sandwiches, washed down with copious amounts of tea and coffee. There might also be the odd cream cake thrown in, and perhaps something containing custard.
Anything for a giggle
If you've read my twitter feed, you might be wondering why a person who talks endlessly about biscuits and otherwise inconsequential matters felt the need to write a number of fairly serious pieces, reflecting on who he is and how he ended up doing what he does. Well, just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you really shouldn't expect twitter, or any social media for that matter, to give you the full picture. Nevertheless, bearing in mind the ability of some people to take things at face value and jump to conclusions, I wrote those pieces to redress the balance and provide a bit of context.
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It's often said that people always remember where they were when John F Kennedy was assassinated, such was the significance of his death and the shock with which the news of it was greeted. I wasn't around that day, but an event of equal significance in my own life, etched on my memory in a similar way, is the death of my mother, which took me completely by surprise, despite the fact that she was terminally ill, and turned my life upside down in the space of roughly five minutes on a sunny morning in Summer 2016. As well as providing a source of bittersweet relief that her illness was finally over, her death marked the start of a new chapter in my life, providing an opportunity to reflect on her as a person as well as a mother. Joni Mitchell expressed it perfectly in her song Big Yellow Taxi when she famously sang "Don't it always seem to go, That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone". Needless to say, she wasn't just singing about paradise and parking lots.
Where are you from?
I've always found this an awkward question to answer, not just because I am a Yorkshireman who's lived more of his life down South than in God's Own Country, but also because it touches on much of what caused me to end up as a lawyer living in London. For me, a lot of the awkwardness stems from the fact that where I am from represents something I've been trying to escape since I was 18, when I left home to go to university. It's only relatively recently that I've come to accept that where I am from forms a large part of what makes me who I am, with the realisation that in my eagerness to escape, I turned my back on much of my past and in a sense forgot who I was.
What do you want?
I'm an indecisive person at the best of times and this question encapsulates a conundrum that I have struggled with pretty much all of my working life. I didn't become a solicitor because I felt a vocation or some burning desire to further the cause of justice. I did it because I needed a fairly well-paid job that satisfied my family's expectation that I should "get a profession"; because I was too squeamish to be a doctor, dentist or vet; and ultimately because I couldn't think of anything else. My decision had absolutely nothing to do with what I actually wanted to do, quite simply because I didn't know.
The beginning…
I was never really cut out to be a lawyer, well not the type I ended up becoming. I trained at a large firm of solicitors in the City of London and from day one always felt like a misfit. But how did I get there and stick it for as long as I did? The answer's really quite simple if you know where to look. No-one forced me to do it after all. It was my choice. But my background and upbringing had a lot to do with it.
What I learned today... 