E & A in the UK: Wednesday

Big day.

Wake up to clear, bright sun in a watery sky and frost on the ground. Gather outside for a run. The air is brisk and shadows are cold, but it’s one of those days in early spring where the sun feels supercharged and the light on my skin makes me feel like I can fly. We take the scenic route through town, up over the old pit heap and past the allotments along the back way to Trimdon. On the way back along the lines the sun glitters through the bare trees. It’s already starting to warm up.

Shower and then head up into Newcastle; Erika and Austin have an appointment to get matching bee tattoos at a semantically-adjacent spot called Bluebottle in Whitley Bay. While they’re getting 😎 inked up 😎 Sam and I take Ghyll for a stroll down on the beach.

The sun has well & truly brought its A-game and the sands are buzzing with spaniels and labs chasing balls hither and yon. Ghyll intercepts an errant tennis ball and plays keepaway with a Saluki and we have a hard time returning the ball without Ghyll chasing it down again. We finally part them and climb a long-disused staircase back up to the promenade.

At the top, a man in a tracksuit sits on a step with his head in his hands, chain-vaping from what appears to be a small robot and guzzling from a can of Carling. It’s 10:15 am.

When we return to the tattoo parlour we find that the artist has successfully sold Erika and Austin on the Gospel of Greggs, so we dutifully trek down amongst the pigeons and OAPs and their trolleys and purchase: a) a steak bake, b) a cheese and onion bake, c) a corned beef pasty, and d) a sausage roll. Then we take turns passing them clockwise through the rotation until everyone agrees that Greggs is Actually Not Very Good.

(I might be editorialising here a little bit.)

Once the tattoos are finished and wrapped in hydrocolloid bandages, we head back south. We’d originally planned to visit Beamish but we can’t find our passes and anyway Beamish closes relatively early midweek, so we drive down to the North York Moors instead for a walk along the cliffs above Skinningrove. It’s a steep climb but the gorse is in bloom and the track is dry and before we know it the high tide is washing the cliff foot far below us.

There’s an old WWII-era pillbox half-buried in a field alongside the track, so we have a look — but find it totally flooded. Instead we walk out up Hummersea Point and try to find our way down to the beach. Here too we’re thwarted: the walkway has been destroyed by a storm or a landslide or a floor or something, so no access to the beach. It’s high tide anyway. We walk back along the clifftops to the car.

The sun’s making its lazy way over the horizon so we all trundle up over the moor to Egton for dinner at the Wheatsheaf, whence good room-temperature British ale, steak pies, and sticky toffee pudding. We finish up with a pint or two at the Witching Post next door and then fall into a bit of a stupor on the drive home in the dark.

(Not me though, cuz I was driving.)