IMS_Blog

Sometimes living in York feels squeezed. It seems to me that at times the city feels so small, so constricted. Sitting here I can actuall feel the edges. In a true city I’ve never had that. When I used to live in Newcastle I wasn’t even certain where some of the edges were. The situation is probably emphasised by the city walls, encircling its historic centre as if to continually define it and prevent escape. Yet it is more than that. Even outside the walls, from side to side—for want of a better phrase—, it seems a tight circle, as if further walls invisibly imprisioned us. It’s not a feeling that is easy to attribute. It’s not like everything isn’t here—but perhaps that’s partly it; everything is right here. It’s also partly that everything isn’t here, in some sense hard to define without standing in the centre of a large city and feeling the everything around it, so much more than here. I suppose I’m just a ciry boy at heart and York occasionally only just cuts it.