Life and dearth in Britain: Newcastle

I hadn’t been to Newcastle in a decade. On Friday I found myself at the University of Northumbria, giving a lecture on how the technological changes in the media were affecting our jobs as journalists.

An energised and vibrant place, the lecture hall was packed with people from both universities and from the city.

Newcastle itself seems to have done much to slay the tyrannical impact of the car nurtured in the 1960s by the visionary but ultimately convicted T Dan Smith, who wove the most ghastly highway around and through the city. The presence of 70,000 or more students has given the place a new lease of life.

Walking the hills around Alston on Saturday in balmy spring sunshine. By lunchtime the drizzle had set in on this Pennine town, giving the place an air of deep recession. No-one moved in any of the remaining shops – the newsagent has closed down and a couple of other shops, too.

February is not the best month to test a place so dependent on tourism. But the locals hope that a 23 per cent fall in holidays in Spain will bring them here. I wonder.

Sadly, on my way home someone had committed suicide on the line outside Durham. The train was delayed two hours. The tedium was broken by rugby fans who’d been to see Italy play rugby with Scotland – my, they manage to get through a lot of cans!

A consultant anaesthetist from East Anglia engaged me on the subject of eye surgery in Bury St Edmonds (no waiting list). He opined that Italians were getting better at rugby, too.

Alston photograph courtesy Brin Pinzgauer