Newcastle to London. Due to today’s inclement weather (words you only hear in train stations) the buttercup-yellow lines on the platforms gleam as they slip past. At the end of the carriage, a businessman in a black anorak is talking loudly on his phone. He’s pink-faced and jowly. His sandy hair is furrowed with gel-hardened comb-tracks. He takes a breath. “I can’t say too much on the train but … Yep … Exactly … It’s funny. I’m literally just pulling into Durham now and, well, it is what it is, isn’t it?”
I’m slow to pack up. The cleaner says he’ll be better when he’s done for the day. In the tube, the escalators bring a steady stream of new faces.🪶
Heaton Park is full of birdsong. It sounds like splintered light. Two elderly volunteers in hi-vis tabards are weeding the borders in front of the pavilion. “That’s a bit better isn’t it?” The dandelions look cosmic. The cow parsley is nodding in the breeze. On a nearby telecoms box someone has scribbled fresh graffiti in silver pen. ‘I think you are great! ❤️xx’ it reads.🪶
Two days to go until the local elections. Percy the cat is hocking up a hairball on the kitchen floor, pumping his ginger legs like bellows. Liv grabs a flyer at random from the shifting pile on top of the piano. “Do you want to be sick on the Lib Dems?” She asks in her infantilising cat voice. “We’ve not got one from Reform.”🪶
Spring in Newcastle. Off Heaton Park Road a graffitied, grey electrical box is dwarfed by a plume of hot-pink blossom – like a punk’s hairdo. Jesmond Dene is a corridor of birdsong and luminous green, bluebells, wild garlic, rhododendrons and Jack by the Hedge. The horse chestnut trees are candelabras of white flowers. A group of teenagers are fooling about on the path. They scatter as I jog past. The lads (three of them, all gangly and awkward and fuzzy-lipped) walk away, laughing. The lasses form a huddle around a girl in an Adidas tracksuit. She watches the boys go and scowls. “How’s he talking?” She says. “He looks like Albert Einstein.”🪶
A magpie hops across the path in front of me. It’s pure black and white until it catches the sun. Then there’s a glimmer of purple and blue in green. It leaves a feather of liquid shit behind it on the tarmac, cackles and flies away.🪶
Howay the lads!
Loved talking to Knats for the latest issue of Jazzwise about their new album, A Great Day In Newcastle, messy nights out on the Bigg Market, fights in the school playground, Geordie optimism, community, classism and hard graft.
A couple of quotes that stood out:
I ask King how he’d sum up the Geordie spirit. “It’s got grit to it,” he says. “People don’t give up. Everyone’s a hard worker – finding their own way when there is no way.”
“Divine inspiration. That is so bullshit.” Says Stan. “I hate when people are writing and they’re like: ‘Ah, I’m not inspired.’ That is not how it works. You’ve just gotta graft. The only reason I wrote these tunes is because I was doing it every day. I probably wrote 15 terrible tunes that we never even played. People take year’s hiatuses. Just fuckin’ crack on, ye knaa what I mean?”
Honourable mentions for Jackie Milburn @coopsie_xoxo@dangray101@cobaltstudios.ouseburn@thelubberfiend Cosy Joes and the great Dave Hignett
Long live the Geordie jazz scene!
Thanks also to @shabakahutchings for answering some questions about his new album, Of The Earth. A fascinating insight into his creative mind.
Available wherever you get your jazz mags. Maybe the Bigg Market.
@knatsncl@jazzwisemagazine #geordiejazz #ukjazz #newcastlemusic #toon #newcastle
Seeing in the new year at Allendale Tar Barrels. An icy wind whipping in off the moors. The sky full of embers. Out to the cost on New Year’s Day. White horses and a wolf moon above St Mary’s Lighthouse. Frozen toes from a dip turned paddle. And snow in the reflections. Wishing you all a wonderful 2026.
#allendale
A weekend in Embleton for Mum’s birthday. Views of Dunstanburgh – wonkiest of castles. Like a child’s drawing. Miraculously still up. Other childhood fascinations: patterns in the sand and the duplicity of marram grass. So soft and silky until you run your hand over it.
Following the pilgrim’s trail along the Llŷn Peninsula. From the weather-beaten church at Aberdaron, where the poet R.S. Thomas once preached and the thick stone walls muffle the sound of the wind searching the slate in the graveyard outside. To the cliffs at Pen Y Cil for views of Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) “where there is no going to but in a small boat the way the saints went, travelling the gallery of the frightened faces of the long-drowned”
Teal blue coves, bronzed bracken and crumpled light on the sea. Footpaths snagged with brambles, hops and spent sloes. Rocks scorched with lichen. A peregrine falcon – flung like a dart.
Then down to the beach at Porthor, where the sand squeaked beneath our feet and the waves churned against the black lava.
This is the cottage where my Nain used to live (and my Uncle John and my Hen Nain Alice before that), pottering about in the kitchen making tea and jam tarts and the best blackcurrant pies in the world. Peeling potatoes with the table knife with the broken handle she always used – now one of my Dad’s most treasured possessions. She kept the tea bags in a tin from Harrods (“very posh”) from her last trip to London, around 1965.
We were in Wales seeing family, celebrating Gethin and Jordan Rees tying the knot, my Uncle Edmund amused/bemused by the idea of a makeup trial: “£90’s worth of experimentation…” He was wearing a pocket watch that belonged to my great grandfather, John Henry Rees, a miner and a firm believer in education. He was adamant his children wouldn’t follow him down the pit.
I’d missed Nain’s village. The river at the foot of her garden where we used to play, fishing and building dams. The flat rocks higher up sheltering an eye of deep water – the Ogre’s Lake. The neat row of houses where my Great Aunty Ann and Great Uncles Will and Hughie used to live. And the churchyard where Nain and her family are now. Gethin had laid some flowers from the wedding on her grave. She’d be delighted. Very posh.
Autumn in Eryri. Chasing mountain goats up the north face of Tryfan and climbing Yr Wyddfa in the damp. Soggy buzzards, spines of rock and lakes blue as midnight. Cloud illusions (like Joni’s Both Sides Now) – a hidden valley or the reflection of a hillside in a drizzle-grey llyn?
Following the Afon Glaslyn from Beddgelert – the water frost white, smoke grey, jade green. A glimmer of gold in the oak trees and the crunch of acorns underfoot. The sound when the fall: a soft clatter of leaves and a hopefully little thud. The spicy, peppery smell of the earth.
Then home to the cottage for tea and barra brith. Watching the light set fire to the mynydd – bracken and heather and wind-whipped grass turned to saffron, burnt ochre and rust.
#travelsketches #autumncolours #wales
