There's No place like home

There's No Place Like Home

Simon Rogerson

March 13, 2024

First of all, I’d like to begin with an apology. I have been doing tours of York since 2018 (that includes a break of a couple of years in the middle of that time for obvious reasons) and thoroughly enjoy doing so. Before I started tour guiding I’d been living in York for three years and had read, watched and listened to as much as I could about the city. I had also enjoyed giving friends and families impromptu tours, usually regurgitating whatever I’d just learned as if I was some sort of long standing expert. So I had much of the required knowledge to begin with but as with everything else in life, you really learn on the job. There’s a lot of information you are always trying to remember, you want the tour to be enjoyable, you need to make sure people on the tour have stopped in a good place and aren’t blocking the way etc. etc. There’s a lot to think about and lets just say that the people who paid to attend the first few tours I took did not get the premium experience.

There is a standard journey that you follow when you train to be a teacher. You start out unconsciously incompetent, you may know you are doing things wrong but you don’t know what exactly you are doing wrong or why they are wrong. Then you become consciously incompetent when you begin to see for yourself exactly what it is that you’re doing wrong. Then you start to fix those problems and become consciously competent before (hopefully) ending at unconsciously competent when you start to automatically do things correctly without even thinking about it.

One thing on my tour guiding that I was determined to do from the very start was responding to questions that I did not know the answer to with a friendly smile, an admission of my ignorance and either a promise that “the next people who ask me that question will definitely get a good answer” or segue the question into one that I could actually answer. However, with all of the other things I was trying to remember, I didn’t always follow my own rules and there were occasions when I found myself bluffing sub-optimal responses to difficult questions that I should never have tried to answer.

Therefore I’d like to apologise, not only to those people who had to be on those first few tours as I learned my craft but also to anybody who happened to be walking past us and found themselves shaking their heads at the rubbish I was spouting. I’m much better at following my rules on this now. I promise.

I'm not going to admit here to any specific sub-optimal answers but instead write about what happened on my very, very first tour with paying guests sometime back in the halcyon, innocent days of the summer of 2018. It was about half way around our tour that someone pointed at something I had never seen before and said “What’s that?”

At the time I was taking the group down Coffee Yard between Stonegate and Swinegate and had stopped to talk about Barley Hall. I like taking groups down this area, I still like doing it, for a number of reasons.

A.      Barley Hall itself is very pretty and makes for good photos etc.

B.      You get to introduce Mark Jones’ wonderful concept of the Snickleways in York, which always goes down well.

C.     You can talk about the reconstruction of Barley Hall and all the exciting discussions around that topic that people travel miles to hear.

D.     Come on, look at that pretty building and take some photos.

And then a gentleman pointed to a letterbox on the wall with a Latin inscription on it and asked the question. He did well to see it, it’s quite high up on the wall and I’d certainly never noticed it before. Perhaps he was bored and looking around for anything else to take his attention. I’m sure lots of York residents and regular visitors know all about this letterbox, but at that point I was not amongst their number.

Nihil Domestica Sede Jocundius, the letterbox said. “Is this inscription significant and what does it mean?” the gentleman asked. Fortunately I was able to not panic, stay calm and simply admit I had never seen it before. Between everyone there we had enough Latin to get some sort of basic translation going. Nihil means nothing, Domestica is something to do with the home and Jocundius must be something to do with happiness or jocularity. “There’s no happiness like the home” it certainly wouldn’t be a perfect translation but did a job at the time. Of course once you've got there, you can’t help but make the obvious comparison to an oft used phrase in The Wizard of Oz and make jokes about clicking your heals together while you’re saying it.

On further research, it appears to be a phrase that is used on Venetian homes (or is used on at least one Venetian home) and although I couldn’t tell you who the letterbox belongs to or why they chose this particular phrase, I feel that now I am armed with enough information to give a decent enough answer whenever that question comes up again.

And you know what? It never has. Not a single other person has ever asked me about that letterbox since that very, very first tour. Oh well, I keep on hoping.