The Book of the City of Ghost Cats

What gives with the weird title of what is, ostensibly, a travel blog? A soon-to-be expat travel blog, at any rate.

I remember discovering in my early Internet research about York that the city was known for three things: ghosts, cats, and chocolate. It was comforting and welcoming, somehow, to be heading somewhere so well-suited. A City of Ghost Cats. Some of whom may be made of chocolate. I was only curious at that point. It all seemed a little too much like a story to be true.

Growing up, I was always an Anglophile. Saturday nights, there was little better than than watching the classic Britcoms on PBS (Are You Being Served?, Vicar of Dibley, Keeping Up Appearances). English folk tales and princess stories and Brian Froud’s faeries, J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits, any fantastical image of a valorous knight was the ambrosia of my youth. I endeavored to teach myself Irish, read Edmund Spenser and Chaucer, and thrilled over the rare stories from family who had taken trips to London.

Of course, time and a little history can color your understanding. I know that mine was an extremely filtered awareness – for better or worse – of England and her people. All a blur of Paddington Bear and double-decker buses and soldiers guarding Buckingham Palace under the watchful gaze of Big Ben. Still, as a child, the British Isles carried a magic for me that was impossible to dispel.

Probably most keenly, though, I loved a little show called As Time Goes By. There’s such a wry romance between Jean Pargetter (Dame Judi Dench) and Lionel Hardcastle (Geoffrey Palmer), two older lovers kept apart after a miscommunication during the Korean War. They meet again together after becoming different people with families occupied such a place in my heart. It was subtle, kind, calm. Silly, melodramatic, but never mean. It was spa humor, gently rippling over your mind. Nothing could ever go too wrong, nor would you want it to. Jean and Lionel were too real in their struggle to reconnect despite the weight of their pasts, too rooted in actual emotions for you to ever root against them.

This was followed closely by another romantic, epistolary love story – Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock. A story of a London-based artist Griffin Moss falling in love via letter with a woman – or perhaps a phantom he’s invented – located on the other side of the world. And then, the usual Jane Austen-Charlotte Bronte teenage bender.

All that said, for all that I loved about what I thought I knew of England, I never really entertained the idea of moving there. It would take some time for me to become a world traveler after visiting China when I graduated from college. Much longer to ever get to Ireland. England, its Jeans and Lionels, were behind a veil of distance and imagination.

A long series of events brought me there, though, in 2023 to play D&D at a Castle. Events precisely of distance and imagination when I met my boyfriend. That is a tale for another time, but it did result in a chance meeting, an utter serendipity, that meant that England was suddenly a door that was held open to me. And that door linked me to York. A city famed for its history of chocolate, ghosts, and not-so-secret artistic representations of cats. A place I hope to get to know much better, as time goes by.

Like Jean and Lionel, it is somehow meant to be.