Bank Holiday Blues

It's Spring Bank Holiday, and I'm feeling the familiar ambivalence. Bank Holidays have always vexed me. When we were kids they were often days of house arrest. Living in a holiday resort, there was a culture of knowing superiority perpetuated by the grown-ups, mainly my mother, who would insist that only a fool would venture out when the town was invaded by hoi polloi. We were encouraged to pity these sad folk arriving by the coachload, whatever the weather, with their delusions of enjoying a day at the seaside. Our superior alternative, in those days when we didn't have a car, when bank holidays were holidays for everyone and there were no shops open, was to stay 'around the doors'. We'd watch Charlie Chaplin or Mack Sennett compilations which were on TV in the morning (daytime TV was bank holiday only, and seemed to be limited to the silent movie era) and then kick a football against the side of the house. They were days spent in limbo, purposeless and unsatisfactory.

Even when we got our first car, a yellow Morris 1100, it didn't get any better. My parents would question whether it was worth going anywhere because everybody would be out on the roads, and who would want to be stuck in a traffic jam when they could have a nice relaxed time 'around the doors'.  If  we did venture out the spectres of the crowds, the traffic and the weather would be weighing us down with such foreboding that the little Morris, with its cargo of a family of 5 and a border collie, would become a pressure cooker on wheels. Throw into this mix my regular and spectacular car sickness and you can imagine the fun we had.

My life changed in so many ways when I met my wife. In one of those mad, serendipitous, new love moments we shared stories of our childhoods and it emerged that her family had been regular day trippers to Whitley Bay. Much to my mum's bemusement, on our first August bank holiday as a couple we went to the seafront to meet a large gathering of the extended family who were to become my inlaws. I remember I was grouchy as I struggled to cope with the demolition of the bank holiday pillar of family wisdom. People were having a good time. There were crowds, but that added to the atmosphere. There was a bit of a cold wind off the sea, but the sun was shining and the bite of coldness gave an added flavour and warmth to the chips that we ate. This was what I'd been missing for all those years. Bank holidays could be fun.

Of course now a bank holiday is a different proposition. Shops are open, there are leisure and entertainment options a-plenty, and public transport runs as normal. My mum is away on a coach trip. And yet I'm at home, writing this, wondering whether to take the dog for a walk, or to go to the garage for a loaf of bread. We've already jettisoned plans we'd made to go into town, and my family are all dozing. Looks like we're staying around the doors...

Gimme Shelter 2

Another key feature of the Whitley Bay promenade when I was younger was the parade of beach huts north of the Rendezvous Cafe. They were brightly coloured wooden boxes, with sloping roofs and double doors at the front. They seemed to be locked up most of the time, but occasionally on a bank holiday or a sunny summer Sunday one or two of them would have the doors thrown open, with deck chairs, towels, buckets and spades and all the other seaside paraphernalia spilling out on to the concrete deck at the front. As a child I had it drummed into me that it was rude to stare, so I would steal glances at the occupants and at the tardis-like interiors. I have a memory of checked fablon tablecloths, primus stoves and kettles, and pictures on the brightly coloured interior walls. They seemed so exciting, little private spaces where you could be part of, and apart from, the holiday hordes. And they were on turntables so they could be moved around to maximise those rare pockets of sunshine. Unfortunately you couldn't stay in them overnight, which really spoiled the whole concept for me. I wanted to live in one. I wanted to sit in it in the middle of winter looking out at the wild grey sea, wrapped in a cosy blanket drinking hot chocolate made on the primus and toasting my feet on the paraffin stove in the corner. Maybe the fact that their use was so limited was the reason that they fell into disrepair and were demolished, leaving only the circular footprints of the turntables.

If only the Whitley Bay town planners, a notoriously unimaginative and conservative shower, had consulted 10 year old me.

And there is hope. In the last couple of years plans have been put forward to build some new beach huts that can be slept in. If that happens, I'll be there. In January.

Gimme Shelter

This shabby looking shelter stands on the promenade at Whitley Bay. There are three or four of them, and for as long as I can remember, they've been sad, under-used spaces. They stare blankly out to sea. On sunny days they seem cold and forbidding, and when it's actually sunny on Whitley Bay seafront the last place anybody wants to be is undercover. On wet days they're so open that unless the rain is coming down at a perfect vertical you're likely to get soaked anyway, and on dull days they absorb the oppressive inertia of heavy clouds and steely grey seas and sit there, stagnating.

As I recall from my teenage years, they came to life at night. When there was nothing else to do or nowhere else to go, and when as a teenager it felt crucial that you were out doing something at night, they provided dark corners for hanging around, sometimes drinking, occasionally fighting and often fumbling with the opposite sex. They were so damp and cold and smelly that a girlfriend to cuddle up to was a necessity, and paradoxically our parents didn't need to worry about things going too far because anything more than cuddling would in all likelihood lead to hypothermia. Ah, the romance of it all.

Proud to be a geordie

I first saw Newcastle United play in 1966. I was 10 years old and it was a Christmas Eve match against Don Revie's Leeds. I was in the paddock at St James Park, popped up on the wall at the front with all the other kids. My dad was standing a few rows back with his mates. The crowd was probably close to 50,000. It was a savage match. The players who left an impression on me were Jack Charlton of Leeds and John Macnamee of Newcastle, both centre-halves, and both apparently bent on kicking opposition players further than they could kick the ball. A muddy, bloody match was won 2-1 by Leeds.

Up to that point I'd only seen live football at Hillheads Park, watching Whitley Bay in the Northern League. They were a decent amateur side, and well supported, but after that first match at St James, I knew where I had to go to get the ultimate football-watching experience. Which was ironic really, because although the crowd and the atmosphere at Newcastle were amazing, the football was often disappointing. It was best summed up by the fact that Newcastle's no. 9, Wyn Davies, went 15 months without scoring and he wasn't dropped.

I refused to be a Newcastle supporter, even though I went to as many matches as I could get to, graduating to standing at the back of the Gallowgate end. I was there in a crowd of about 60,000 when they beat the all star Man Utd of Charlton, Best, Law et al 5-1, and I still stubbornly refused to see myself as anything other than an interested neutral. It was some kind of teenage rebellion. I decided in 1967 that I was a Man City supporter, and followed them from afar, despite continuing to serve my time on the Gallowgate. When we got to the cup final in 1974 I cheered (oh, the shame) as we were demolished by Liverpool. I'd painted myself into a corner. I knew I was hooked, that I loved watching Supermac, but my obstinacy meant that I had to maintain, even underline, my detachment.

I gave up all that nonsense when I moved away from home to teacher training college in York. When I couldn't get to see them regularly, I realised how much I missed them. The football they played was still frustratingly inconsistent, a mash-up of the marvelous and the mediocre, but they were what I'd always, somewhere deep down, known them to be. My team. My club. NUFC.

And last Sunday I went with my son, his cousins and my brother-in-law to Loftus Road to see them beat QPR 1-0. They were true to form, playing sloppily for a good deal of the match and yet scoring a fine, well-crafted goal. The fans, as seen in the picture above, were as brilliant as ever. They (we) love football and all that it means. I feel proud when I look at the sea of black and white filling the away end. We're not unique in this, but we're a club who bring football to life, despite our comparative lack of achievement.

So now we're back in the premiership, and I'm already feeling that nervous mix of hope and trepidation. This season we've got used to winning, we've got a team with more English players than I can remember for many a year, including some home-grown, and we've scored a lot of goals and conceded relatively few. It can't carry on like this, not with our history. Or can it?

Home Sweet Home

I grew up on the North East coast, in Whitley Bay, a town that has always been a bit confused about its identity. When I was at school we were told that we lived in a dormitory town, a place which provided homes and easy transport links for all the important people who worked in Newcastle. It was a conservative (and Conservative) place, an aggressively middle class outpost surrounded by mining, fishing and shipbuilding communities. It was a seaside resort, with a picturesque lighthouse, a beautiful beach and the Spanish City amusements and funfair. For 2 weeks every summer it played host to a Glaswegian invasion. It was called Scots Fortnight and was one of those typically English uncomfortable compromises, like the Queen opening Buckingham Palace up to the punters. We needed their money but we'd dress it up as some kind of cultural event, with a sports festival on the Churchill Playing Fields, rather than admit that it was a 2 week piss-up. For the rest of the year it was pretty much dead, with the main drama in the local paper usually concerning the one-way traffic system or the ongoing battle with dogshit. And yet, in keeping with the confused nature, on Friday and Saturday nights it was a crazy all-fighting all-drinking orgy, with pubs and bars in the town centre and on The Esplanade offloading drunken revellers on to the streets.

For those of us too young to get into the pubs and bars it was a bottle of cider from the off-licence and a teens only Saturday night disco at the Alletsa, an old dance hall along the seafront. The mayhem wasn't up to the X rating of the adult violence, but it could still get pretty tasty at times. I remember walking my girlfriend home one Saturday night and encountering a crowd of skinheads from Shiremoor. They ranged from 10 and 11 year old wannabees up to 16 year old nutcases, one of whom was giving a hammering to an older 'hairy'(speaks for itself). Beaten and angry, the older guy kicked the nearest thing to him, which happened to be a car which was slowly cruising by. The car stopped, the driver and passenger got out, and then a fight started up between them, the hairy and the older skinhead. The younger ones spotted me and my girlfriend and were sizing me up as the next course. On this occasion, and on many others, I was saved by the fact that I played football with one of the older lads and had played against a few of the others, so a few minor insults were exchanged and we were allowed to pass. Thank heavens for the beautiful game.

People are always talking about how things are getting worse, especially with regard to the young. When I look back to the early 70s bacchanal and boot boys cocktail that formed the backdrop to my impressionable teenage years it seems to me that only the clothes have really changed.