A Fizzing Summer

It’s been a summer without a summer, which happens every couple of years in the North East. The last truly glorious weather we had was over the Easter weekend. Since then we’ve lived in ever-diminishing hope for a hot summer, which has finally been extinguished today, on this grey and drizzly “Summer” Bank Holiday Monday.

Summer in New Zealand but it could have been England

We spent the last couple of summers in Fiji and from the vantage point of Facebook, it looked like Northumberland had magically turned into sunny Spain. Of course, I realise now that 95% of people will only post photos if the sun is shining as the entire point is to generate envy. Nobody wants to commit the act of eating an ice cream while sheltering from the howling wind in their anorak to their Facebook timeline when everyone else is baring their flesh in bikinis on white hot sandy beaches in exotic locations. So when the sun makes a brief appearance, coats come off, pints get taken outside and the moment is captured for all of eternity on Instagram, where goosebumps and damp bottoms from wet picnic benches are effectively air-brushed out of existence.

Just because we’re not all prostrate from the heat doesn’t mean that we didn’t have a reasonable summer. We just adjusted our expectations. For example, BBQ weather at our house means that it’s not raining too hard, you’re unlikely to attract a bolt of lightning while handling the barbecue tongs and the wind isn’t sufficient to start a fire from blowing embers somewhere inconvenient.

Despite our human-centric take on the rubbish weather, the flowers keep blooming and the fruit keeps ripening. This year, we made an epic version of elderflower champagne, which starts with what looks like a bucket of garden clippings and magically transforms into a sublime essence of summer in a glass. Sugar, vinegar, flowers, water and lemon ferments courtesy of the yeast living on the flowers in sterilised soda bottles. It is truly kitchen alchemy.

There’s also been a lot of beer brewing going on in our house, with the concomitant amount of beer drinking. Beer is an intrinsic part of English life and you can probably chart social change in the UK through beer and attitudes towards it. One of my abiding memories of my first trip to England was my husband (then boyfriend) sending* me to the bar to get two pints of beer in a pub in the Lake District. I came back to the table with one and a half pints, as the barman would only sell me a half as I was a woman. And you ask what feminism has done for us...

We recently took a tour of brewery at Matfen – High House Farm Brewery. For a fiver each, we were taken around by a knowledgeable chap (whose name currently escapes me). I was struck by how close the process was to what we did at home, just on a bigger scale. We sniffed stinky hops and chocolatey malts and I marveled at how much better beer has become in England since I first arrived. I’ve also got much better at understanding of it. I will no longer be tricked into ordering a pint of spleen-splitter (though it was very amusing for husband and bartender) and I certainly wouldn't be fobbed of with a half if I want a full pint. Though these days I wouldn’t order a pint, I’d order a schooner and immediately find a postage stamp sized bit of sunshine so that I could capture the moment on a selfie and post it to my timeline.There would then be no question about how hip I am or how sunny my life is. Not that there ever was.

*I had no idea that English people speaking English in England were going to be so hard to understand and that they were going to have such a hard time understanding me, so I communicated with the locals only reluctantly.

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.