Limits

It's our last morning in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne as I type this from our posh renovated flat in Akenside House. This place was built as offices over a century ago with a granite lower storey (now Akenside Traders Tavern) and three floors of sandstone. Our flat at the top has sandstone lions standing aflank the windows. The view looks down on Akenside Square, the Tyne Bridge, the Tyne River, and over a clutter of Victorian rooftops. For all my love of hotels and the way they keep throwing clean towels at you, it's hard not to appreciate that no hotel would ever have given us this location at this price.

Yesterday was a slower day, and I needed a slower day. In fact I still need more slow days so I can work. I tried to do an illustration yesterday and couldn't get anywhere in the 1 hour I had. It's all starting to feel like life back home: persistently out of this weird mystical tripartite substance I call TimeFocusEnergy.

Stuart was feeling brave and volunteered to get our Sherman Tank out of its tiny mousehole carpark and drive us to Hadrian's Wall. This was easier driving than York or Harrogate: it takes a second to get outside the city limits of Newcastle, and once you're out, things are wide and fine. We plugged "Hadrian's Wall" into Google Maps on my phone and just let the algorithm decide where we should go. After all, Hadrian's Wall slices Great Britain left to right, and people walk the whole length. Theoretically we could visit the wall at many points.

Google decided we should go to Birdoswald, a very intact garrison with a cafe, toilets, informative posters, and yes, a souvenir shop. Google knows us so well. This was a great choice.

The very first thing the attendant Maura did was to try and sell us an $80 ticket to all the English Heritage sites - just to save us money, you understand - and preceded to ask us how long we were staying and where were we going? Who the hell did Maura think she was? Google?

My face morphed into some menacing artifact while Maura plied her sales techniques on us. Stuart stayed blithe and informed her that our next stops would be Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Inverness. Maura recoiled at the mention of those places and ceased all sales efforts. Those are in Scotland, and this heritage is English heritage only. Maura was herself Scottish, by the way. She claimed she only wanted to save us money because she was a Scot haha, which is a joke that would've landed if I hadn't been so unimpressed with supersizing, bundling, upgrades, and add-ons. But anyway, when we invoked those Scottish places on the Southern side of the wall, we were given tickets and sent away, encouraged to enjoy the archaeological site.

I enjoyed the morning well enough. The exhibition itself had some anti-colonial and anti-racist flavours in it that I especially appreciated. There was a cartoon of an Indigenous person flinching underneath Roman speers saying to the viewer "How would you like it if your home was invaded?" This was the same sentiment I saw curated as part of the Jorvik Viking Museum: this honesty about colonialism.

And it also underscored something about the English that I've never really appreciated before: the English believe that invasion and colonisation is an inevitable part of reality because they've been invaded and colonised multiple times. Little wonder that they should feel justified in colonising more of the world than anyone else: they believe it's either settle or be settled.

We had cold bright weather standing there at the very limits of the Roman Empire. I was really haunted by the spectre of what happened in the 5th century with the Romans leaving. I don't understand why Empires withdraw and relinquish, but I need to understand it. Because my history education has this massive gap between the Julio-Claudians and Martin Luther (which is partly my fault, since studying history in my time was like taking an empty tray to a a cafeteria and filling it with only the morsels that look most appetising), I had always just assumed that the Romans basically... I don't know... assimilated.

I was partly right. When the garrison at Banna (Birdoswald) was decommissioned, many of the people who lived there stayed there, and kept working there. And I'm sure they were governed - as Bob Dylan says, "You're gonna have to serve somebody" - but I don't know who by.

Hadrian's Wall was a pleasure. There weren't many other tourists, and not much other traffic. The gift shop was anticlimactic, which is just bizarre to me because I arrived here with plenty of tourist dollars and a lifetime of dreaming. But a 60 pound jumper with a bland screen print of Hadrian's face on it? No. A cheap Chinese notebook with a wrapping paper pattern of no clear meaning on the front for 10 pounds? No. A 30 pound tee shirt that will fade within 5 washes? No. And as to the ten pieces of meretricious jewellery that one could find at a Boots Pharmacy? No, no, no. I bought a plastic cylinder of freckles (called "Jazzies" here in Cumbria) and left happily.

That afternoon we walked down to Quayside for a beer (for him) and coffee (for me) and found a ridiculously pretty Art Nouveau building called "Baltic Chambers" across the river from the famous Baltic Flour Mill. The centre part had been turned into a cafe called "CatPawCino" and the corner had been turned into a "funky wee bar" called "The Hooch," which we entered. Stuart ordered a pint of Estrella (which the waitress mispronounced, making us adore her), and I had a Fentiman's Testosterone-Busting Rose Lemonade.

But after that, I had reached my limit of TimeFocusEnergy. We went home and relaxed for the rest of the night, eating a Waitrose Quiche, listening to jazz, and doodling. This morning we move on to Edinburgh! But it's impossible that we should have better accommodation than this. Newcastle has been very kind to us; it is in fact a very kind place - cultured and honest too.

I will come back here.Read more