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 …
Ernie, the retired racehorse, stands sleepily in a stall, his mouth clamped wide open, ready to have a troublesome tooth extracted. It’s another busy day for James Marshall, who looks after the teeth of thousands of horses every year in his role as one of the North East’s leading equine dentists. “Open a bit wider …
It was during the 1980s when 68-year-old Steve Ellwood started taking photographs of Newcastle’s architecture. “As a result of the mass demolition of buildings in Newcastle to make way for the Eldon Square Shopping Centre, I started to find it difficult to recall some of the buildings that I had witnessed pre 1970s,” he says. …
A slip on the ski slopes proved to be a lucky break for Teesside engineer-turned-author Fiona Erskine. After a career spanning 30 years at the forefront of chemical engineering, Fiona decided to put pen to paper and create a jet-setting explosives expert — and that expert would be a woman. It took a skiing accident …
There can be few greater tests of resilience than the world of football. But as newly appointed college principal and chief executive of Bishop Auckland College Group Shaun Hope is discovering the skills he developed in the game are crossing into education. “When you are growing up with football you don’t realise the lessons you …
For the boy growing up in Shakespeare Avenue in the South Tyneside town of Hebburn, not even the Bard could have imagined the drama of the life which lay in store for the youngster. Dominic Bruce, born in Hebburn in 1915, made 17 escape attempts as a prisoner of war of the Germans. During the …
Thomas Jackson is a full-time photographer who specialises in capturing live events. A former software developer for the NHS (‘photography is a lot more interesting!’), the County Durham-bred and now Gateshead-dwelling 42-year-old is the top man at Tynesight Media. Although he can’t remember the first photo he took for sure, there’s an old pack of …
Billy Taylor’s off to Germany next week, playing in an emo band fronted by Thomas Nicholas — the actor best known for playing Kevin Myers in American Pie. Prior to that he recorded the guitar parts for the latest series of top-rated ITV show The Masked Singer. And later this year he’ll be hitting the …
Victoria Conner laughs as she recalls her father’s impassioned advice when she was contemplating going into business. “You need to get yourself into coffins – there’s money in coffins,” he would tell her. But Victoria was not keen, replying. “Dad, I wouldn’t trust myself. What if someone fell out the bottom?” Instead, Victoria runs a …
It was during the Miners’ Strike of 1984 that the paths of filmmaker Ken Loach and pitman’s daughter Heather Wood crossed. Ken says: “We were filming in the colliery club in Easington where women had set up one of the many canteens that provided free meals for striking miners and their families.” Heather and her …
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