Pontificating
St Stephen's Church in Aldwark Yorkshire is England's Texas. Now I would like to share a joke I once heard. A Texan meets a Yorkshireman in a pub one day. The Texan boasts, "Texas is so big it takes two days to travel across our state by train!" The Yorkshireman pauses before replying, "Aye. We've got slow trains in Yorkshire too!" Yorkshire contains a variety of areas, different people with different accents. There is no single Yorkshire way of speaking - but many. Some southerners think of Yorkshire as a place of industry and hardship where old men in flat caps lead whippets to old slag heaps and women in curlers hang washing on rope lines between grim terraced houses. But the Yorkshire we were in from Sunday morning to Wednesday was very different from that. Take the village of Alne for example. So many big and characterful houses with gravel driveways, neatly trimmed hedgerows and roses climbing round doorways. Girls in hard hats riding horses. Rang...