Official Guide to the Yorkshire Dales

Everyone said that Uncle Arthur was a funny old sod.  He was a fixture of family gatherings, where everyone humoured his often bizarre proclamations.  One of his regular pronouncements was on the folly of ever leaving Lancashire.  He was born in Blackburn, raised in Burnley, holidayed in Blackpool and had retired to Bury – to be near his sister.  He had not once crossed the Lancashire boundary and he had never wanted to.  Why would he want to leave?  Lancashire contained everything a man needed.  Except a wife, it seemed.  He had never married.

Arthur lived in a sheltered bungalow full of books about gardening and wild animals.  He was fond of describing the habits of badgers to anyone who might listen.  When it was time to provide Uncle Arthur with more help, it was his niece that arranged the place in a care home.  She packed away his belongings and arranged the disposal of his furniture.  She boxed up those books that he had chosen not to take with him to the home and took them to a charity shop.  Among the books about wetland birds she found an oddity.  This was a Guide to the Yorkshire Dales.  The niece smiled at the rogue publication, then put it to one side to show her mother and her daughters later. They would laugh at the foreign interloper.

The Guide was still in the niece’s bag when she went to visit Uncle Arthur later that week.  She pulled the book out and asked him about it.

“What’s a staunch Lancastrian like you doing with a book about Yorkshire? You a fifth columnist?” she waved it humorously under his nose. 

He didn’t join in with the jollity.  “Oh, that. It was a lady friend that I found in the ‘60s. She used to come over on the train and visit me in Burnley every other Saturday.  But she couldn’t leave her home in Skipton.  She had ties, you see.  Her mother.   She wanted me to go and live over there and she gave me the book to try and tempt me, like. Looking back I could have done it easily but I was too stubborn wasn’t I?  Too set in my ways, damn fool that I am.  Spent the last 50 years wondering what happened to her.” 

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/177989837/official-guide-to-the-yorkshire-dales?ref=shop_home_active_16

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