What's this? Another weekend away?

The latest in a series of weekends away designed to foster a feeling of community ~ and a feeling you’d never be able to walk again ~ was a trip to the northeast organised mainly by Anna and Bernice, with Ian Trencher doing the fetching and carrying. The numbers may have been down on the previous not least because of the distance, however, added to in my own case by half an hour due a right turn I blame Anna for us failing to take:

Nonetheless we arrived Friday evening last to find a village lost in time, with a feeling that at any moment you might be run down by a character from Midsomer Murders in an open-top MG Midget:

The hostel itself a relic from the 1930s and incorporated within a building dating back a full four hundred years, which I think you could tell from the flooring in the bar:

Nonetheless once installed there would be adequate room for lounging around, and not least over a pizza the establishment would pride itself upon:

The following morning there would be the occasional dispute over which of the half-dozen nearest parkruns ought to be tackled, which led to a frostier breakfast than was expected and that wasn’t just the cereal:

Nonetheless in the end due fake news as to parking facilities at Ushaw (turning out to be 200 metres away and not the advertised 2000), there would be a contingent both there and at Prudhoe along the Derwent river. And I get to choose which is the bigger photo…

Meantimes with the option to tour Ushaw afterward, Florence would surprise us with what was likely the first and only time that Bohemian Rhapsody would be played in the Catholic chapel designed by Pugin. (Later at Beamish’s museum, Florence would marry a coal-miner and settle down to life as a pianoforte tutor):

As a supplementary attraction at Ushaw, imagine how delighted Ian and I were to find one hundred and fifty wedding gowns displayed throughout the building, memorably outlined with expert eyes by Ian as ‘Looking all’t same…’. Here they are modelled by Henry VIII’s six wives, or what was left of them:

Most of us would reconvene at Beamish’s living museum of northern life afterward, where I would be given a twelve-hour shift down’t pit for turning in a 00:31:52 parkrun earlier:

The idea of the museum came from Scandinavia and involves the recreation of the past with the painstaking re-building of local historic buildings on-site. Here a number of us are posing in front of the final selection of locomotive for the forthcoming HS2 line:

And what better way to round off the visit than a game of bowls at the inter-war pavilion, where Ian would show how a lifetime of living adjacent Billinge’s green would pay off:

Best thing being too that by and large, the sun had shone throughout as modelled here by Paul and Ursula, each of whom are sponsored on the parkrun by Ray-Ban:

Saturday evening itself, a meal at the nearby Derwent Arms, where Andy was good enough to pay the bill and paid for it afterward with having to WhatsApp thirteen more diners over the following week:

The only setback throughout the course of the weekend was the fact the guests in Room 6 would literally be haunted by ‘The Woman in Blue’ and Florence in particular never quite the same again ~ or at least until the proprietor pointed out this has been Hamda asleep in an LED face-mask:

That said though there was a reviving breakfast buffet arranged by Bernice in the Common Room, to which Ian would add his legendary sausages and Ursula her skills at dish-washing:

Thereafter there would be few of us left, at least two seen here headed for Donegal via the ferry at Stranraer:

Meantimes some of us were not let off quite so easily, pressed into circumnavigating the Derwent reservoir along a route advertised as nine miles long that turned out to be over thirteen… although it did take in the delightful model medieval village of Blanchland that would give Castle Combe a run for its money:

All in all there a weekend that lived up to past standards in every respect, and a shame to be back at work Monday. Except maybe for me, or those in Donegal…

Colin🖤💛