Yellow bikes for the tip?

Helmsley, Yorkshire

WE stopped at York on the way up. It is still bedecked in Tour de France flags and bunting, plus hundreds of bikes, all painted yellow and stuck to hedges, railings and shop fronts. Painting them must ruin them and it's strange that the most visible way of celebrating the greatest cycle race in the world is by demonstrating how many unwanted, forsaken and abandoned bikes we possess. Apres le spray-paint, le tip.

I HAVE to report that Yorkshire is depressingly full of stick-thin middle-aged cycle-blokes in clingy, revealing Lycra. Stuck behind a posse of them in your car, it is impossible not to see things you'd rather not see, many of them with large veins.

THERE are two great bargains in York. The first is the park-and-ride service which for £2.60 drops you smack in the middle of a city where you are as likely to find a pink unicorn as a parking space. The second is the £10 admission fee to York Minster which seems steep until you realise it is valid for a whole year. You can pop in and out as often as you like. The Minster also has what are probably the cleanest toilets in the city. Wholly convenient.

WE happened to be in the Minster while they were tuning the great organ. The whole place throbbed with noise. It was an experience similar to being a woodlouse trapped in a didgeridoo. (After the Rolf Harris trial, can we still use the word didgeridoo?)

THAT famous Yorkshire concern for value for money surfaces in the online visitors' reviews for the majestic ruins of Helmsley Castle (built by the Normans, knocked about a bit by Oliver Cromwell). One tripper complains glumly: "Not much left."

CAR-sales cobblers. Over the years, the used-banger business has given us a rich vein of ducking, dodging and diving but the growing curse of the "administrative fee" takes the biscuit. This is an arbitrary sum, often about £75, slapped on the price of your car to cover items such as a check on its hire-purchase status. I was amused online to find one dealer explaining earnestly that he couldn't waive this fee for a customer because, if an earlier customer found out, "they (the dealer) can be made to repay anyone who has paid the fee before." Absolute cobblers but isn't it strangely reassuring to know the spirit of Arthur Daley is alive and well? Nice little runner, squire . . .

INTERESTING, too, to see that 25 years after the last genuine series of Minder was aired, you can still buy Arthur Daley stickers ("les autos par excellence") for your car.

A READER asks why is it that normal restaurants helpfully offer a vegetarian option but if you go into a vegetarian restaurant and ask for the meat option, they get really shirty?

PIANO-accordion makers. Are they feeling the squeeze?

ONE thing you hardly ever pack for a Yorkshire holiday is your swimming cozzie. And then you discover that Helmsley is one of the very few small towns with its own heated outdoor pool. What's a chap to do with no trunks? A helpful lady at the pool said they usually advised people to try the Help the Aged shop. You know how it is when something just doesn't feel right . . ?