Daily photos no. 77: a winter's weekend in York

It's hard to take non-clichéd pictures of one of the most historical cities in Europe, and I'm not sure I succeeded, but here are the fruits of a very relaxed wander around York one wet winter.

Stained-glass snark

My lecture was not well-received

A triptych of exposures - chapter house ceiling

Clifford's Tower - site of an early massacre of Jews

In other news, I've just finished reading comedian Robert Webb's first novel, Come Again. Swayed by highly positive reviews of this story about a bereaved widow travelling back in time to university days (1992, the year before I commenced Higher Education) to save her husband from a brain tumour, and feeling the need for some light summer reading, I was expecting a cross between David Nichols and Audrey Niffeneger, which I'm pretty sure was the original agent's pitch. That and 'He's Robert Webb, off the telly'.

Dave and Audrey would be within their rights to entice Mr Webb down a dark alley to administer some swift literary justice. Yes, the 'plot' is a mix of their trademark bourgeois nostalgia/romance/twist and a smattering of wit smeared over the most ridiculous events meant to be taken seriously, but by god it's a tedious read, aiming for middle-brow tragic-comedy and achieving Centrist Dad Solving Your Problems. I'm not sure how, but it feels both slapdash and overly-laboured: it tries to be good fun with a dash of bathos but feels inescapably formulaic.

Webb wants you to recognise certain things by the end of this novel:

• New Labour was good. 
• People remember the clothes they once wore with a degree of embarrassment.
• Young people say silly things but can be forgiven because they're young and silly.
• He would like to reassure lesbians that it's OK to be lesbian and female practitioners of karate that it's ok not to be lesbians. 
• Too much drinking is bad. 
• Grief can be assuaged by the love of another good man. 
• People get fatter as they get older. 
• Russians don't have to have character but rich ones are probably bad. 
• Some posh people are utter shits and others are good eggs. 
• Poor people are generally good eggs except the bad ones. 
• Not having mobile phones was quite inconvenient. 
• Boris Johnson, Brexit and intolerance are, on balance, bad ideas. 
• Regional gays are hilarious. 
• 'Boobs' are a thing and definitely the habitual term used by bereaved women.
• Britain is in a bit of a mess. 

Still, it deserves some credit for ambition: not many first-time novelists would make the central dead character a terrible novelist, nor provide several Martin Amis-esque paragraphs to prove it. That's asking for trouble.