Sunshine and Strippers

If you've noticed a sudden change in the photographic quality, rest assured, it's nothing to do with me.  I've got a new camera.  You might have spotted that the photos during the Cumbrian Coast trip were flawed - a hair or something had somehow worked its way into the mechanism, and every shot looked like it had a little kiss curl.

The new camera's smaller, has more megapixels, features wi-fi and video editing facilities, and is all a bit overwhelming.  The instruction book is two hundred pages long.  This isn't one of those cameras with enormous lenses that weigh a ton; it's just a little point and click thing.  All I want to do is take pictures.

It means that some of the photos might be a bit unfocussed, or oversaturated, or just plain weird until I've properly got to grips with it.  Apologies.

One feature it does have which is useful is a self-pic monitor.  I point the cam at my face, it realises there's a person there, adjusts the focus accordingly and makes a little beep to let me know it's ok to take a picture.  Extremely handy when I'm out in the sticks on my own.

The "built in Photoshop to make you look like Ryan Gosling" feature seems to be broken.

Stocksfield station was gearing itself for an onslaught.  The Northumberland County Show was taking place near there at the weekend (the one just gone), leading to banners and revised timetables.  I was strangely pleased that an agricultural show could still be such a big draw that they have to lay on special trains.

A right turn out of the station, a little hill, and then I was on the main road to Riding Mill.  The sun bounced off my colossal forehead, and I once again regretted this haircut (I panicked in the barbers and gave the wrong instructions).  At least a bit of fringe minimises my Tefal-head proportions.  Not much, but a little.  As it was, I was quietly roasting in the heat.

I'm deliberately hitting the country stations for the next few months.  While we - theoretically - have a summer, I need to collect some of the out of the way places from the Northern Rail map.  Wandering across Ilkley Moor in December wouldn't just be cold, it would be properly dangerous.  It means a bit of a mad dash to rural halts to try and get them under my belt before they sink into a morass of mud and snow.

I felt like I may have missed something by visiting this part of the country in summer.  It was warm, it was pleasant, it was positively bucolic.  I was in Hadrian's Wall Country!  Surely that's wind-blasted hillsides and desolate scrub.  It's the bodies of a thousand Englishmen buried in the churning wet earth by bloodthirsty Romans.  It's cold and damp and miserable.

All that would be an absolute nightmare to walk in, of course.  I can only imagine the whining blog post I'd have written if there'd been a bit of rain that day, never mind if I'd had to haul myself through grey claggy soil as well.  I did make a mental note to leave it till Autumn at least to collect the other end of the line.

Riding Mill curved round a bend in the Tyne, houses built either side of a tributary that gurgled down from the hills.  Stone miner's cottages had been supplemented with more modern bungalows and detached homes.  Commuters and retirees had taken over the village.

I ignored the call of the Wellington Hotel and took a little side road up towards the station.  It didn't feel like the right road - it was sited in amongst a modern housing estate, not in the historic centre as I'd expected - but there was the curved metal arch to indicate I'd arrived.

Riding Hill opened in 1835, only five years after the first trains ran between Liverpool and Manchester, and as such is one of the oldest stations still in operation in the world.  It seemed strange to think that this quiet country halt was picking up passengers two years before Queen Victoria came to the throne.

Corbridge was a much more popular station.  I climbed off behind two pensioners with suitcases, experiencing that anxiety of not wanting to patronise them by offering to help combined with not wanting to see them struggle; in the end they managed it all by themselves, which didn't really alleviate my guilt.

The station building at Corbridge is still in use, but as an Indian restaurant now.  There were workmen repainting the footbridge and it was clear that they were using the restaurant as an unofficial canteen, with the fire door propped open and empty pint glasses on the table inside.  Once the train departed, the men wandered out, scratching themselves and looking content.

I turned my Bluetooth on and nothing happened.  Looks like I'll never know.

Corbridge station is actually on the wrong side of the river - the town is over the bridge - and I wasn't really in the mood to go and have a poke round.  Besides, I didn't have long before my train back to Newcastle, and I had one of those tickets that didn't allow me to vary my journey home.  I couldn't risk missing it.  Instead, I wandered into the local pub for a pint of bitter.

Yes, that pub is called "The Dyvels".  Inside, it wasn't a filthy coven, and there was no sign of recent human sacrifice; just a single bar room and a pub showing the BBC News channel.  There were a group of men in there who, as far as I could work out, seemed to be competing to be Sexist Pub Bore of the Year.  They were all in their late middle ages, all had hair that was just a little too long (to counteract the balding at the front), wore denim or a brown leather jacket.  They flirted with the student barmaid in a crass, unsubtle way, and she rebuffed them as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

They were talking about lapdances.  Except they weren't, because it was all couched in raised eyebrows and nudge-nudge-wink-wink, and references to "business trips" and "expenses".  "Are you allowed to touch them?" one man asked, breathlessly.

"No, no, no," said Brown Leather Jacket.  "It's like being at the ballet.  Only the dancing's much closer.  And they've not got any clothes on."

There were guffaws and giggles.  "But no touching?" persisted the other man.  I imagined he was mentally preparing masturbation material for when he got back home and his wife was at Tesco's.

"No, no," said Brown Leather Jacket, then arched his eyebrows.  "Not officially."  And the men of the world guffawed some more, and I considered jamming a broken pint glass quite firmly into his spine.

Behind them, the barmaid exchanged a glance with the chef, who'd come out for a cup of tea.  They smirked and shook their heads.  United against a common enemy.

I left the pub while I still had a stomach lining and returned to the station.  I'd finally broken my North East duck; the lines around Newcastle were no longer clean and untouched.  I'd have to come back many times more before they'd all be gone though.  So long as I never went back to that pub, I was happy with that.

The Nature Walk

Prudhoe sounds vaguely dirty.  I'm not sure what it is - some kind of indecent sexual act.  And then he committed Prudhoe, your honour.  It's probably because it sounds a bit like "prod", which is, of course, a properly dirty word.

In actuality, Prudhoe is a perfectly ordinary station in the shadow of a paper mill.  From one side, it looks like a charming country halt, but from the other angle, it's dominated by enormous smoke spewing chimneys lovingly crafting toilet roll.

Still, it used to be worse.  Before the paper mill ICI had a chemical factory here.  It produced agricultural fertilizers until the 1960s, belching filth into the air and the river.

A by product of the chemical factory was the enormous chalk spoil mountains known as the "Spetchells".  When ICI moved out, the chalk stayed, forming a nature reserve which is open to the public.

It meant that, even though I was in the grimy North-East, alongside the filthy Tyne, I actually had something of a nature walk.  Once I was past the cafe (only open in the summer) and the bikers had disappeared, it became a quiet, pleasing stroll.  Butterflies and birds, the rustle of trees, the gentle dapple of the river against the bank.

Occasionally a footpath had stripped back the vegetation, revealing the white scar of chalk underneath.  Amazing how life reclaims a dead landscape.  How industrial waste churns into a green space.

Across the river, a brick mill chimney poked above the trees, the last remnants of a dead factory.  There was already vegetation halfway up the sides.  It was like the outflung arm of a drowning man, just before he's dragged under the waves.

A period under cool tree canopies reminded me that even though it was May, summer wasn't here properly. There was a slight chill and the skies threatened rain.  I was glad when the trees fell back and I was in a wide meadow.

There were horses grazing in the meadow, a couple wandering around lazily, while a third sat on the floor.  It gave me an imperious look as I passed.  One horse allowed me to stroke its nose, breaking off from its grass chewing to give me a better reach, brown eyes staring at me in a fairly bored way.  Are you nearly done? they seemed to say.  I patted it one last time and headed back into the woods.

Much of the route used to be a railway line.  You get an inkling of this from the wide central pathway, occasionally straight, definitely man made, but the railway's real legacy is the Hagg Bank Bridge.

This is one of the oldest arch suspension bridges in the world; the grandfather to the Tyne Bridge and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  A single span was necessary because of coal mines in the area; there were worries that support piers could cause the shallow workings to collapse and flood.  It used to carry two railway tracks and their paths are still marked by deep smooth routes on the bridge.

I should really have tagged every time I mention Dr Beeching on this blog; he's almost as omnipresent as James Bond.  Beeching closed this line but rather than demolish the bridge completely the Council turned it into a public walkway.

I passed over it and the river and into Wylam, a little village with cafes and pubs which is probably most famous as the birthplace of George Stephenson.  The irony of reaching the home of the grandfather of the railways via an abandoned line wasn't lost on me.

If I was a proper railway historian, I'd have gone to Stephenson's birthplace to pay homage.  It's owned by the National Trust and is open to the public.  I'm not a proper railway historian though, I'm just a twat with a blog, and I couldn't be bothered walking out of the village to reach it.

Instead, I went to the pub.  Regular readers would be disappointed if I hadn't.  I crossed over the Wylam bridge, once a toll bridge with a tollhouse still at one end, and nipped into the Boathouse for a pint of Tyneside Blonde.  Ahead of me were three Geordie ladies, out for their constitutional, and now treating themselves to pints of cider.  Their accents were thick as a winter blanket, and they genuinely used the phrase "way ay" in speech, which thrilled me immensely.

This is the signal box at Wylam.  It was once the standard design on the line, but now there are only two left, and they are listed buildings.  I loved it - such a pretty way to solve the problem of where to put a quite perfunctory building.  The footbridge over the tracks is listed, too, but that was undergoing restoration and was swaddled in tarpaulin.  I have a habit of turning up to places when they're being refurbished so I can't appreciate them properly.

The station building, meanwhile, is long boarded up and abandoned.  Northern Rail have painted the wood over the ticket windows purple, but that's not much of an attraction.

One thing it hasn't got is a decent station sign - just a sort of arch over the entrance.  Bad show.

Geordie Score

Everybody likes Newcastle, don't they?  It's just an ingrained part of our national psyche.  I bet Ant & Dec wouldn't be half as popular if they came from Plymouth.  I'd never been before, but I'd long wanted to - it was far higher up my wish list than Preston or Manchester.

It's just so damn hard to get to.  I sort of imagine it to be on the opposite side of the country from Liverpool, but no, that's Hull, and no-one wants to go to Hull unless they really have to.  You have to do a diagonal, right up towards the border with Scotland, up where the air gets thinner and colder and you get the occasional whiff of haggis.  There's only one train a day from Liverpool to Newcastle at the moment, the 06:15.  It's a six car train that splits in two at York, with the front going on to Scarborough and the back continuing to Tyneside.

What I'm basically saying is that I probably would have liked Newcastle anyway, but the train crossing the Tyne sold me completely.  The parade of bridges lining up - impossibly high, impossibly wide - is such a striking, surreal vista.  Coming from Liverpool, which also has a very wide river with docks either side but never got round to building a bridge, it's awe-inspiring.  The train then slides into Central station and you get a glimpse of that magical, sexy Calvert font promoting the Tyne & Wear Metro, and it's full blown adoration.

And this love letter comes from a total of three quarters of an hour in the city, spread over two separate visits to the station.  I didn't even have time to step outside.  I had a ten minute window to barrel over to the ticket office, get a Hadrian's Wall Country Day Ranger, then run back to get my Pacer out of town again.

I had to dash because there's only a couple of trains a day to Dunston.  If I'd missed the 9:45 I'd have been forced to miss the station altogether.  Luckily I made it, and I was the only person to alight onto the wide island platform.  I immediately whipped out my mobile and checked in on Foursquare.  This is partly because  I like totting up the points (though it gets a bit depressing when I get an alert of Congratulations! Five weeks in a row at Sainsbury's!), and partly because it was a Dunston Check In.

You probably don't remember terrible family comedies starring an ape and Jason Alexander in a bad wig, but I do, based purely on its trailer:

It's a bizarrely accurate copy of the GoldenEye trailer, and I will love it forever for that.  Just turn it off before Academy Award winner Faye Dunaway simulates orgasm while getting massaged by a monkey.  (I should also point out I haven't seen the film; nothing could match up to the trailer).

Unsurprisingly, for a station so sparsely served, there's not much to Dunston.  A ramp up to the road bridge and a few signs, that's all.

I walked away, past a pub with footballs for lamps, and into a sparsely populated district of industrial estates, docks and 1960s housing.  Wide open expanses of green marked the spot where a tower block had been razed to the ground, waiting to be replaced with more modern housing when the market picked up.

I was shadowing the Tyne, but it hadn't been gentrified and tidied here; it seemed like a much wilder river than the Mersey.  The geography of the area means that the space by the river was devoted solely to industry and docks, with residences on the higher land instead of mixed inbetween as on the Wirral or in Bootle.  There was a feeling of desolation and isolation; I was the only walker, criss crossing the road to get round parked up trucks or places where there just wasn't a footpath at all.

Passing Mandela Way (I'm sure the hero of Robben Island will be delighted to learn that Gateshead Council have memorialised him with a road round the back of Costco) the traffic began to get a bit thicker, a bit more domestic.  I was approaching the Metrocentre.

When I was young, I got a copy of the Guinness Book of Records.  It was second hand, bought from a car boot sale and containing facts that were clearly out of date ("Abba are the world's largest band?  That bunch of disco has-beens?").  It had a purple cover and, for some reason, the pages smelt of beef.

I was the kind of boy who would open it at a random page and just go on a little tour of the pages, passing from one fact to the next, following little trails and picking up info on the way.  This is when the Guinness Book of Records contained actual superlatives, and wasn't just a list of "stupid people doing weird shit".  The MetroCentre was in there, partly because it was a massive shopping centre, but also because it had its own theme park.  You can imagine how exciting that sounded to a kid.  The Arndale in Luton didn't have a theme park; it had some fibreglass flamingos and a market that stank of fish.  In my mind, there was a rollercoaster right down the middle of the mall, corkscrewing screaming teens over the heads of their mums nipping into the British Home Stores.

I was disappointed to discover that the theme park closed five years ago.  What was left was a big shopping centre, one that was currently undergoing a lot of regeneration - ironic, since its opening in the 1980s was a symbol of regeneration in itself.

It was very Lady Di in places - mirrored tiles and marble effect - white columns to give you that Roman bath feel.  I'm not sure why there's this architectural urge to make large malls look like an extension to the Coliseum, but it does seem to be very popular.  The Central Mall is in the process of being transformed into the "Platinum Mall"; the shops are going upmarket, there are leatherette chairs instead of benches, and a champagne bar has been installed on the first floor.  It's all very WAG-friendly.

I was personally more excited to find a Greggs Moment, a new concept where everyone's favourite purveyors of pig gristle and oily pastry have put a few chairs in to make a cafe.  This revolutionary new idea is just being trialled in the North-East at present, though if they want to know how it works, they could just visit the Sayers in Williamson Square where they've been doing much the same thing for decades.  I resisted a Steak Bake and pressed on.

It was all very ordinary.  I suppose part of me was let down because there was no funfair.  A little train did pass me, offering kids a ride round the centre for a quid, but it wasn't exactly Alton Towers.  It was just another shopping mall.  Not even the laminated sign on the columns from BBC Three warning I could be filmed (for the first series of Mall Stars - a "brand new six part series following the lives of people who work at the MetroCentre in Newcastle!") could infuse it with any sense of glamour.

At least the bus station was interesting.  It was rebuilt a decade ago, and has a grand sweep to it, a real sense of place and importance.

It's certainly better than the station.  On the one hand, we should be glad that the MetroCentre has its own railway station - out of town shopping centres aren't often bothered about public transport provision (the Trafford Centre still hasn't got round to building the Metrolink extension it promised, fifteen years after it opened).  It gets a good service too - a train every fifteen minutes from Central, some of which continue onwards while others just reverse.

It's a shame it's such a bland, dispiriting station.  There's no ticket office, no attempt to integrate it into the loftily titled "Transport Interchange".  It's a couple of formica clad buildings out on the edge of the MetroCentre complex and it hasn't been updated since 1986.

The bus station came with a Debenhams - their decision to take space as anchor tenants meant there was money to redevelop the transport side of the mall, giving more space for arrivals by coach.  I don't know who would take a coach trip to see a shopping centre, but there's clearly a market for it.  Liverpool One has just installed some bays for visitors, which depresses me; I suspect there are a lot of people who are getting off that coach, looking round the shops, lunching on the Leisure Terrace and then leaving without seeing any part of Liverpool that doesn't belong to Grosvenor.

It's a shame the owners couldn't have found a few grand to give the station a make over to match.  Or at least to build a decent sign.  I had to squat under the platform sign, which just isn't on.  Never mind your champagne bars and branches of Karen Millen - won't somebody think of the bloggers?