Andrew Hitchon

Andrew Hitchon, a journalist living in York, takes a sidelong look at the world around us.

Andrew Hitchon, a journalist living in York, takes a sidelong look at the world around us.

Latest articles from Andrew Hitchon

And it’s goodbye to all this from me

NOTHING lasts for ever, and in the case of a column that’s surely a good thing. Style tends to become jaded, opinions repeated, the whole thing that little bit too familiar.

A changing city waits at the lights

A FORMER senior figure in York’s civic life once complained that whenever the city’s leaders tried to do anything new and better they were inundated with complaints from people who just wanted things leaving as they were.

Don’t box me in

ONE of the disadvantages of dealing with bigger, more remote companies and institutions is the “tick-box culture”, where instead of listening to people and seeing if their needs can be met employees have to check if the “customers” have negotiated a series of prescribed hurdles before anything can be done for them.

The Doctor and me

WHEN I wrote last week about the lasting appeal of the 1960s there was a phenomenon from that era I missed out.

Nostalgia makes us a funny bunch

WE’RE a funny bunch when it comes to nostalgia. Last month I found my journey from the Dales back to York grinding to a crawl because of an event in a village en route, the way jammed with closed roads, tourists’ cars – and people driving US army-style jeeps.

Taking time to remember

TIME flies as you get older, or so they say. Actually, I think my recollections are getting mixed up, so some things that occurred only recently feel like they took place decades ago and I think events from years back happened only yesterday.

Stifling opinions is so dangerous

DO YOU ever read something and think “gosh, that’s really dangerous”? I’ve done it twice in the last couple of weeks while reading this very publication, as two contributors questioned whether newspapers should publish letters from people who deny that climate change is caused by human activity.

Movies go back to history class

GOOD news film fans; it appears movie companies are looking to hire academics to ensure scripts based on true stories or set in past eras are free of historical inaccuracies.

It’s too important to be left to MPs

IT’S rather like a schoolday situation when kids in a certain class have committed a particularly outrageous act, so the head tells the whole school something like: “I’m sorry, but you were warned, and you’re all going to face new restrictions.”