When I was 19, I spent a semester in the Northern English city of York. Every Monday, a professor dutifully doled out our weekly food allowance in the Queen’s paper notes, and I’d walk the cobbled streets to a local bakery just outside the Roman walls. There was a stationery shop next door, the kind of antiquated but charming thing you’d expect to find in a city with 400-year-old pubs . I often browsed, but never purchased, saving my pound coins for pints .

Eleven years later, I returned to the city, and thankfully, the stationery shop was still there. Another benefit of a city that ancient: things don’t change quickly. At my old fish and chips haunt, I confessed to the lady behind the counter that I’d waited over a decade to come back, only for her to reply, in her rough Yorksh

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