The North Wind Doth Blow ....

… but brought with it only sunshine. I’ve just spent a happy week in Northumberland, my favourite part of the UK, and my home when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I could wax lyrical about the beauty and grandeur of Northumberland - those windswept, empty beaches, the haunting calls of the sea birds, the sense of mysticism, of history, of holiness, that permeates those northern shores. Not to mention the river valleys with their rushing water and purple hills, where often your only audible companions are the bleats of sheep and the lonely calls of curlews. But there are other bloggers who make their lives there, who know it all much better than me, and who are perhaps less prone to the romantic view I hold of the North East, as is the wont of exiles.

So what impressions can I share, that won’t make any readers yawn? It’s quite an emotive journey for me, that long drive up the A1, as it brings back so many memories of heading ‘home’ after we’d first moved down south. The mounting excitement felt as roadsigns appear announcing The NORTH. (Funny to think that my children will feel ‘home’ when they see The EAST). The sense of relief at being among people who talked like my sister and me, who said spelk for splinter and clarty for muddy, and who didn’t think my Mum, with her strong Geordie accent, was foreign, and who wouldn’t laugh at my flat ‘a’s (that was before the need to conform took hold of me, though my ‘a’s still change from sentence to sentence). Memories of family gatherings in Newcastle and the villages of the Tyne valley, at Christmas and Easter, then our annual two weeks on the coast in summer. The smell of seaweed and fish and chips. Making sandcastles that mirrored the imposing fortresses that loom over the beaches in this part of the world. Rough grey seas with tiny fishing boats bobbing madly on bad weather days, blue green sea with white sand to rival the Caribbean on good days. Heading back down south, to what eventually became a much loved home, but which for a long time was a foreign land. Listening to my Mum crying at night, when she thought we couldn’t hear, because she was so homesick for the north. Sitting in assembly one day at primary school in the South East, singing Jerusalem, and the headmaster explaining that the line ‘dark satanic mills’ apparently meant the area around Newcastle, where it was ‘grimy’. The other children tittering, and my big sister putting her hand up to explain, politely, that there weren’t any mills there, but being ignored.

But I digress, as ever. Back to the week we just spent, and the pleasure I get in seeing my children playing, each year, where I used to play, discovering the same things, feeling the same wind (sometimes cutting, it must be said, though not this week) on their faces. Seeing them wander around the limekilns at Beadnell, digging with their bucket and spades in the shadow of the castle at Bamburgh, watching and listening for the seals on Holy Island, eating fish and chips at the harbour in Seahouses, flying kites at Alnmouth, hiding in the dunes at Embleton. Playing on the stepping stones at Ingram in the Breamish Valley, and falling in, as I always used to. Taking a picnic to the heart of Coquetdale, and for once not have to wrap up in a fleece. Standing in silence looking out over Whittingham Vale. We didn’t get as far as the Roman Wall this time, my son’s favourite bit of England, but still, a perfect week. And Michael Owen even started scoring again, just for us, it seemed.

But what was different, this time, was making new friends. Meeting people who I’ve got to know from the internet, via blogging. Not something that I would ever have thought I would do, and how weird it feels to write that I did, to have travelled a few hundred miles to meet perfect strangers. And yet strangers were the last thing that they were. It’s funny to think how long it can take us to make new friends, once we’re past our sociable teens and twenties. The first espying of someone who looks like we might like them; the gradual building up of acquaintance, seeking out opportunities to meet, the delight in finding mutual likes and dislikes. On meeting these two Northumbrians, it felt like the groundwork had already been done, that we were just picking up where we’d left off. Fabulous to meet two such warm and friendly people, fantastic to think we might all meet again. Thanks again for your hospitality to me and my children, you two, and my heart soars whenever I think of you both in your beautiful part of the world.

I don’t stay on the A1 all the way to London any more, but turn left and east to get home now. Funny how I’ve made my home by another eastern shore, in another sparsely populated, quiet land, with the same vast, vaulted skies and lonely farms. We have ancient hedgerows instead of dry stone walls, timber-framed houses painted mellow pink instead of fortified stone bastles, and stunning medieval churches soaring from the prairie fields, instead of purple hills. My heart always breaks a little when I leave the hills of the north, but starts to mend as I come back to this gentle, verdant land. It’s good to be back.