It's Warm up North

Deciding to start a blog isn't difficult. But you actually have to write it. And there is the slight problem of having to have something vaguely interesting to say.

When I started my last blog (which I perhaps I should start referring to as my late blog), I was at the beginning of a 2-1/2 year adventure to the South Pacific. Everything was strange and new and I had loads to say about everything, much of it uninformed.

Arriving in the UK for the first time things were new and exciting and I had loads to say about everything too. Except the internet hadn't been invented yet and the idea of self-publishing your everyday musings through a medium where millions (billions?) of people could access it instantly would have been filed in the same place as hover cars and successful cryogenic reconstitution.

Interesting concept - great salad!

For those of you that cannot picture a time when there was no such thing as the interweb, it was also a time before there was a McDonald's in Newcastle. I understand that this may be too difficult or distressing to imagine, but I once spent a fruitless day walking the cold, damp streets of Newcastle searching in vain for a Big Mac. At that point you could not get an edible burger in Britain anywhere else. McDonald's had obviously already entered the Geordie psyche because every lovely person that I stopped and ask for directions to McDonald's directed me to various branches of Wimpy's. Decades later I can still feel the burgerless disappointment keenly. I digress…

In this blog I hope to capture some of the wonder and enthusiasm for the North East that I had for Fiji recently but that also had for Geordieland when I arrived in the grey, damp 1980s - when going down to the Quayside was scary because you might get mugged properly rather than just mugged while buying an overpriced cocktail. Since then, it has felt like life in North East England has emerged from an era of black and white into the age of Technicolor.

When I arrived back from Fiji in March, it was all the same but different. NUFC was still floundering around the less salubrious end of the table and the random bus driver still called me pet, but there was a fabulous sense of renaissance - a flourishing of culture and dynamism despite the continuing grind of austerity.

The North East is a place of contrasts. Maligned by those “down south” as a post-industrial wasteland, there are pockets of serious deprivation but there are also vast unpopulated beautiful spaces, with some of the country’s most beautiful beaches and countryside. The people are also exceedingly friendly though the recent election results do suggest a certain number who secretly keep a shiny pair of jackboots at the back of their wardrobe. And when you walk the streets of Newcastle you pass queues outside of expensive restaurants as well as a disturbing number of homeless people.

As I've got older my sense of wonder and outrage have both increased dramatically. I can be deeply moved by the sight of a happy family or viscerally angered by virtually anything that I read in the Guardian. Maybe this is the early stages of dementia, but I’m hoping that it’s actually the onset of wisdom. Either way, I will try to capture it in Latitude 55. Welcome -  it’s warm up north.