NOTHING broadens the mind like foreign travel.

After a fortnight's break, the latter week spent amid the fleshpots of exotic South Wales, your diarist returns suitably broadened.

Wales, or Llachnidrimtaltachanbach-y-Gfeddfod to use its native name, is a beautiful land filled by glorious hillsides and vast road signs.

And seaside towns on the Pembrokeshire coast - as reliant on tourism as York - charge £1 a day for parking.

STILL on things Welsh, in one of my last columns before departure I reported the strange events in Margaret Lawson's household.

When she and husband John (now known as Aneurin) applied for Post Office card accounts, the cards arrived with covering letters - all in Welsh.

"The mystery of all that Welsh paperwork was solved the instant I read your front page headline For The Chop - Seven York Post Offices Set To Shut (August 19)," writes Margaret from her home in The Groves, York.

"Of course they are breaking in 'Aneurin' for travelling to Wales to pick up the pension..."

MY thanks to Bill Hearld who, in my absence, edited the column with more aplomb than a plumber in a plum tree.

A diarist of renown both on this paper and the Northern Echo, Bill is a top drawer act. So I was thrilled to see that I shall become more like him with each passing day.

In an Evening Press feature a couple of Saturdays back a few of us nominated the "time of our lives".

I speculated that my magic moment would arrive when I was a little older and wiser, and my picture was then "aged" by our graphics team.

On this basis, I am set to become Bill's twin by 2012.

Anyone got a hat I can borrow?

ONE disappointment on my return was to discover the Bo Ding Warehouse liberators had left the building.

There's been a lot of hypocritical guff talked about the group of squatters who took to the riverside building.

"This is the scene of devastation that greeted the leaseholders of York's beleaguered Bonding Warehouse who now face a £10,000 clean-up bill after evicting squatters from the building," we reported 12 days ago.

"Leaseholder Lionel Davis claimed it would cost between £5,000 and £10,000 to clean up graffiti-daubed walls, windows and gates, smashed windows and floors strewn with cans, bottles and rubbish mingled with urine and excrement."

Our pictures confirmed it was in a right old mess. However, it would have more edifying to have compared them with pictures taken inside the Bonding Warehouse before the York Peace Collective moved in.

It was already in a terrible state. Flood damage had been left to fester. Smashed windows allowed in the pigeons, whose urine and excrement was untouched for years.

And who was responsible for this disgraceful neglect? The leaseholders.

The peace collective may have been nave to be gatecrashed by vandals, but they have again drawn attention to a scandalous waste of an historic York building - this one owned by the city.

Write to: The Diary, Chris Titley, The Evening Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York YO1 9YN

Email diary@ycp.co.uk

Telephone (01904) 653051 ext 337

Updated: 09:08 Wednesday, September 01, 2004