RETURN TO BASE CAMP

I was back in my home territory today – Newcastle, attending a ‘clinic’ – a strange name for a presentation about software licensing agreements. The clouds had knotted themselves together into a dish-mop and decanted lots of tiny raindrops onto my head. I was protected by a spindly folding umbrella that wouldn’t open or close properly. I jammed my fingers in the mechanism several times, occasionally drawing blood. I caught an early train. It was quite empty. That suited me. The coffee tasted like gravy. That didn’t. I sat in a permanent reverie as the brown drenched fields flashed past and I scarcely looked up as we swept along the coast and over the magnificent bridge over Berwick-upon-Tweed. I had made this journey before. I left the train and wandered out onto the rain-girt streets of Newcastle. I had to find the Conference Hotel. It was two hundred yards from the station. I almost missed it. A few bored people had turned up. Some of the men were very fat. I was the only one of the delegates to be wearing a suit and tie. The male presenter was a Scot with a posh Glasgow accent and a crew-cut. He said that everything was very complicated, which it was, because he made it so. The female presenter was middle-aged, slender, pleasant, erudite, and neat in a powder-blue trouser suit, a starched white blouse and a pale silk cravat. After the presentation, I ate lunch – little pastry things with no proper crusts and warm vegetables inside and vols-au-vent which tasted like plaster of paris. The lady presenter’s name was Marion Quince, and she was an MA as well as a BA (Hons). She was dripping with brains. I talked drivel to her for several minutes after lunch. She said she lived in Norwich. I told her that somebody had to. She didn’t get the joke. Instead, she shook hands with me, said ‘Goodbye’ in a voice that would have curdled nail varnish, and gave me an artificial smile that died on her face the minute I turned on my heel to leave. I had an hour to kill in the Central Station. I bought a cappuccino and sat in the main concourse, looking at the magnificent train shed roof (the finest in Europe) and the people swarming about like flies round a honey-pot. Across from me, a bull-necked chap in a pale check shirt was reading a red-top and across from him an earnest young man was eating a pasty and glancing at a headline in ‘the Times’. He kept spilling crumbs on his tie and waggling it around as if he was Oliver Hardy. The evening cross-country train was bang on time. There was a kerfuffle when a woman challenged an elderly couple over her seat reservation. “You’re sitting in my seat” she cried with some asperity. “No we’re not”, the elderly couple replied. Turned out the woman was on the wrong train so, technically, she was right about the seat reservation, only it was a seat in a parallel universe. The guard turfed her off at Berwick. The rain disappeared as we headed north and by the time we had crossed the Border, a low sun hung in the vast, empty sky. It shone right into my eyes because I was obliged to sit ‘back to the engine’. I folded a newspaper and used that as an eye-shade until the sun had sunk below the horizon. As I jumped down from the train onto the immaculate platform at Dunbar station, I thought to myself “Who needs Sky TV when you can have a day as exciting as this.”