A many splendored thing

These are the Simonside Hills near Rothbury. The distinctive stepped ridge is visible from all over south and mid - Northumberland. I used to look for it as I travelled on the coast road from Newcastle to Whitley Bay. It marks the beginning of the wilder northern part of the county, the Cheviot Hills running up to the Scottish Border. I reckon I was 8 or 9 when we got our first car and this was a regular weekend day out for us. We'd scramble all over the hills, racing each other to the top, and then taking in the view back to the coast and the chimneys of Blyth Power Station a good 20 - 30 miles south.

They felt like they were our hills. There was a Northumberland National Park Visitors' area and car park with forest and nature trails but we rarely went there. We would park at the side of the road and strike out through the heather on the most direct route to the top. I associate it with my dad and our dog, Moss. After dad died I don't remember going there as much.

This is a poster for a romantic weepy film that was a favourite of my mam's, starring her no. 1 heartthrob William Holden. I guess you're wondering why this connects to a small hilly ridge in Northumberland. I was on a train this morning, and looking at the hills in the distance sparked a memory. In the film William Holden plays a war correspondent covering the Korean War (I think) and Jennifer Jones is the woman he falls in love with in Hong Kong. Their love is conquering all (I can't remember the particular obstacles - maybe something to do with her being Eurasian and society's disapproval) when he goes back to the war and is killed - bummer. I watched it a few times on Sunday afternoons when I was a kid, and the scene that always got to me was at the end. The couple have a favourite hill where they meet

and when she hears that he has died that's where she goes. Then she sees him walking down the hill towards her, and he waves, and it's confusing and great and then in one of those manipulative heart-wrenching tricks of cinema he fades away and she's left, bereft.

This scene had an impact on me long before I'd really experienced loss. My dad died when I was 13, and when I was 14 I started going out with a girl at school. We were together, on and off, for the next 6 years. When I was 15 her family bought a holiday caravan on a site in Rothbury, a mile or so from Simonside, and we'd go there for walks. Her family tended to follow the trails, and one day I had a yearning for the old days so I went off-road and headed in a straight line for the top. As I did I thought of Love is a Many Splendored Thing and I couldn't shake off the idea that when I got to the top he'd be there, even if only for a few seconds before fading out of view.

I walked all over that summit, choking on huge sobs. There was nothing. No sign, no sensation, no presence to bring him back to me even for a moment. Love is a many splendored thing, which makes losing somebody you love all the harder to understand and accept.

Funny what you see when you look out of a train window.

More of the same

I don't know when this picture was taken, but it clearly shows that Sunderland-Newcastle derbies go back a long way. I was working while the match was on yesterday, teaching on a psychotherapy training course, and catching updates on my phone between pieces of supervision. Despite the late, lucky equaliser from the Mackems I was happy with the result. It suited my current ambivalence about my club. Actually, that phrase 'my club' is the problem. It's not mine. It doesn't belong to the fifty odd thousand who turn up at St James Park every home game either. It wouldn't be there without us all, and we'd be lost on a Saturday afternoon without it. And it belongs to Mike Ashley, the latest in a long line of exploitative owners who apparently have no love or understanding of the game, who openly despise the fans and who will systematically dismantle the team by selling the best players rather than build on success.

The received wisdom is that a few wins is all that it takes to erase history and bad memories from the fans' minds. We've done all right since Alan Pardew took over, and we seem to be playing decent football. We've even revived a long-standing tradition of getting humiliated by a smaller club in the 3rd round of the FA Cup. I just can't get excited about it at the moment. The sacking of Chris Hughton was dishonourable, a way of letting us all know whose club it really is, whose club it was always been. The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers - all those shopkeepers who fancy bigging themselves up by having a stake in the local club - the lawyers and bankers who turn it into their plaything. The owners. They've always been there, especially at Newcastle, and sometimes I wonder whether it's worth caring and getting worked up about.

Mind you, Andy Carroll might be back from injury in a couple of weeks, and I really can't fault the team.
Supporting Newcastle is a thought - provoking pursuit, never straightforward, and humiliation never feels far away.

Adrift

This picture is a still from the Powell and Pressburger film 'I Know Where I'm Going'. I don't, and a whirlpool seemed a good image for my thinking process at the moment. To my loyal readers, all 5 of you, I apologise. I've been living up to my pseudonym and spending a lot of time with my thoughts, going nowhere.

I've been thinking about, and as the year goes on I will write about

• Learning Front Crawl

• Looking up to my son

• The joys of living in Chorlton cum Hardy

• How to be middle-aged

• and the rest...

I love the word melancholy. It has a musical cadence, and a complexity to the way that it looks and sounds that fits with its meaning. It's a kinder word than depression, a mood rather than a condition, and it comforts me when I use it as a label for the way that I have been. I've had a recent brush with Bell's Palsy, now almost cleared up, and our daughters have both gone back to their other homes after being home with us over Christmas, and I feel lucky and lost all at the same time. A bit like seeing a beautiful evening sky...

Loss

Two days after the Great Salford Swim Benji died. His tumor had been growing, and he was struggling with walking, but we then had an added complication in that he stopped eating. We had arranged to take him to the vet for a check-up, but as he was clearly deteriorating we asked her to come to us. We then had to make the agonising decision to have him put to sleep. The tumour had spread, his liver was swollen, he was clearly struggling and yet it was still so difficult, to have to choose to end his life. We've none of us recovered yet. He was with us for six years and he became part of the fabric of our family life. Everywhere I look in the house there are memories and associations. I'd love to say that I could feel his presence, that I had a sense of him watching over us, but dead is dead and our time together is over.

When a dog dies the loss is so immediate and intense. There are none of the bureaucratic and administrative diversions, death certificates, funerals to arrange etc. There's just an empty space.

It's taken me so long to publish this post. I couldn't bring myself to complete it, to let go and say that he's gone. I've read a lot of philosophy this year, and taken a lot of comfort in others' struggles to make sense of life, and death. I still don't know, and I've realised how much I value not knowing, if there's anything more than this, these few moments we spend living. Benji dying was an awful and inevitable experience, and yet it was worth going through for the 6 years that he chose to spend with us.

Swimming with shopping trollies

I did it! I completed the Great Salford Swim in 53 minutes 44 seconds, breast stroke all the way and pretty much the same time that I've been managing for a mile in the pool. It was an amazing experience. The water was 14 degrees, and it felt refreshingly, rather than numbingly, cold all the way round. What really struck me about it was how clear it was (a bit scary when you can see bike wheels and shopping trollies lying in the silt at the bottom) and how sweet it tasted when I got the inevitable splash in the face. Because the course followed the walls of 2 docks and the narrow canal connecting them our back-up team of family and friends who were spectating were able to keep pace with us and offer encouragement along the route. This meant a lot to me because by 1200 metres I knew I was going to get round, but I felt bored, restricted and contained by the course. I realise now that this was sabotage. I was getting closer to my goal and it was as if I wanted to stop myself from succeeding. I turned for the last stretch to the finish. I could see it in the distance. A voice in my head was saying 'Turn round and swim back, you don't want to finish' and I was beginning to slow up, when I heard my oldest daughter shouting 'Come on Dad!' I looked up and there she was, waving me along. It was just what I needed. I dug in and thought of the people who had inspired me to be there - my wife who, along with our middle daughter and our son had completed the Great North Swim last year and who, in the way she embraces new challenges, inspires and empowers the whole family - my dad, who showed such patience with my fear of water throughout my childhood years - and Pete Kendrew, the former olympic swimmer who looked after the pool at my teacher training college and the man who finally convinced me that I could float.

Since the swim I've lost my way. We've only swum a couple of times in pools, and our wetsuits are hanging like bats on the backs of doors around the house, scaring guests going to the bathroom at night. In writing this post I'm dipping my toe in the water, making a pledge to myself to get back in the swim, to learn front crawl and to prepare myself for the open water challenges to come.

Round the block

So here I am at the end of October and I haven't written anything for a month or so. I've started a few posts and then deleted them, unable to see them as having any worth. Writer's block is a pernicious condition, and today I'm writing my way through/past/around it. I'm determined to get to the end of this post and publish it. I've switched off (well, turned down a bit) my internal perfectionist editor and I'm writing. Why do I let it worry me so much? As I look now at the screen and see the words accumulating, the sentences unfolding, the piece taking shape, I begin to realise that I've been punishing and depriving myself. Writing is a way of reflecting on life, of celebrating and making sense of achievement and loss. In the last couple of months so much has happened and I'm going to post about it all in the next couple of days.

The blank page is here to be filled, not feared. Tally Ho!!

Summer Holiday

The first holiday that I went on was in 1970. It was just after my 14th birthday. We went to Pontin's  holiday camp on Jersey for a week. It was a profound, and emotional, experience. I'm not attempting irony or humour in saying that. My dad had died the previous summer and the only reason we were at last able to afford a holiday was the insurance payout. Thinking about it now, it wasn't the most salubrious set-up. The chalet was a room with 2 sets of bunk beds, and a small bathroom (I think there was a bathroom), and it had to contain my mam and 3 boys. At the time it seemed amazing. We flew there from Newcastle. It was the first time any of us had flown and I remember it as noisy, bouncy and exciting. The holiday camp was actually a pretty quiet place, located on a headland and surrounded by lovely small coves and beaches. In looking for pictures to accompany this post I've found out that it's now abandoned and derelict, and I found this aerial photo.

 It looks a bit grim in the picture, but the sun shone every day when we were there. We made friends with some kids from Essex and I fell in love with a girl called Wendy from Westcliff on Sea. That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, given that the high point of our relationship involved us sitting on the swings at dusk, holding hands and talking. I think it was probably the first time since my dad had died that I talked to somebody detached from that drama, somebody who didn't know the story and who was prepared to listen as I told it.

I hated going home. Whitley Bay seemed drab and grim. Our house, still full of memories, felt claustrophobic. I'd seen the possibilities of a world outside our bubble of grief and then they'd gone. Nothing had changed. I was angry and depressed, and this was compounded by the phalanx of well-meaning adults who guarded my mam and who kept telling me how grateful I should be for having had such a wonderful, and expensive, experience. I realise now that it was life-changing. I didn't suddenly come to terms with the loss of my dad - that would take many more years - but I knew that I wanted to get out into the world, to escape the confines of my family and my home town.

I started this post because I wanted to tell you about the fantastic holiday we had this summer. Funny where your thoughts can take you.