Thursday 30 January 2003. It was to be my last working day with Myerscough College, though not quite the end of my association with them. I was joining a centrally-funded service of JISC, the name of which had originated as the Joint Information Systems Committee, one of two committees run by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). As a committee JISC could not employ staff directly and so all staff carrying out work for JISC were employed by organisations within the Higher Education Sector. I would be employed by the University of Northumbria which was located in Newcastle.
Until I got involved with the proposed service as a representative of Further Education, I had never been to Newcastle in my life. This night after close of play at Myerscough just north of Preston in Lancashire, I set off to drive there only to find myself driving through snow that at times amounted to white-out blizzards. This shot was taken on the final motorway services just before my turn-off for Newcastle. It was dark, it was cold, it was deserted and I wondered for a while how I would ever find my hotel for the night in these days before SatNavs. They had come out in the 1990s but the US military used to interfere with the signals until 2000 when Bill Clinton told them to stop. They then became more reliable and TomTom first released their system in 2004.
I was staying overnight in a Premier Inn on the banks of the River Tyne right next to the Tyne Bridge. Not having a clue where I was going, I asked someone, but then a drunk came out of the pub and interrupted him to offer me a different set of instructions altogether... "Naw, ye gang oop there..." By the time I had fobbed him off, the original guy had left me with a look of disgust on his face... I found it eventually.
I met up with my new colleagues for a meal in an Italian restaurant somewhere near the quayside. This was by way of softening me up gradually as following this, most team meetings seemed inevitably to include a visit to a curry house. Until then I think I might have tasted curry only once or twice. My Mum's idea of adventurous cooking was shaking a box of mixed herbs over stuff, usually to its detriment, and even the advent of Vesta wasn't going to convince her to try out exotic food when we were kids.
When first married we lived in my parents' Blackpool hotel, where Miss Franny helped with the cleaning and food preparation and you could tell what day it was by which roast we were having... I'd got used to some more rich foods at various governor's meetings and works' meals but they tended to be either game ([CRUNCH] followed by tinkle of lead shot being spat out on plates around you) or meals out with colleagues veering more towards Italian or Chinese than Indian or Thai.
Anyway, we all bonded nicely as we were supposed to and in the early months I got used to the less fiery versions of curry and even managed to avoid the treacle that my colleagues insisted was coffee - "Do you want a baby coffee?" I was regularly asked when visiting the office... My boss did suggest at one point sending me on a course on "How to Drink Copious Amounts of Alcohol" as I was never what you might call even a moderate drinker. This refers to drinks outside working hours I hasten to add...
Most of these photographs were taken around 11:00pm after the meal. Newcastle turned out to be remarkably free of Michael Caine types, throwing people and cars off cliffs into the river or running about with shotguns and I never felt anything other than welcomed during my many visits.
True, it had a somewhat bewildering road system where no matter which way you went you would eventually find yourself crossing the Tyne Bridge into Gateshead and then having to work out how to get back. Also true that it had a tendency to emulate the Grand Canyon every time you walk to and from the station or centre to a hotel on the quayside. Also true that some streets were more staircases stretching 150 feet than roadways. But it had character. And characters plural.
My work for the next 11 years would take me regularly on trips to the far reaches of the UK, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. One fortnight involved all four countries over a 7-day period. One trip involved a conference in Alicante. One trip had me staying in the most bombed hotel in the world. I taught workshops in some of the most prestigious universities in the UK including Cambridge, LSE, UCL, all three universities in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Durham, Sunderland, Bristol, Brighton, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Swansea, Norwich, Lincoln, Keele, Nottingham, Plymouth, and many more whilst I also did similar work in Further Education colleges in every county of England and in colleges or hotels for F.E. delegates in all the other countries of the UK.
Because of all the travelling I didn't want to move the family to Newcastle only to leave them on their own whilst I was elsewhere so we had come to an arrangement with Myerscough College that I could rent an office at the college with Internet access and I did that for a few years before starting to work from home. I got back from the meeting in Newcastle only to find that Myerscough was not going to be outdone and had arranged for some snow to be sent over...
