Newcastle

Nice city, Newcastle. Loads of bridges; I don’t know why there are so many here so close together, it’s like they cost nothing…and -perhaps due to Newcastle’s history as a ship-building town- they old ones are all astonishingly tall and grand, and the more modern one’s are the fancy type that open up.

Newcastle was especially impressive after our painful 24 hours in Coventry, and the bleak bus trip through some of the Midland cities like Manchester and Birmingham and Leeds. Actually Leeds seemed like it had some nice areas and a good thriving subculture or two, but what we saw of Man and Birmingham was the endless broken grey of industrial parks and housing estates, and it was easy to imagine their interiors like Coventry’s: a mismatch of severe post-war architecture, wide ring roads that totally disrupt the city centre and got us lost at least three times, all the shops closing early and perhaps a tenth of them closed for good, their windows reflecting blackly with their emptiness or Closing Down Sale! posters fading gently in the pale sun…

sheesh. But Newcastle is much nicer! Lots of coffee shops and hostels and vegan-friendly cafes and weird bookstores which had me fawning over comics and Daniel ogling the latest expansion of Magic: the Gathering. Daniel literally pulled me out of tue store by the arm. The local events list is full of exciting shows and interesting exhibitions. There’s a potentially good night out in our very street with some dubstep, and Skrillex is playing a sold-out show tomorrow night. I had only heard vaguely of Skrillex before Daniel shared with me this hilarious trolling article: http://christwire.org/2012/02/skrillex-uses-satanic-and-homosexual-influence-to-win-grammys/

Hadrian’s Wall

Or as iPad would say, Hardpan’s Wall. It’s a nice quick trip on the bus out of Newcastle and into the gleaming countryside: the light fantastic, creating that fingers-of-heaven rays of sunlight thing, but the clouds had altered and the sun dipped almost to the horizon by the time we got to the wall. We got off the bus at a village called Heddon-on-the-Wall, instructed by two lovely elderly locals who sat at the front of our bus. All the little lanes of houses were called Marius avenue or Antonine Way and such; Hadrian’s Wall begins just metres from one if the small-holdings, drizzling down the meadow like a length of giant rope or a desiccated snake. At only about 150 metres long, this is one of the longest remaining stretches of the wall that was built at its thickest, 3 metre-wide, dimension. At the beginning and end of the stretch of visible wall the ancient stones are only one piece high, and sometimes only one wide as well; in the middle the stones rise and fall, filling out the wall to five or six stones high, and then back down again. Daniel says the wall would have been up to seven metres tall, originally, and pointed out the two metre deep ditch that ran parallel a few paces from the wall. He demonstrated where the pike fence of wooden spikes would have been laid, and parodied a Northern barbarian rushing the up to the wall. We walked up and down and discussed whether we’d rather travel into the past or the future.

Then we noticed signs of insidious moles which the Romans were ineffectively keeping out of the Empire. Then we kicked some molehills.

Out of interest, I think that the Viking age and the early 19th century, for example were definitely interesting times and remain fascinating to study, but daily life not so much. Fatally tedious or outright deadly, really. I’d much rather travel forward into the Culture, where I could live for two hundred years, change my sex, gland any drug I feel like and slowly skim the galaxy on a giant city-ship.

Alnwick castle, a magnificently intact 15th century castle surrounded by tended gardens, was unfortunately closed until March -it might even be the 31st of March I think- and our only option was to tour the grounds and FREAKING AWESOME treehouse, but it’s a two hour round trip and would cost probably £40, and it’s probably really disappointing in person…that reminds me: today Daniel cryptically said “rotten berries” in response to some opinion of mine. After a while we worked out he meant “sour grapes,” but far be it from me to stifle his linguistic creativity.