It’s not only actors who fluff their lines. When the gas repairs were finished in High Ousegate, workmen replaced the cobbles without bothering to look first.

Where once were double parking lines, stood a yellow muddle, more like hieroglyphics from Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The clocks were put back twice. By an hour to replace British summer time and by 70 years as hundreds descended on Pickering for the town’s annual war weekend.

After last year’s damp squib, Illuminating York returned to what it does best; interpreting the city’s history in light and sound against a backdrop of ancient buildings.

Pilot Theatre joined forces with York Theatre Royal to produce Blood and Chocolate, a unique, landmark First World War play which took viewers on a tour of the city armed with cordless headphones that could hear an actor’s whisper 100 feet away.

A less welcome sight was Britain’s most venomous spider, the False Widow. Many reported seeing the creature in North Yorkshire, including a York man who found one of the creatures on the handlebars of his daughter’s scooter.

Knaresborough doesn’t normally make headline news, but armed police swooped and children were kept in school when a terrorism hoax spread fear throughout the town.

City leaders agreed a £500,000 transformation programme for the way the council operates, while teachers across York, North and East Yorkshire took part in a day of strike action to protest over pay, pensions and changes in education policy.

Plans were announced for a £1 million Olympic standard velodrome at York Sport Village and a £400 million master plan to revamp the University of York’s Heslington West campus.

York wheel spun for the last time, the first ever Yorkshire Marathon was held and Sophie Knox from Harrogate was crowned conker queen at the women’s world conker championships.


In national and international news...

...Mother of eight Amanda Hutton, 43, was jailed for 15 years for starving her four-yearold son Hamzah Khan to death.

Hamzah’s decomposed body had been found in a cot in Hutton’s bedroom in September 2011, where it had lain since he died of malnutrition almost two years earlier.

Special £5 coins minted to commemorate the christening of Prince George went on sale; Royal Mail shares went on sale – and rose 33 per cent in the first day of trading; tennis hero Andy Murray (later to be crowned BBC Sports Personality of the Year) was presented with his OBE by Prince William; and Neil McArdle, the panic-stricken bridegroom who staged a bomb hoax on his wedding day so his bride would not find out he had bungled his register office booking, was jailed for 12 months.

The ‘St Jude’ storms brought chaos to the UK, leaving four people dead and hundreds of thousands of homes without power; energy bosses defended controversial rises in customers’ bills, blaming green taxes; and jurors in the phone hacking trial of former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks and ex spin doctor Andy Coulson heard that the pair had had a secret six-year affair. The relationship between the former editors of the News of The World was exposed through a letter to Coulson on Brooks’ computer.

German-American relations became strained when the German media said the US had been tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s telephone since 2002.

US President Barack Obama claimed he had not been told of the bugging.


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