Annual pilgrimage to Newcastle

Every year I make one trip up in the summer to visit my best mate from university, Mike, up in Newcastle, where he is a solicitor. This is always a weekend I greatly enjoy - the weather is usually fine, I get a lovely train journey up on Friday afternoon, and I spend a weekend with someone with whom I get on now as well as I did 35 years ago when we first met as students. Actually probably better now we are both middle-aged and portly because we have more in common than when we were at university and it was only me that was middle-aged and portly! 

So as I say, weekend started with train journey up the East Coast, including its view over Durham in the late afternoon.

Friday night is always a lager and curry evening, enabling us to catch up on life since we last saw each other. The best lager and curry evening of the year.



Saturday usually involves getting out somewhere in the Northumberland countryside. This time we decided to go out for a walk to Dunstanburgh Castle, after a fine pub lunch in the village of Craster. Crab salad was lovely.

 Then the walk up the coast to Dunstanburgh, one of Britain's most romantic ruins. Just such a lovely setting.

Mike warily eyeing up a sheep. Am I a bad person because this immediately makes me think of grilled lamb chops?

 And beyond the castle there is an extraordinary stretch of sandy beach. Unfortunately, the sort of beach on which you want to wrap up warm rather than strip off on.

Unfortunately, Saturday was a rather grey day. Sunday by contrast was marked by the brilliant blue sky that would have set off Dunstanburgh so well. But hey ho. As I was going back in the afternoon we just mooched around central Newcastle. The Tyne can rarely have looked this good. The grey industrial past has given over to a recreational area.

Newcastle is no longer the grim working class city of old. It now has proper fine dining. 

Mike took me up to an area I had never visited before, where the city retains a stretch of medieval city wall. Unlikely as it seems, just behind said wall is Newcastle's China Town.

There is also the remains of a Blackfriars monastery, now turned into high class pub and restaurant. So how much more typical of inner city Newcastle can you get than sitting in a shady courtyard sipping our elder flower and strawberry gins?