Doing Things I Always Wanted To

When one's life is effectively one big holiday it seems a bit excessive to undergo the trauma and hardship of travel to do it further afield. My days of airports, foreign currency, language and such things have long been over and memories of Topkapi Palace, St. Mark's Basilica and the Charles Bridge are reduced to vestigial snapshots of moments. However, seeing a coach holiday in the local paper while waiting for a takeaway, with an optional day trip to Durham, prompted a return to the lower end of the holidaymaking classes. I seem to have an affinity with Northumbria, this being the third 'holiday' as such I've undertaken there out of my last four. Since Japan is unthinkable, Durham Cathedral was about the only thing on my list of places to go I considered worthy of the undertaking.

As the difficulties of coach travel and l'enfer c'est les autres can now be treated with more irony than angst, it was actually worth it, revisiting Lindisfarne all too hurriedly after maybe 27 years, seeing a bit more of Newcastle and missing Hadrian's Wall for the sake of the University's Rosemary Tonks archive, as below, into the bargain. Holidays don't come much more bespoke than that and while doing such things on one's own might mark one out as a weirdo, having anybody else there would have made such self-indulgence not admissable and, anyway, I know a few perfectly good and normal people who readily pay the single person supplement.

The complexity of the vast network of coaches moving people from all parts of the country to so many others turned out to be an additional feature of great interest. My three coaches and 12 hour outbound journey would have been miraculous except for taking in the M6 and Stoke-on-Trent and the driver apparently getting lost whether the M1 was blocked up or not. Thus two three-hour rides with only a 20 minute break weren't the original plan. And then, on arrival, having to find one's key, with a form to fill in for imminent dinner's menu choices I was prodded on the shoulder and asked reasonably politely if I could not wear my hat on the coach as it spoiled someone's view, presumably of some small but crucial detail of M1 travel that one person had particularly wanted to see.

A series of such impossibly picky gripes from various fellow travellers whose worlds are presumably otherwise forever unblemished soon became a further ghastly entertainment, with their concomitant insight into human nature, as the days went by. Even the hotel manager found it necessary to relay a warning via the understandably eternally disgruntled coach driver that guests should not be helping themselves to a free lunch from the breakfast buffet. Comparing notes with my best friends of the week, they asked if I'd read all the rules and I conceded that I hadn't. They said you could be thrown out of the hotel for doing that but the penalties were easy-going enough to stop short of transportation to Tasmania.

My temporary best friends were two ladies from Redditch, among the few ostensibly younger than me available, and I was glad of them especially as they made the effort before departing on their coach on the last day to come and wave to me. What our staid, possibly Daily Mail-reading co-travellers made of our blowing kisses to each other made of it I don't know but, in my defence, the soundtrack of the first leg of my trip north had been John Lennon's Shaved Fish compliation and so the spirit of such hippy times was expected to be within the remit of the clientele.

Having to share the once tranquil idyll of Lindisfarne with so many other day-tripping hordes would surely have made Cuthbert and Bede shudder but they were no more guilty than me and I dare say that 98% of the people one sees in Barcelona, Venice, Bourton-on-the-Water or even Las Vegas are tourists and doing what you're doing, too, and so such places can't ever be 'real' any more. My pilgrimage to the place my once favourite pop group was named after was an absurd parody of a pilgrimage.

Durham Cathedral met expectations. I can't remember very much of Canterbury; Wells is tremendous, as is Westminster Abbey. Gloucester, Salisbury, Winchester and my regular backyard in Chichester are all fine. And that's betting without Rome, Venice, Prague, Istanbul, Vienna and others. It's good, just for once, not to feel the need to make a league table. What I did come way with was more regard for Bede, the writer, than Cuthbert and all his devotions.

Alnwick Castle, The Angel of the North, Newcastle Cathedral, the Hotspur pub, the Baltic and Earl Grey on his vertiginous plinth were duly included but St. Michael's Church, Alnwick, outran its odds with a performance of much charm and genuine peace because I had it to myself and there's much to be said for that. I also found deep sympathy for Rosemary Tonks, as below. So, yes, it was worth it but, no, I don't think I'll be doing such a thing again because I can't at the moment think of anywhere else to go that could line up such a worthwhile few days.