A brief glimpse of the high life

The depression that really troubled me last week was not the Atlantic one that caused a storm surge over Newcastle Quayside, but the personal one imprisoning me in a black fog of self-centred gloom.

This always happens at this time of year. I used to put it down to the approach of another lonely Christmas, usually spent totting up my non-achievements in another wasted year.

Yet now I have two delightful little boys who very much believe in Santa Claus, and all the joys of a family Christmas to come. Including Charlie’s first ever school nativity play, in which he is playing the key role of a sheep.

(We seem to have got over his initial violent objections to his costume, centring on his refusal to wear tights “like a GIRL”.)

So I tentatively conclude that my depression is purely seasonal in character, related to the lack of daylight. My London doctor came up with this diagnosis years ago, and prescribed a winter break somewhere dry, hot and sunny. He suggested Arizona or Dubai.

Unfortunately I detest going abroad even more than I dislike being depressed, so I have never taken his sound advice.

I realised last week that the invention of email is a decidedly mixed blessing for the depressive. On the one hand I can just about muster up the energy and mental clarity to dispense advice electronically, even when I am far too miserable to answer the phone.

On the other hand, it is all too easy to ping off a costly “I resign” message when one is simply too enfeebled to drive to a meeting.

A change of scene often helps to lift my mood, I have found over the years, so much hung on a planned brief glimpse of the high life in London over the weekend. Unfortunately my East Coast rail tickets mysteriously got lost in the post, a hurdle that almost induced me to give up.

Though, to be fair, they did organise replacements after a certain amount of bureaucratic palaver.

Then not only was the station car park full, but also the only obvious alternative car park. I was all for going home, but Mrs Hann would have none of it, and we did eventually find somewhere to leave the car, with no more than an average chance of finding it up on bricks with the engine removed when we got back.

Saturday’s lunch at the celebrated Wolseley restaurant in Piccadilly lifted my spirits more than a bit, though I enjoyed equally outstanding (and, in the case of pudding, distinctly superior) fare at Jesmond Dene House the previous weekend, at around half the price.

Then I took Mrs Hann to Covent Garden to see the Royal Ballet’s classic production of Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet, as choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan, with the famed Carlos Acosta and a Russian newcomer called Natalia Osipova in the title roles.

Both were fantastic. As were the company, sets, costumes and orchestra. I wrote in my Bluffer’s Guide to Opera that the Royal Opera’s Turandot is the ultimate test for those who claim to dislike opera, because if that does not win them over, nothing will. Romeo and Juliet is its balletic equivalent.

Yet it did not work on all. Before us in the stalls sat an immensely fat man who slept soundly through the first act until jerked awake by the famous dance of the Montagues and Capulets, an intrusion he clearly found most unwelcome.

He spent the first interval swearing loudly at his immensely fat wife, apparently on the edge of reinforcing his points in a Saatchi-Nigella sort of way.

Mercifully at the second interval he stormed off, never to be seen again.

Meanwhile to our right during the first act were two empty seats, occupied for the remainder of the evening by a woman loudly informing her male companion that it was “ruined” and “all spoilt” by his failure to get her there for the start.

So much talent on the stage and in the orchestra pit; so much misery in the auditorium. I can’t quite decide which cheered me up more, but either way it was worth every last penny of the ticket price!

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A train is the perfect place for writers and thinkers

I am writing this column on a train, as I often do. I also write emails, letters, speeches – even company reports and presentations when I can secure one of those individual airline-style seats that afford some protection to client confidentiality.

In short, I find rail travel hugely productive and always have done. There are usually fewer distractions than in the office. This is particularly true for those like me who supposedly work at home, where the temptation to make a pot of tea, potter around dusting the bookshelves or take the dog for a walk so often proves irresistible.

If I do say so myself, over the years I have done some of my very best writing on trains. Helped no doubt by the 5.30am start required to get me on the first departure from Alnmouth to King’s Cross. Because like many people I am at my best for work purposes, if not for small talk, early in the morning.

But even late journeys home are rarely a waste of time, enabling me to catch up on much accumulated reading. Before the accountants abolished that civilised institution, I also made more useful and interesting contacts in the restaurant cars of the East Coast main line than almost anywhere else.

An image "The GNER restaurant car, RIP" has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police. I wish I had taken my own photograph while I had the chance.

Partly, no doubt, because it was one of the few places where one would routinely share a table with total strangers.

Hence I am a great – some who have ventured into my attic might say obsessive – fan of trains and rail travel. Yet according to a study commissioned by the Department of Transport last week, I am in a tiny (well, ten per cent) minority in actually finding train journeys useful.

The other 90 per cent of business travellers apparently waste their time watching other people, staring out of the window, reading trash or surfing the internet. This seems completely at odds with my own experience and observations.

Is he bored? Or is that a light bulb above his head?

But what a helpful coincidence that these timely survey findings should back up the Department’s claim that there is a sound business case for splurging £17 billion of our money to shave a massive 23 wasted minutes off the fastest journey time from London to Birmingham New Street through the construction of the HS2 high speed rail link.

A project which will, at the same time, lead to a marked deterioration in service for those travelling from the current intermediate stations on the West Coast line.

The problem for the Transport Department is that anyone with half a brain can see that high speed rail between London and Birmingham makes no sense at all. This is not to deny that they could make a case for it between London and Glasgow, though only if one believes that faster transport links boost regional economies rather than sucking life out of them to the centre, as all the evidence of the 186 years since the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway suggests to me.

But for PR purposes they surely need to start building the thing in Sauchiehall Street, so that by the time it reaches the West Midlands adding an extension to Euston could be presented as a no-brainer.

The last traditional main line constructed in Britain, the Great Central Railway’s London extension to Marylebone, was developed that way around. Purpose-built to the Continental loading gauge for connection to a Channel tunnel, it was ripped up in the 1960s by a typically forward-thinking Government that assumed trains had had their day.

How useful some of the main lines, diversionary routes and passing loops destroyed by Dr Beeching would be today. Would it not prove more cost-effective to increase capacity by reinstating those rather than embarking on the HS2 project?

Beeching: the prime hate figure of my childhood

Unless, of course, you believe that all time spent travelling is wasted. But if that is the case, why aren’t we all flying on the rocket-powered successor to Concorde?

And are the Department’s researchers really on the right lines when they loftily dismiss the time business travellers spend staring out of the train window as “daydreaming”? Perhaps they are actually indulging in that most important activity for any of us: thinking. It might be helpful if our politicians and civil servants tried it more often.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

What I did on my holidays

No image of the Second World War resonates more strongly with me than that poster enquiring “Is your journey really necessary?”

If asked to recommend a single grand gesture to “save the planet”, I would close down the entire global tourism industry at a stroke.

The ever more intrusive rigmarole of airport security has heightened my already strong aversion to air travel; congestion makes the roads unbearable; while the demise of the East Coast restaurant car removes the last plausible excuse for regarding a train journey as a potential pleasure. I have never been on a cruise, but can see no reason to disagree with Dr Johnson’s assertion that time spent on a ship compares unfavourably with a prison sentence because it carries the added risk of being drowned.

Now admittedly I enjoy a huge advantage in living in one of the loveliest spots on all God’s Earth, and might take a different view if home were an inner city slum or even a dull suburb. Indeed, growing up in Longbenton in the 1950s and 60s, I greatly looked forward to my annual fortnight with my parents at the Haven hotel in St Abb’s, where the sun always seemed to shine on the sandy beach, the other guests applauded latecomers to the dining room and the children were entertained with sports and amateur theatricals (in which I resolutely refused to participate).

An early taste of Paradise: St Abbs Haven Hotel

Having belatedly acquired a son of my own I even thought of taking him there. A notion I entertained for long enough to look the place up on the internet, where I found that a developer had turned it into flats.

Last year I got away with a holiday at home because the boy was deemed too young to know or care where he was, but this year I was told it would not do. I fought hard for a cottage in Northumberland on the grounds that we already owned a cottage in Northumberland, which has a number of obvious advantages. But instead I find myself writing this in a remote corner of Wales.

Our beach in Wales: how the Tourist Board presents it

The reality: all wrapped up building a sandcastle in the rain

The rain has been lashing down more or less ever since we arrived, and there is also a scenic rivulet trickling down the wall of the sitting room. The Welsh equivalent of Bob the builder came round to look at it on Sunday afternoon, disrupting the toddler’s afternoon nap, and announced that it was due to the gutters overflowing during Saturday’s freak downpour. But later we pulled the plug on our son’s bath and watched a perfect miniature reproduction of High Force in the room below.

Our sitting room after The Boy's bath

There are two real ale pubs within 50 yards in which I could drown my sorrows, if only I could face running the gauntlet of the menacing huddle of troglodytes outside their doors, drawing deeply on cancer sticks and muttering darkly in Welsh.

In short, it’s just like being at home except wetter (indoors and out), less comfortable and more expensive. The only conceivable advantage is that the beach is a five minute walk away rather than a half hour’s drive, but this seems immaterial when it is too cold, wet and windy to do anything on said beach apart from taking a brisk walk with the dog. The scenic highlight to date was observing the amazing rainbow that formed during the violent thunder and hailstorm from which we sheltered under the awning of a beach hut on Friday evening, as our son looked at us in wonderment and pronounced “My soaked”.

An uncanny echo of Roeg's 'Don't Look Now'

Next month my wife and boy are going for a more advanced beach holiday in Majorca, where sun is apparently more or less guaranteed. I shall be at home in Northumberland enjoying a good book. Which, unless Wales bucks its ideas up pretty smartly, is also where I shall be by the time you read this.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.