It was our first morning in Lima. We’d come the day before from an English winter, but it was high summer in the Peruvian capital and pleasingly warm. Our son Mat — spending a year in South America teaching English in the 90s — suggested lunch by the Pacific which sounded like a cool idea …
Recently while watching Mammals, the latest of David Attenborough’s remarkable films about the animal kingdom, I was entranced as a gorilla used the branch of a tree to help him walk along a path through dense jungle. Then he went and spoiled the touching image by braying a rival over the head with it. This …
One Monday morning long ago, a young man called Charlie Rogers limped down Bensham Road in Gateshead, wincing as he went. Two days before, this ‘ageing left back’ (his description) was playing in a Cup-tie for Kibblesworth Colliery Welfare when he got ‘a hefty whack on an already dodgy left knee’. The doctor studied it, …
I missed a family birthday lately, but there were no bruised feelings — or embarrassment for me — for the simple reason the person concerned was no longer around. In fact, he died all of 29 years ago at the age of 102, which given the many challenges thrown at him throughout his long life …
Long ago, getting on for a century, a young man visited Newcastle for the first time. The place made quite an impression, as he recorded later: “Thirty or was it 300 years ago, I stood on the Gateshead side of the Tyne Bridge and looked down into the mighty trough. On one side was the …
One morning lately we boarded a London train (‘Daytripper yeah…’) and were advised over the PA to get our tickets ready for inspection. This sometime pedant knew this was impossible. We should have been asked to produce our mobiles and find an image on a screen. There was no ticket, no ‘it’— and I wondered …
I heard running water before I saw it. The rain seeps from the peat drop by drop. A dribble here, a trickle there, a sike becomes a runnel or perhaps a rill and the decibels grow as the full-blown stream I cannot see bounces over rocks and boulders. A paradox this land of water: not …
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