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.

Blue Monday

Just under 15 years ago we went to Cornwall on holiday. We stayed in a hotel which had been voted the UK's best for children and families the year before. Unlike many of our family holidays, I don't remember it with any great fondness. I got food poisoning and five of us (including an 8 month old who wasn't in the most user friendly sleep pattern) were in the one room. It was a very nice room but it still became like a pressure cooker as the week went on. I do remember being out and about under grey skies, visiting St Michael's Mount and Mousehole, and driving through Newquay on a sunny bank holiday Monday with squadrons of teenagers armed with super soakers firing water into every open car window they spotted. Our kids thought it was hilarious when a blast caught me full in the right ear. Looking back, I think I was going through an early midlife crisis, bound up in worries about money and responsibility, growing up and growing old. I think the grey clouds I remember were my own creation, following me around all week and maintaining a steady drizzle of self-doubt.

Oh dear. I hadn't expected this piece to go in that direction. And maybe it is important that it did, because something tangible and good came out of that gloom. I learned and resolved to never again be a miserable sod on holiday, and we visited a National Trust property and bought a scrawny little shrub. The house was Trerice. It was a small (by stately home standards) Elizabethan manor house and I remember how friendly the staff were to our children, what a warm, welcoming and homely feel the place had.

The shrub we bought was a ceanothus, and when we got back home we planted it against the sunniest wall in our garden and watched it grow. It thrived, bushing out and growing taller, bursting into an intense blue flowery cloud in the early summer, and after eight or nine years it was so large and solid looking that I suggested that we cut off the lower foliage and turn it into a tree that we could sit under. And that's what we did. You can see the result in the picture, our own blue grotto. It could become a nuisance when the flowers faded and died, covering anybody who brushed against it in a coating of blue-grey dandruff, but that was a small price to pay for the peacock splendour of its full bloom.

Disaster struck during the winter. The snow that was with us throughout January was something we'd never experienced during our time living here. It was exciting and spectacular, and it proved too much for the ceanothus. My idea of turning it into a tree, with its skinny trunk topped by an afro of branches and foliage, meant that it was top heavy and ill-equipped to cope with the weight of sustained heavy snowfall. One day my wife and daughter were looking out of the kitchen window when they heard a crack, and the largest of the branches collapsed into next door's garden. When I went out to look at the damage there were splits through all the branches. On Sunday I finally accepted the inevitable and began the process of cutting it down. On Monday morning I opened the curtains and looked out at the sad, savaged stump. The garden looks lost without it.

And, on reflection, I feel ok. The garden will recover. We've got an opportunity now to plant something new. The blues that I experienced 15 years ago are gone, the children are growing (the baby is now shaving) and moving out into the world, and I'm looking forward to summer, holidays, gardening and whatever new opportunities life throws up.

A good 'Read'

This is a tentative step. I realise I have so much admiration for bloggers. They make it look so easy. Now that I've put myself in this position and I'm having to write I'm really aware of the advice that Neil Gaiman gave in the 10 rules for writers feature in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago 'put one word after another, find the right word, put it down'. It's as simple, and painful, as that. What prompted me to start this blog was a visit to Sam Read's bookshop in Grasmere. As you can see it's a classic corner shop, devoted to books, and it's a browser's paradise. I've not got anything against the high street bookshop chains - I mourn the passing of Borders - but their symbiotic relationship with the bestsellers lists and tables full of 3 for 2 deals somehow mean that they are less interesting, accessible and rich in choices than this treasure chest. There was a startling range of interesting titles for each subject area, and it was more than that. It was the sense that each book had been hand-picked, that the guiding principle of the place is a love of the printed and bound word. The smell of paper, ink and wooden shelves took me back to childhood, and to student days in York when there were booksellers on the Shambles and Gillygate, streets which are now devoted to tourist ephemera.

I realised how much I love places like that little bookshop and Chorlton Bookshop, a similar independent emporium close to my home in Manchester , and how at risk they probably are in the age of Amazon, Abebooks and Waterstones. I fear for them in these commercial, corporate times and I admire their character and their individuality. Chorlton Bookshop is so low tech that it doesn't have a website, so I've linked to a review website giving some details. In one of the reviews somebody makes the point that they bought a book for full cover price there and they could have bought it for half-price at the airport, and I guess there's so much in that story. I am a creature of habit and I like the ubiquitous presence of W H Smith at stations and airports, but when I buy a book from a small independent retailer I feel more involved in the whole process, the journey from writer to reader. It feels like choices have been made at every step of the way and now I'm choosing, and supporting the craft of the bookseller. I've never felt like that in a chainstore.

So, in Sam Read's I bought Robert Macfarlane's 'The Wild Places', and writing this has fired me up so I'm now going to Chorlton Bookshop to do my bit to preserve individuality, creativity and independence.