15. Barnard Castle
CC Site
10th-12^th April

I drove up the Roman road from Scotch Corner to Piercebridge and then westwards along the A67 towards Barnard Castle in Teesdale, stopping in Gainford, where I used to live in the 'Seventies and early 'Eighties, to get my monthly medication. The lady in the hairdressers told me the doctor's surgery, which used to be in an old stone house on High Green, was now in the bright-shiny health centre on the main road. Doctor Neville, the senior partner, is the son of my old doctor, who is now almost certainly no more. He was a lovely man and someone told me he had come over here from his native Ireland because there was a wartime shortage of GP's.

I    In about 1977 I played football for the firm's team in Holland. Just before half time I was running back towards my goal to head away a deep diagonal cross when, unknown to me, our goalkeeper came running out to catch it. He was a great keeper, but was a rugby player and didn't understand the finer points of defensive play, like calling for the ball. We collided at a combined speed of twenty-five mph and his sturdy scrum-half's knee met my family jewels. After about ten minutes, with the aid of the magic sponge and icy water, I had stopped screaming and everyone else had stopped laughing. I lasted until half-time then spent the interval soaking my privates in a basin of cold water in the toilets. I then survived the second-half and the massive extended booze-up which followed the match. I was staying at a Dutch friend's house and woke at 5:00am feeling strange. When I examined myself I felt even stranger because I had a black and purple todger and black plums. In the plane on the way home, while we were enjoying our in-flight meal, one of the warehousemen passed a black olive over to me and said “Have you lost something, Rog?” I went to see Doctor Neville on Monday morning. When I dropped my pants for him to have a look, all he could say was (provide your own Irish accent) “Jesus, that's a terrible injury.”

     The site just outside Barny (as the locals call Barnard Castle) is in open country on the road to Middleton-in-Teesdale and High Force, a spectacular waterfall and major tourist attraction. It's also next to the young offenders' prison, which seems to be thriving. Did my laundry then had a quiet afternoon and evening.

     On Friday I got the Scarlet Band Number 95 bus into Barny. It was a lovely sunny day and really warm – in the sun! In the shade it was still March. I wandered round this charming and surprisingly busy town for half an hour then caught the Arriva Number 75 into Darlington. It had either square wheels or no suspension. The main objective was to take some photos in Darlington because I'd been too tired to get them all on my last visit. I soon found I had forgotten my camera. The 75 goes via Staindrop, a small village with a strange name, first passing a huge housing and industrial estate which used to be a vast army camp. It also goes through Gainford, and this is when I noticed that St. Peter's, an enormous red-brick Colditz-like approved school, is still there just outside the village, derelict and depressingly wrecked. Who owns it? Why not re-develop it? Knock it down. Why leave it like this for twenty-five years?

I    I had a nice chat with an old chap on the bus and told him I'd been back to Gainford, having lived there thirty-five years ago. “I don't expect it's changed much,” he said and of course he was quite right. It now has the new health centre and one pub when it used to have three, but is otherwise largely unchanged (the Tees rolls on sedately) and this is true of this part of the country in general. Nothing much changes. 

Joseph Pease

 

     So, it's farewell, then, to Sue Townsend, a brilliant writer and a really important figure in the last thirty years. She was a major social observer and commentator. If you read Adrian Mole's diaries you see Britain, the Thatcher years, the post-Thatcher years and the Blair years, through his eyes. She deserves to stand alongside Dickens and Thackeray as one of the great social commentators and her books are a good deal funnier than theirs.

     Now here are some random observations about Darlington:-

 

1. The standard haircut for a young man in Darlington seems to be the US Army Mark 2 buzzcut, a sort of wide mohican, a stripe of short hair on top and hardly any round the back and sides.

    2. The Mechanics' Institute in Skinnergate, which has been some sort of fun spot for a Number of years, is being restored, but I'm not sure of its next incarnation. Probably a three-storey bookies. Darlington was a Quaker town, and the working man was encouraged to better himself by education and the Mechanics' Institute was where he could get it. (A 'mechanic' or 'mechanical', as in “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, was a skilled manual worker or artisan).

3. They have demolished the bus station and replaced it with – a demolished bus station. To be fair, a new cinema is going there eventually.

4. I was amazed to see two old shops, Affleck and Moffatt, gents' outfitters, and Cooper and Leatherbarrow, opticians, still going strong in Duke Street. Great names, aren't they?

5. Amazingly, there is a pub (horrid and modern but not a Weatherspoon's) called “The Joseph Pease”. Pease, a native of Darlington, was a Quaker and the founder of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and became known as “The Father of the Railways”. He was a teetotaller and would never have been seen dead in a pub. I'm amazed his statue in High Row hasn't fallen off its plinth.

Well, I did it. On Saturday I went to Bishop Auckland and watched Darlington versus Padiham in the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League, Division One North. “Why would he do that?” I hear you say and you may well ask, given the difficulty of getting there, the horrible weather and the fact that Darlington didn't come and see me when I was poorly. The Arriva Number 8 bus should have taken me from Barny direct to Bishop, but unfortunately it has ceased to exist; pity Arriva haven't updated the website. So I got the Number 75 into Darlington and then caught the Number 1 to Bishop. The driver begged me not to do it as he didn't go anywhere near the ground. He told me to get the X1. I checked all the timetables and saw no sign of any such service, so I got the next Number 1. He was right, it didn't go anywhere near the ground. I got off at the hospital (where my son Matt was born) and walked over two miles round the ring road, nearly to bloody West Auckland for God's sake.

There was a good crowd (1,012), but an icy gale  and a hard pitch made for a dreadful game (well, two totally incompetent teams may have had something to do with it). Darlington missed six good chances in the first ten minutes and finally scored through Steve Thompson, their Player of the Season, after twenty-five minutes. In the first half Darlington's keeper touched the ball once and the nearest Padiham got to the Darlington goal was half-way into Darlington's half. Thompson was the only man on the pitch who looked as if he had played the game before; there couldn't have been much competition for his award. The game ended 3-0; I missed the third goal as I ran away with five minutes left when I had finally lost all feeling in my limbs and nearly lost my mind to boot. I caught an X1 back having waited for it in a shelter with no timetable or indeed any indication of which service stopped there or indeed moreover that it was a bus shelter at all. Luckily I had followed another demented supporter from the game and asked him.

I generally have nothing but praise for the buses in all the areas I have visited, but these around Darlington are the worst I have encountered. Arriva achieved a monopoly by driving Darlington Borough's own bus service out of business a few years ago by means of various dirty tricks and now they seem to have total contempt for their customers. I think this is the company owned by a Scottish born-again Christian, so what can you expect? 

On the way back to Barny I saw a man in the middle of a field, closely surrounded by a flock of black sheep with a grey and white border collie flying round and round them at top speed. These grey and white collies usually have one blue eye. As we pulled away I heard one of the sheep say to her mate “I wish he'd go and have his afternoon nap and leave us in peace and take that wall-eyed mutt with him!” Honestly. 

Talking of black sheep, it's good to see so many pubs round here advertising “Black Sheep Bitter”. When the Theakston brewing family betrayed their heritage and sold out to Whitbread a few years ago one member of the family broke away and started his own brewery right next to the old brewery in Masham. Talk about thumbing your nose. Good to see him doing so well.

The Tees at Barnard Castle. The castle itself was yet another victim of good old Oliver

 

After getting off the Number 75 in Barny I walked back to the site, over the River Tees and up the road to upper Teesdale. As I neared the site I started to smell fish and chips and, lo and behold, there was a chippie van at the site. Fish and chips, home-made mushy peas and a can of cloudy lemonade. Haute cuisine!

Yet another good day. Early night, very tired.