Wednesday 2 March 2011

Weekend oop North

We just spent a lovely family weekend up in the North East of England. It's where mum grew up and where a lot of my family still lives, including my sister who is at university there. I love being there, not just because I get to see my family, but because we spent so much time there as children. 
It has always felt like a second home to me.   
We spent Saturday afternoon / evening walking along the Quayside in Newcastle-Gateshead and looking around the Baltic Flour Mill Gallery. It was so quiet and the light made the water so serene and calm. There was an excellent exhibition by an artist called George Shaw. If only I were a very rich person and could afford one of his paintings. 
We spent Sunday at the coast, at St. Mary's Lighthouse.
I love the Durham/Northumberland coastline.It is so rugged and dangerous, yet capitvatingly beautiful.
It was bitterly cold and extremely windy. 
We pottered around for a while, sticking our noses into rockpools and gazing up at the vast white lighthouse.
It was a fascinating old place. So bleak on a cloudy day. 
It was amazing to think that people used to live there.  
There was a weird juxtaposition between the beautiful, Victorian lighthouse and the natural beauty of the seashore with the garish, brilliantly tacky snack van. The chips smelled so good though! It would have been very hard to resist if we didn't have some amazing pies to munch on in the car. 
It was not, however, very difficult to resist the ice cream van. Too cold. 
                                    
We finished off the afternoon with a trip to a new National Trust House called Seaton Delaval Hall. It was marginally warmer than the seaside and had some really beautiful formal gardens. A lot of the house was falling down, which added a tumble-down charm to the place. We even saw the first few snowdrops of the year. 
The rest of the weekend was spent visiting my awesome relatives and eating delicious food. Not too shabby for Naomi. 

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