A modest birthday wish

When did Newcastle-on-Tyne become Newcastle upon Tyne?

That was the question posed on a Facebook page I enjoy visiting to look at old photos of the toon.

It was the cue for a lot of fiercely patriotic Geordies to assert that it had always been called Newcastle upon Tyne, at any rate since it stopped being called Pons Aelius.

Reminding themselves, for good measure, that it had been a proud county in its own right and never a mere part of Northumberland.

The finest street in England ...

... leading to the finest riverside in England ...

... via a magnificent railway arch ...

... bearing the world's least likely warning sign

Clearly no one recalled, as I do, a decree being handed down that we should stop calling the place Newcastle-on-Tyne, which was the normal form when I was a small boy.

I can’t remember whether it came from the City Council or the Post Office, and remarkably in the age of Google and Wikipedia I can find no record of he pronouncement being made, but I guess it was around 1960.

I do distinctly remember my father moaning about having to change the wording on our letterhead, and the postmarks on all local mail changing to the longer and grander form of “upon Tyne”.

A few years later my dad had occasion to moan again when the introduction of postcodes demanded another print job, and I was grateful for his blood pressure that the change in the county boundaries in 1974 did not make him print the things again.

Because although we were shunted from Longbenton in the historic county of Northumberland to North Tyneside in the new-fangled and bogus county of Tyne & Wear, our postal address remained “Newcastle upon Tyne”.

We lived yards from the city boundary and I cherished the grand sign bearing the coat of arms and the legend welcoming visitors to the “City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne”.

The road sign was much better than this; shame I never took a photo of it

It was one of those distinctive things, like yellow buses, the Tyne Bridge, singing Blaydon Races, and displaying unquenchable loyalty to an underperforming football team, that set Newcastle apart and gave me a surge of pride in my birthplace.

Which was, indeed, described as “upon Tyne” on my 1954 birth certificate.

I must admit that I have always thought of Newcastle as being part of Northumberland, not least because of the large, white LNER signs precisely halfway across the river on the King Edward Bridge, proclaiming that that was where Durham ended and Northumberland started.

Then there was the fact that Northumberland County Council based itself next to the New Castle, in what is now the Vermont Hotel, until the end of the 1970s. If, as I must accept, Newcastle was recognised as a county in its own right in 1400, it seemed odd that it took the council nearly 600 years to take the hint and move their base to Morpeth.

(They should, of course, have gone to Alnwick, which as any fule kno is the true county town of Northumberland, but that is a story for another day.)

A claim undisputed in Alnwick

Finally, and critically for a royalist like me, Newcastle did not have its own Lord-Lieutenant, but was part of Northumberland for this purpose. Though I note with pleasure that the first Duke of Northumberland, when appointed to this role in 1753, was titled “Lord Lieutenant, Custos Rotulorum and Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumberland, and Lord Lieutenant of the town and county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.”

It seems a shame, given this quirky history, that we have not managed to create any pleasing apocryphal tales, like the widely-held misconception that Berwick-upon-Tweed is still at war with Russia over Crimea. Maybe we should work on that.

One fact on which we can all sadly agree is that is Newcastle formed part of the county of Tyne & Wear from its creation in 1974 until its welcome abolition in 1986. Why it retains a vestigial existence for ceremonial purposes, such as the Lord-Lieutenancy, is a total mystery to me.

Just plain wrong. Good riddance.

I am very proud to be a Novocastrian, Northumbrian, Englishman and Briton. But I can no more identify with Tyne & Wear or NewcastleGateshead than with the European Union.

Today, coincidentally, is my 61st birthday. If anyone else can remember the official clampdown on “Newcastle-on-Tyne” and let me know who issued that order and when, it would truly make my day.

mail@keithhann.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Missing London, and why I intend to do more of it

“You must miss this,” my driver said as we sat in a huge traffic jam on the edge of the City of London on Monday.

To our left a bus inched past, leaving just about enough clearance to accommodate a sheet of graphene. To our right assorted Lycra-clad loons on bikes wove gaily in and out of the traffic, scattering pedestrians like confetti.

“Are you trying to be funny?” I asked, thinking fondly of the beauty and tranquillity of the corner of Northumberland where I had just spent the weekend.

I lived in London for nearly 30 years, and have never regretted handing back the keys of my rented flat in 2006. Though I do bitterly regret selling my small stake in the capital’s property market 20 years earlier.

I felt sure things must have peaked, having more than doubled my money on my fourth floor walk-up flat in Earl’s Court in less than five years. I pocketed a magnificent £73,000. Not so long ago I thoroughly depressed myself by checking a property website and finding that it last changed hands for not much short of a million.

Which is, by any standards, utter lunacy. If I were starting my career again, even in an overpaid trade like financial public relations, I could surely never aspire to buy my own home.

The Bank of England faces the uncomfortable challenge of setting interest rates that will dampen the undeniably overheating South East property market without visiting ruin on the rest of us.

It’s quite enough of a challenge maintaining a single currency in a country united by centuries of shared history, language and values, when its regional economies diverge so markedly.

How anyone ever imagined it was going to work satisfactorily across an entity as diverse as the European Union is completely staggering. But then, of course, they never did. The Euro was merely a lever to help achieve the grand objective of building a United States of Europe. Whether for the noble purpose of ensuring peace and prosperity or to allow a small elite to strut the world stage with added swagger I leave to you to judge.

A big fan of the Euro, you may recall, was one Tony Blair: a man still fond of global swaggering. We would be lumbered with the Euro now but for the sterling (in every sense) efforts of Gordon Brown, who deserves to have a statue erected in Kirkcaldy just for this. Even if he was perhaps motivated less by an appreciation of the Euro’s economic insanity than by a determination to deny Tony his desired place in history as the man who abolished the pound.

But, of course, Mr Blair has no need to worry about his place in history. That is assured thanks to Afghanistan and Iraq – and hasn’t that gone well?

Invading Iraq to eliminate non-existent weapons of mass destruction and clamp down on non-existent terrorists, we have managed to put great swathes of the country in the hands of real terrorists of particular savagery. The same brutes we support, oddly enough, when they are fighting the evil dictator Assad in Syria.

When the terror campaign spreads beyond the Middle East, as it surely will, I imagine that it will make rather more impact on life in London and our other great non-UKIP-voting, cosmopolitan cities than it will in the rural backwoods of the north.

Another great reason for all of us to count our blessings and ask just one question whenever we are asked to attend a business meeting in London: why?

If God had intended all our decision-making to be concentrated in one square mile, why would he have allowed us to invent videoconferencing and superfast broadband?

If the latter ever comes to my little hamlet, I’ll hardly ever need to leave the house again. And the cost of extending it would be a tiny fraction of the money we propose to lavish on HS2, to get people to their unnecessary meetings in London a fraction quicker.

Or, for that matter, on unnecessary wars that have achieved the exact opposite of what they were billed as being for, at a human cost that is almost unbearable to contemplate.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Going primitive

I have just made an offer for a house. Or, to be accurate, a converted Primitive Methodist chapel, built with an eye to eternity in 1875.

I like to think that the Hann family will be fitting occupants since my two sons are indisputably primitive, if not knowingly Methodist. While my wife’s assertion that she is a Muslim (only ever made to callers hoping that she might become a witness for Jehovah) will surely have added piquancy when delivered from a quasi-ecclesiastical doorstep.

My late mother was raised a Presbyterian and regarded other nonconformist sects with due suspicion. She liked to quote the neighbour who came round each Christmas and announced self-righteously: “I’ll take no strong drink, thank you, I’m a Methodist. I’ll just have a glass of port.”

My parents duly had me christened by the Presbyterian Church of England, which was a godsend for a cynic as it allowed me to joke that they had entrusted the care of my immortal soul to an organisation that had disappeared (through a merger with the Congregationalists) by the time I was 18.

The old lady who currently occupies our prospective home tells me that she receives occasional visits from people who were married or baptised there. If our purchase goes through, I shall try to treat these callers with good grace.

I have never understood the mentality of those who live in converted railway stations, signal boxes and goods sheds, and then festoon them with notices designed to repel the train nerds they inevitably attract. (Though I write that as a bit of a train nerd myself.)

At least I imagine that chapel spotters are rather less obsessive than their railway equivalents.

It undoubtedly helps that the chapel is not registered as being of any particular architectural or historic interest, and that it does not possess a burial ground. Someone I vaguely know bought a converted parish church where the graveyard was still in occasional use. Although not in the least superstitious himself, he did admit that it was vaguely disconcerting to pull back the curtains of a morning and find a black-clad party clustered around an open grave just beyond his hardy perennials.

Mrs Hann and I first visited the chapel on our own the weekend before last, and decided to make an offer after a second tour accompanied by our children. Four-year-old Charlie’s tactlessly loud assertion that it was “rubbish” was just the confirmation we felt we needed. Added to which, it is just down the road from his very good state school.

We now have to overcome three major hurdles. First, a structural survey to determine whether the uneven roof line and numerous loose tiles obvious even to me require a bit of tidying up or a full scale reconstruction. (If the latter, I wonder how far I might get with one of those church roof appeals, with a thermometer-like sign tracking progress to date?)

Second, finding someone daft enough to lend me the money until my current house sells.

And finally, extricating the present incumbent, who has clearly devoted much of her life to collecting stuff in a way with which I can sympathise all too well. I naturally agreed on Saturday that we would like to keep the pews and refectory-style table which fit so well in the kitchen. Then she suggested that each of our boys would surely like one of her Victorian school desks.

At this point Mrs Hann took me to one side for “a quiet word” about my propensity to act as an open door when anyone has stuff to give away.

She is right, of course, as she usually is. Sometime this year I shall be forced to make some tough decisions about which of the many thousands of books I own, have never read and am never likely to read, I really must sell or give away.

If anyone would like to buy a house in Northumberland with stunningly lovely views and a ready-made library, majoring on classic and modern fiction, history, biography and railways, do please drop me a line.

Two unruly children and a fine pair of Border terriers may also be available by separate negotiation.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Coals to Newcastle

What phrase can replace “carrying coals to Newcastle” as the shorthand for total pointlessness, now that the Tyne is indeed a river importing coal?

How it was: shipping coal out

How it is: shipping coal in

I pondered the question at some length as I sat by my fireside over Christmas, particularly when excavations in my depleted coalhouse finally broke through more recent strata of Polish and Colombian dust. Unearthing, in all their glory, some substantial lumps of genuine Northumberland coal.

They had an effect on me pretty similar to that madeleine on Proust, transporting me back to the glorious blazes of Shilbottle cobbles that had me shrinking back from my parents’ hearth half a century ago.

There was a peculiarly dismal phase when we went “all electric”, until I faithfully promised that I would clean and lay the fire before school each morning. It was, I think, pretty much the only childhood promise I actually kept.

I suppose I should have kept back just one piece of this black gold: coated it in lacquer, perhaps, polished it up and put it on display. But instead I just revelled in the simple joy of a good old-fashioned fire.

Now I am hoping to harness the power of the press to see whether anyone can point me to a source of decent quality house coal, ideally from a British mine?

After all, it is to the imported stuff I have been buying for the last few years as a fine Islay malt whisky is to industrial drain cleaner, and I would be content to pay an appropriate premium price.

I have tried majoring on fashionably “renewable” logs but I am increasingly convinced that more warmth is created by lugging in several baskets of the things each day than my stove ever throws out.

Enough logs to warm my house barely perceptibly for about six months

Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a new generation of community micro-mines. After all, every pub and restaurant these days seems keen to emphasise the local sourcing of its food, practically telling you the name of the beast you are about to eat and the grid reference of the field where it grazed. So how about adding locally sourced coal fires to the list of attractions?

While for Guardian readers, the rival pub across the valley could offer state-of-the-art loft insulation, electric convector heaters powered by its very own wind turbine and free jumpers and mittens for all customers on those days when the wind disobligingly fails to blow.

Some will argue, no doubt, that we should not be burning coal at all if we are to “save the planet”. British coal fired power stations are closing left, right and centre at the behest of the EU.

Yet Germany, which was also in the EU last time I checked, is currently building no fewer than ten new ones, which seems odd to say the least.

Does anyone truly believe that converting coal-fired power stations to burn wood pellets that have to be shipped halfway round the planet will really make a useful contribution to mitigating the effects of climate change?

Any more than pricing our own heavy industries out of business so that the same processes can be carried out in China using coal-fired energy over there.

“Exporting aluminium smelting to the Yangtze” might be a reasonable summary of utter futility, though it can hardly be said to trip off the tongue.

So how about “teaching humility to politicians” or “giving climate change fanatics a sense of proportion and humour”? Or must we fall back on that sad old stand-by: “buying a new trophy cabinet for St James’ Park”?

I had intended to close by wishing all (both?) my readers a very Happy New Year and apologising for my absence for the last few weeks owing to a combination of depression, indolence and Christmas Day falling on a Wednesday. At least one of which will not recur in 2014.

But then I remembered that I should not mention my depression because, despite suffering from it for 40 years, every column on the subject provokes at least one irate reader’s letter complaining that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.

Maybe “a depressive writing about depression” is the new “coals to Newcastle” I have been looking for.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Social mobility - sadly, it cannot be a one-way street

Everyone seems to agree that social mobility is a good thing, but we focus only on increasing the opportunities to move upwards.

Though since we can’t all be dukes or plutocrats, this is clearly only possible if other people are simultaneously moving in the opposite direction.

The post-war political settlement sought to achieve this with punitive death duties on the rich, balancing the grammar school ladder of opportunity for clever children from poorer backgrounds.

Direct grant schools like Newcastle RGS were, in the words of one Cambridge don I knew, “Powerful engines for turning lower-middle-class boys living in the north of England into upper-middle-class men living in the south.”

Which was perfectly true. Remarkably few of my own Oxbridge-educated RGS contemporaries ever returned to live in the North East.

Though this was balanced by the Durham and Newcastle graduates of my acquaintance who were born in the south, but loved this region so much that they could never bring themselves to leave.

I bucked the trend and returned to Northumberland because we Hanns don’t really do mobility. We have been hanging around the Alnwick area since at least the 1600s, and quite possibly longer (but we were not socially elevated enough for me to be sure).

Mrs Hann, on the other hand, is definitely from mobile stock, her immediate antecedents being Iranian or, as she prefers, Persian (because it conjures up warm images of cats and carpets, rather than bearded fanatics).

Having said that, there might be a touch of the fanatic here ...

She also continues to believe that holidays are best taken abroad, despite the tremendous break we enjoyed in Northumberland earlier this month.

Nevertheless, I would unhesitatingly place my wife in the “credit” column in the debate about that aspect of social mobility known as immigration. Though that, too, must come with the caveat that the entire human race cannot live in the UK, and those moving inwards and upwards must be balanced by others heading down and out.

These reflections are inspired by the fact that I am facing, with extreme reluctance, some potential moving of my own. I put my much-loved Northumberland house, with its marvellous views of the Cheviots and Simonside, on the market six weeks ago.

I did so because of the remorseless logic that my elder son starts school in Cheshire in a week’s time. And, once he does, our ability to spend time in the North East as a family will be greatly reduced.

It also reflects the lack of forward planning that can frustrate even the most determined would-be social climber.

The American songwriter Eubie Blake famously observed in his 90s: “If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” Similarly, if I had foreseen that I would have two young sons at close to what I always fondly imagined as my retirement age, I’d have taken care to save some cash rather than squandering it all on opera tickets and champagne (the rest, as George Best once said, I simply wasted).

On the plus side, this profligacy has equipped me to write the new edition of The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera, available from all good bookshops and tax-evading online dealerships just as soon as the ink dries.

So I have, late in life, finally achieved my ambition of getting a book into print, albeit not the blockbuster comic novel I have squandered a lifetime pretending to be writing.

I also find that I am deriving steadily increasing satisfaction from fatherhood, which may finally be edging me towards that elusive condition known as happiness. Which I already knew, from my wide-ranging acquaintance with both multi-millionaires and the comparatively poor, has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of one’s bank balance. (Though at least the millionaires get to be miserable in comfort.)

To date there has been an encouraging lack of interest in my house, though I await my estate agent’s feedback on today’s scheduled viewing with appropriate trepidation.

If it does sell, so far as I am concerned, it will definitely represent downward mobility of the worst sort, but at least it creates a golden opportunity for someone else to move up in the world. Does anyone fancy placing their foot upon the ladder?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

From Clattery to Wandylaw: I should have seen it coming

My favourite place in the whole world, surpassing even Venice, was a damp two-room cottage on the moors above Warenford in Northumberland.

It was called Clattery or, on the maps, Clattering Houses. My family rented it as a weekend retreat for most of the last century, and my mother was born there in 1909.

My family at Clattery, circa 1909

My grandfather (in Panama hat) and the family business from which he apparently needed a weekend retreat: the Lion Garage in Alnwick Market Place

Clattery in July 1986, when I moved in

I was lucky enough to live at Clattery full time for two years in the 1980s, while I pretended to write a book. I will never forget the magical view down to Bamburgh and the Farnes, or the sweep of the Longstone light in the evenings.

I thought its peace and beauty were timeless, but the place is a ruin now. I left when the neighbouring Wandylaw estate decided to try its luck at opencast coal mining. Since then a much bigger profit opportunity has emerged in the form of a wind farm.

Today's view of Wandylaw from Adderstone, where my great-grandfather was the local blacksmith

With hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. Clattery got its unusual name from the racket of the primitive drift mines once worked on the moors, while you probably don’t need me to explain that “Wandylaw” means “windy hill”.

The fact that I never go back to my favourite place is sad for me, but of no consequence to anyone else. Those moors were the opposite of a tourist hot spot. Many years ago my uncle introduced me to Ros Castle, the hill fort a little further inland, and pointed out the seven castles one could see from its top.

Now visitors to this favourite resort of the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey seem much more likely to end up counting turbines.

Looking east from the roadside near Ros Castle

Which is another shame, though Ros has never drawn the huge numbers of visitors its breathtaking views merit. But then a major part of the attraction of Northumberland has always been the ability to go hill walking or sit on a stunning beach, and feel that one has the place almost to oneself.

Sadly this becomes a serious handicap when attempting to stir up opposition to those who would transform the character of the place in the pursuit of profit.

My own position is unusual in that, for most of the last 25 years, I have had my home in Northumberland but earned my living elsewhere. Hence I tend to see the county from the semi-detached perspective of a frequent visitor rather than that of a permanent resident.

I have never wanted to take my holidays anywhere else, and have spent the last five years battling with a series of dreadful summers to bring my wife round to my point of view. Last week I felt we came close to a breakthrough as the children played happily on the sun-drenched sands of Newton-by-the-Sea, fortified by truly excellent fish and chips from the village’s Joiners’ Arms.

Family holiday fun at Newton-by-the-Sea

Driving around the county, the intrusion of huge wind turbines into the views I have loved all my life upsets me, and the prospect of many more seems simply appalling. But I am well aware that my views are not universally shared. Even my four-year-old son disloyally announced that he found them “pretty”.

I haven’t yet been able to ascertain his views on the alternatives, though I hope he will share my joy in the irony that those who shouted loudest to defend the miners from “the Tories” now seem to be the most vociferous opponents of the new fossil fuel technology of fracking.

Personally, I’d prefer some fracking rigs and the odd fully functional nuclear power station to serried ranks of intermittently operative wind turbines. I’d also like to explore the potential for a revival of coal, plus wave and tidal power.

But, at the end of the day, the will of the people should prevail. If those who share my son’s perception are in the majority (and I hope not, because he’s been wrong about most things up to now) let us proceed with a wind farm free-for-all.

If not, neither central Government nor local planners should be trying to impose them on unwilling communities.

If I prove to in the minority, I’ll sadly move on from Northumberland as I did from Clattery and never come back, though I hope I may continue to enjoy some very precious memories.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Whingeing in Northumberland's noble cause is no conspiracy

This column believes that variety is the spice of life, and was hoping to move on from wind energy to opera (not least because I have a book coming out on the subject).

However, it is hard to resist the appeal for enlightenment from Mr Ian Kerr of Chapel House, who enquired last week why wind farm “whingers” like me never seem to “name and shame” the “wealthy landowners” who are “really gaining the most from these developments”.

As one who loathes balls and has never been invited to Christmas drinks at any “big house” in his life, I can assure Mr Kerr that no sinister conspiracy is involved.

If I have not swung my sword of truth and justice at greedy and selfish landowners in the last couple of weeks, it has mainly been down to shortage of space.

Plus the fact that most take care to keep their identities well out of public view when turbine planning applications are made, preferring to shelter behind the energy companies or their agents.

I have seen three names so far attached to the Follions application about which I have written lately, and a fourth person turned up to speak in favour of the plans to a stonily silent council meeting. None was the farmer whose land is involved.

Given the level of anger aroused among his immediate neighbours, so evident in their objections to the planning application, it would be fascinating to know what degree of financial need drives anyone to pursue a course so likely to make him a pariah in his own community.

But I believe that Mr Kerr is wrong about the division of the spoils. Wind farms rob money from all of us, through the huge subsidies that are ultimately added to our electricity bills. They particularly steal cash from those who have invested in businesses like holiday cottages and other tourist attractions whose entire appeal is based on being located in unspoilt and peaceful countryside.

They then transfer this money chiefly into the pockets of the largely foreign-owned “green energy” companies and turbine manufacturers, who have latched onto Northumberland as a county too sparsely populated to mount an effective resistance to their cynical and calculating efforts.

In which category one must undoubtedly place Energiekontor’s recent submission of their planning application for the Belford Burn wind farm at a time when so many potential opponents may miss the two week window to file objections, because they will be enjoying their summer holidays.

Yes, landowners are beneficiaries, too, and the sums involved can be very substantial. If you own a chunk of Northumberland moorland but live in Mayfair or Monaco, the temptation to cash in is obvious.

But those “wealthy landowners” who actually live on and care for their estates seem, on the whole, worthy custodians of our shared heritage. The Duke of Northumberland’s views on wind farms are well known, while among the most cogent arguments against the Follions application were those filed by the trustees of the late Lord Armstrong.

In our still semi-feudal county society, there may well be eager “greens” who feel browbeaten into silence about the wonderfulness of wind turbines because the local squire is against them. Just as there are certainly others who feel they cannot speak out against applications on their landlords’ farms for fear of eviction.

Personally, I would be happy to give the responsible great landowners a more formal role in the political process, perhaps by offering them seats in a second chamber of Parliament. Why has no one thought of that before?

But anyone who loves and defends the beauty of Northumberland is on my side, very much including the 14 county councillors who last week voted unanimously to overturn the advice of their own planners on Follions.

When Churchill visited Cambridge during the war, it is said that he was bearded by a woman angry because the college grounds had not been turned over to vegetable production.

“Madam,” the great man replied. “Those lawns are what we are fighting for.”

Take a drive out of Chapel House, Mr Kerr, and admire the sheer glory of unindustrialised rural Northumberland while you still can. That is what we “whingers” are fighting for.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Revolt against this madness of the wind turbine blight

Have we all gone completely mad? That is the question to which I keep returning as I contemplate the future of my beloved home county of Northumberland.

On many days the pictorial “View of the North” that graces this paper’s letters page features a glorious, panoramic view of the unspoilt Northumbrian countryside. The one from Auchope Cairn yesterday was a particular gem.

Surely anyone can see that these landscapes, and the precious tranquillity they offer, are our greatest economic asset? They are the reason people move here and spend their leisure time here, and so support a wide range of local enterprises. Why are we even contemplating the utter folly of trashing all this beauty and peacefulness with growing numbers of gigantic wind turbines?

Yes, I know a few people find them beautiful: one person e-mails me every time I write on this subject to tell me so. I also appreciate that others sincerely, though misguidedly, believe that we have no alternative but to make this supreme sacrifice in order to “save the planet” from the effects of manmade climate change.

Such zealots may be relatively few in number, but they seem to have had, up to now, a wholly disproportionate influence on those framing national energy and local planning policies.

Hence we have crazily allowed an array of giant 410ft turbines at Wandylaw and Middlemoor to wreck the once glorious views from the “Heritage Coast” to the National Park. Yet any idea that “enough is enough” seems utterly alien to the subsidy-hungry promoters of these monstrosities, who are now eager to pile on yet more damage to the adjacent fine scenery at Middleton Burn and Belford Burn.

This is the view that St Cuthbert would have enjoyed from Lindisfarne, and one wonders when and how he is likely to react. After all, he has form in these matters, having famously shrouded Durham cathedral in fog to save it from approaching German Baedeker raiders in 1942. Perhaps he will send down 25 years of impenetrable coastal haar.

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, another applicant is seeking to insert the thin end of the wind farm wedge into Whittingham Vale and Coquetdale, with an application for a 256ft turbine at Follions Farm.
This may be smaller than the behemoths of Wandylaw but it will still dominate local views, plonked in the middle of open countryside designated as of high landscape value and right on the fringe of the National Park. There could be few worse places to erect a turbine unless we intend the National Park to be completely hemmed in by wind farms on every side.

Bafflingly, in view of the overwhelming weight of objections from local residents, visitors, parish councils and the National Park itself, this proposal has been recommended for approval and comes before the Planning Committee at County Hall at 6pm this very evening.

Distributing leaflets to bring this to the attention of my neighbours on Sunday, I found considerable anger that their views are apparently being ignored by those in authority; but also, in some, a fatalistic sense that “there is nothing we can do”.

Well, there is. The ruination of our county by onshore turbines is no more inevitable than the widely predicted triumphs of fascism or communism, or UK entry to the euro. We just need, collectively, to make it emphatically clear to our elected representatives how we feel on this issue, and that they won’t be in office too much longer if they choose to ignore us.

After all, we have even got the substantial figure of Eric Pickles on our side, with his pronouncement of July 29th that: “The views of local people must be listened to when making planning decisions. Meeting Britain’s energy needs should not be used to justify the wrong development in the wrong location.”

Do please join me and my neighbours at County Hall this evening if you can. We shall come in peace, though I may see whether we can borrow the newly recreated banner of St Cuthbert to accompany us.

Even if not, I feel sure that he will be with us in spirit.

We peasants may be growing madder, but surely sanity will ultimately prevail. Won’t it?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The planners' tunnel vision threatens Northumberland's far horizons

The great historian G.M. Trevelyan famously described his home county of Northumberland as “the land of far horizons”.

Today we rely on altogether more prosaic “Landscape Character Assessments” to determine just how many gigantic wind turbines may be shoehorned into any particular patch of cherished countryside.

Reading the recently issued county planner’s report on the application for a large industrial turbine in my own neighbourhood of Callaly, I was initially encouraged by the quoted assessment that “this landscape … may have an increased sensitivity to this type of development … [and] the high intervisibility and the proximity of this landscape to the National Park suggests the highest level of sensitivity.”

The application has attracted 107 letters of objection and precisely none of support, which is some achievement given that it is never hard to round up a few useful idiots prepared to assert that any “green energy” development is a fantastic idea, whether on the grounds of “saving the planet” or “creating local jobs” (both, of course, equally untrue).

It is also opposed by four parish councils, Northumberland National Park and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, on a variety of grounds including visual impact, road safety, the effect on tourism and the potential for setting an unfortunate precedent.

Yet all these petty local concerns are magisterially set aside by Senior Planning Officer Joe Nugent, relying on advice from the county council’s experts on highways, conservation, ecology and public protection that those who actually live in and love the area do not know what they are talking about.

Because the “potential impacts on the local landscape and visual amenity … are not considered to be of such significance [as] to outweigh the wider benefits of the proposed wind turbine in terms of renewable energy provision.”

The mindset of council planners has long been completely beyond me. A neighbour is told that he cannot replace the jerry-built extension to his listed house with a sound one of identical size and appearance because it would be “too big”. Yet ask to whack up a giant industrial turbine, with all its supporting impedimenta, in the middle of glorious, unspoilt countryside, and it apparently presents no problem at all.

The planner devotes five paragraphs to explaining why the National Park, who might be expected to know a thing or two about protecting fine landscapes, have got it completely wrong. While the tourism argument is dismissed on the grounds that few actually come to admire a field on Follions Farm, and are unlikely to be deterred from visiting Cragside or Wallington.

As for that concern about precedents, once the landscape has been degraded by one turbine, it should surely come as no surprise to find that the local Renewable Energy Plan has already concluded that the area could accommodate up to 12 of the things without anyone noticing at all.

A telling column on these pages recently observed that Northumberland County Council’s planners seem to regard themselves as cheerleaders for the speculative wind farm industry, helping to push their proposals through in the teeth of opposition from ill-informed yokels like me.

I write “telling” chiefly because I do not recall anyone from County Hall writing in to deny the charge. 

We pay the wages of the council’s “experts”, yet they show no inclination to acknowledge the overwhelming strength of local opposition to such wind turbine developments. Nor, on the evidence of his deafening silence of late, does our elected county councillor.

Northumberland is still the most beautiful place I know, but the more the rash of wind farms spreads, the less this will be true.

True to form, an application that was quietly slipped in on Christmas Eve 2012 comes up to have the officer’s recommendation of approval rubber-stamped by the council’s planning committee next Tuesday, August 6, when so many of those with an interest in the subject may again be expected to be on holiday.

However, my neighbours and I are not (because why would anyone who could take their holidays in Northumberland ever go anywhere else?)

I hope for a lively debate between the tunnel-visioned “green energy” profiteers and those who have minds clear enough to appreciate the true preciousness of those far horizons.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

My prayer for a summer as glorious as the Northumberland scenery

Legend has it that the mandrake plant screams if it is uprooted. I know just how it feels.

I descend from a long line of non-travellers. The only complication in researching my family history is an occasional, regrettable tendency for ancestors to sneak across the Scottish border, so that the relevant records end up in Edinburgh instead of London.

My father only left the country once, in 1944, at the absolute insistence of His Majesty the King. My more adventurous mother waited until widowhood and old age to try her one and only day trip to France, from which she returned with the fascinating discovery that “they eat frozen peas, just like us.”

As a boy, I was desperate to see the world and had a particular passion for old buildings. My father assured me that there were no finer castles than those of Northumberland, and that I had the greatest cathedral in the world just down the road in Durham.

I thought he was making excuses for his own laziness and lack of experience. Sadly he died before I realised that he had been bang right all along.

Now I find myself advancing similar arguments about the delights of Northumberland to my own family. After four years of marriage and workaday residence in Cheshire, “home” for me remains my bachelor house in the North East and I enticed my wife and sons over for the bank holiday weekend on the Met Office’s promise of stunning weather.

Typically, the strongest sunshine beat down upon the car on the way across.

I was reminded that two years ago we spent a whole August fortnight here watching the rain tip down, while a two-year-old agitated to go to the beach and build sandcastles.

True, it was reasonably pleasant, if breezy, on Sunday at the Milfield Festival of Heavy Horse, which failed to live up to my cynical expectations by actually featuring several horses.

Though my tractor-mad elder boy was a mite disappointed when the commentator’s magnificent build-up to a parade of vintage machines was followed by the sheepish confession that it would not be taking place after all, because the tractor drivers were in the beer tent.

Where I had no need to join them because we had just been treated to a truly magnificent lunch in the adjacent Red Lion by Fleet Street legend David Banks, author of the unmissable J2 Friday column.

I naturally hoped to meet at least some of the huge cast of fascinating characters with which Banksy populates his column, but sadly they all proved to be otherwise engaged. Even Mrs Banks had suddenly felt an urgent call to go for a long walk in the Cheviots, which would have been more understandable if she had ever met me.

By the time Banksy exclaimed “You’ve just missed the Byreman!” as we took our leave at the horsefest, I was beginning to experience distinct echoes of my father’s favourite James Stewart film, Harvey. With the obvious difference that Harvey the invisible white rabbit actually existed.

My family are on their way back to the North West as I write, while I am going to try and prune a large holly tree, with potentially fatal results. As I do, I shall pray not to fall off the ladder and that once, just once, my family will return to Northumberland on a perfect sunny day when it is not blowing a hooley, and say, “You and your dad were absolutely right, this really is the most wonderful place on Earth.” 

The late Michael Winner told a story of a man who prayed each eek for a big lottery win. Eventually the voice of God boomed: “Help me out here, Hymie. Buy a ticket!”

Lord, I have invested in a lovely house, so please help me out by sending us a summer in England this year. Otherwise I am going to have to succumb to a ghastly fortnight on some foreign shore and sell the home I love because keeping it is economic lunacy that would make even Gordon Brown blush.

Meanwhile, I really must explore the possibility of adopting a second name by deed poll. Mandrake has a ring to it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Nothing is inevitable but death - certainly not wind farms

I am sure my late mother was blissfully unaware that she was quoting Jane Austen when she regularly observed that “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

Substitute “passions” for “pleasures” and the gulf in understanding yawns wider still.

I am a strong opponent of “ever closer union” in Europe and look forward to the promised “in out” referendum, if it ever happens, but polls consistently suggest that the great mass of my fellow citizens do not care all that much either way (though they should).

On the Horsegate food contamination scandal, media vox pops certainly found some consumers who were beside themselves with rage at the thought of unwittingly munching Dobbin in their burgers or lasagne, but many more received the news with a resigned shrug.

Another horse joke, courtesy of the Huffington Post

Among other recent burning issues, I have not written about gay marriage because I really could not care less one way or the other. Nor do I regard it as a “scandal” that people who are lucky enough to own a house should have to sell it to fund their care home bills, so long as their partner is not rendered homeless in the process.

While Scottish independence, though a lousy idea in principle, would have the great advantage of taking whingeing Salmonds, Sturgeons and other assorted fishes with chips on their shoulders out of our newspapers for good.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the one issue about which I do feel pretty passionate at the moment: the despoliation of the matchless Northumberland countryside by the crazy wind energy subsidy scam (this century’s answer to the last one’s plague of subsidised conifer plantations – though at least we will never run short of wooden pit props for our thriving deep mining industry).

Follions as it would really look (compare the picture accompanying the planning application)

Last week’s column on the planned Follions Folly attracted a small handful of passionate e-mails of support, one castigating me for failing to appreciate the beauty of wind turbines, and another pointing out that they are less ghastly than nuclear power plants.

Well, up to a point, Lady Copper, though at least nuclear can produce large amounts of electricity consistently if not particularly economically, rather than relatively small amounts when the wind blows at the right sort of speed.

And from the great mass of the public, I suspect, total indifference. Fuelled by the sense that covering much of the countryside with gigantic turbines is “inevitable”, like German victory in World War II or the triumph of communism, and “the future”. Which is interesting considering that they combine the mediaeval technology of the windmill with Faraday’s cutting edge invention of 1831, the dynamo.

In my experience nothing is inevitable apart from death (we all know now that taxes are pretty much optional if you are rich enough to pay for the best advice). So I shall keep banging the drum for the total madness of wrecking a peculiarly beautiful bit of countryside, designated as of High Landscape Value and right on the edge of the National Park, just to put a bit of extra cash in someone’s pocket for the next 25 years.

The last week has seen the creation of a website - http://www.fightfollionswindfarm.co.uk - and Facebook page, which both feature a rather more realistic photomontage of the development than the one accompanying the planning application, plus some interesting height comparisons with existing turbines and buildings. Do please take a look and “like” the Facebook page if you feel so minded.

A public meeting has also been arranged at Whittingham Village Hall at 7.30pm on Friday for everyone concerned about the issue. Curiously, the applicants’ agents have declined an invitation to come along and explain why the turbine would be such a good thing for us all. Suggesting either total confidence that they are going to get their way regardless of what the yokels think, or a contempt for the views of the local community that almost beggars belief. Perhaps, indeed, a bit of both.

In a county that has already more than done its bit to help meet renewable energy targets, there can only be one sane response to opportunistic proposals for large turbines in beautiful, sensitive and remote locations. Just say no. Please.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.