Three years ago, feeling much like a hedgehog staring into headlights, I wrote about exponential growth, at the point where UK hospital cases from COVID were doubling every 4 days due to a colossal failure of government to do anything about it. Eventually they did, far too late, causing many unnecessary deaths in the UK.

Two years ago, soon after getting my first vaccination, I wrote some reflections about how much everything had changed, and how the government had lifted its restrictions far too early, causing many more unecessary deaths. Last year I was taking a break from this blog and didn't write anything; in any case, COVID was feeling like the new normal. By this time last year, I had been vaccinated twice and had one booster; I had also travelled internationally.

I hadn't been abroad since my trip to NYC in 2019 for the Stonewall 50 march, but in December 2021 I flew to Paris. While I was there, the UK government finally decided to take action on the growing COVID surge (far too late – is a theme emerging yet?) and changed its travel restrictions while I was abroad, requiring me to get a PCR test before travelling back. This was a deeply strange experience for several reasons, not least because if I had tested positive, I would have been denied entry to my own home country – an odd feeling.

I hadn't yet caught COVID, but about a year ago, the government scrapped all commercial and travel restrictions due to COVID, so naturally it began to circulate more. Further, people mostly stopped wearing masks, which would slow its spread (and is still recommended by the World Heath Organisation). I have continued to mask in supermarkets and on public transport, but finally caught COVID in October 2023, on a trip to London – I believe I caught it on the train on the way there or coming back, since that's the time you sit next to strangers for 3 hours, and I was unmasked part of that time to eat and drink. It was a horrible experience, with a temperature of 39.5, coughing all day and all night for several days, and with two occasions where my windpipe was completely blocked and I seemed to be moments away from passing out and potentially dying.

As I write this, I have COVID for the second time, and it's been more like the less scary experience that younger colleagues have talked about – with symptoms milder, in fact, than those following my very first COVID vaccination. Once again, it came on a few days after one of my regular work trips to London, and perhaps I caught it on the train again. Certainly, there have been fewer and fewer people in London wearing masks every time I've gone, to the point where I'm now usually the only person wearing one on a crowded tube platform or train.

So this, it would seem is the new normal: we have decided to pretend COVID-19 doesn't exist, and that the increased days lost due to sickness are unavoidable, and that the deaths due to it (mostly the elderly and clinically vulnerable) are acceptable. COVID-related deaths in the UK are just about to hit 200,000.

But now we are into the fourth year of COVID, and at some point the ONS will have to stop using the pre-COVID 5 year average. And then thousands of people dying of COVID every month will truly be normalised. We could cut this down by everyone wearing masks, but apparently we as a society can't be bothered. When historians close the chapter on this period in history, our response to COVID-19, like our response to climate science, will be remembered and we will not come out of it well.

Three years ago, the data showed that infections go down when you stop people mingling, then start to climb again when you let them again. That's still true. If we really wanted to stop COVID killing people (and it's clear at this point that we do not), we'd develop a rapid-deployment braking system in which, whenever a surge started, we'd close down venues where the public get together too densely, at short notice, for short periods. Restaurants, supermarkets, libraries and other public places would be required to deploy their distancing and one-way systems in these periods. They could be compensated by the government using the money saved from hospitals not having to deal with surges of hospitalisations from COVID. In this technological society, where taxi companies can routinely deploy “surge pricing”, we could easily achieve this. The fact that we haven't got the will to save lives when we easily could, is damning.

I'm starting to feel like the emphasis on individual convenience over the public good is feeling a lot like the “no such thing as society” 1980s. We're overdue for a swing back the other way.

What makes a place, a place? Can somewhere be a place if it doesn’t have a name?

If you asked anyone who lives in Newcastle where Shieldfield is, my guess is most people would know. It’s close to the city centre, and nowadays lots of students live there. But if you asked people where Battle Field is, my impression is that few people have heard of it. On maps, it’s the area south and east of Shieldfield, but the name doesn’t seem to be in common currency. Meanwhile, when I tell people I live in a place called Quayside, everyone knows where that is, even though the name doesn’t appear on most maps.

Does having a history make a place, then? Shieldfield appears on early medieval maps; I have read that the name denotes a shelter in a clearing. Battlefield sounds like it could be medieval too, but it isn’t. Here’s a fragment of a map from 1833. The building numbered 58 is St. Ann’s Church, and to the north of it (north is about 30° clockwise from vertical on this map), east of Elwicks Lane, are nothing but fields.

What I’ve always found especially interesting about this 1833 map is that it shows some proposed roads, some of which were built and some weren’t. On this excerpt you can see the proposed route of Byker Bridge, which wasn’t built until 1878.

Then for comparison, here’s the OS map of about 1900. (Open the image in a new tab to see it in more detail.)

On the left-hand edge of the map, Elwicks Lane has been renamed Crawhall Road, and to the east of it is a built-up area named Battle Field. Where did that come from?

The answer lies just to the east, in Ouseburn valley. Before big, heavy industries came to Newcastle, rather late in the Industrial Revolution, smaller industries were springing up, many of them along the Ouseburn, which is tidal up to a point just north of the railway viaduct (the exact point where it emerges from a culvert today). There were many lead works, glass works and potteries. Potteries need clay which was dug from the fields north of St. Ann’s. And after a few years of that, the fields resembled a battlefield! It’s a jokey name, very Geordie.

Apart from a row of houses on the south side of City Road opposite St. Ann’s, nobody ever lived between City Road and the river Tyne; it was all commercial, with wharves and warehouses and a railway goods yard (bottom left in the 1900 map; the line serving it passes through a tunnel under City Road and St. Ann’s Yard, emerging to form the eastern boundary of Battle Field). If a name was needed, they probably called it part of Battle Field. The warehouses persisted until the 1980s, and then things changed.

In 1986, the first Tall Ships event gave many their first ever reason to visit Newcastle’s quayside, which was now largely abandoned. And then in 1987, a Conservative government anxious to divert development funds away from the Labour city council set up the Tyne & Wear Development Corporation. Adding to the new Law Courts which opened in 1990, it planned a cinema, luxury hotel, casino, high-end retail, and up to 100 “executive housing units” for the quayside between the Tyne Bridge and Ouseburn. The cinema was never built, the casino didn’t last long (it’s now Barclays), but there was a demand for office blocks, and even more demand for housing, and now quite a lot of people live on or close to the quayside south of City Road. The last two undeveloped plots, Quayside 12 and Malmo Quay, are certain to be used for housing too.

Meanwhile, Gateshead has been equally successful redeveloping the opposite bank, with the Sage, the Baltic and above all the Millennium Bridge bringing hordes of tourists to the quayside – in fact probably almost all tourists to Newcastle-Gateshead come to the quayside, because it’s simply the most eye-catching and beautiful part of either city. So the name Quayside has, without any official endorsement, attached itself to the area.

Here’s a brilliant aerial photo of the Quayside, half-way between being nowhere in particular and becoming a place. We’re looking east: the Ouseburn is at the top and Byker Bridge top left.

The number 2 labels the quayside car park under construction (nowadays new developments never get huge car parks), and 3 shows the first big office blocks being built. The rest of the quayside has been cleared in readiness, except for the historical Sailors Bethel building top right, and the Co-Operative building which is now Malmaison. The Law Courts are in the foreground, with a tall ship moored opposite Broad Chare. It’s a fascinating snapshot of a new place coming into being. And that doesn’t happen very often any more.

One year ago, I couldn’t think about anything but the pandemic. By the time the UK started to take it seriously, I had been worrying about it for more than two months: I had a Chinese coworker who had been telling us about the soaring cases in Wuhan since the first week of January, and by Chinese New Year she was worried sick about it. I didn’t know then that epidemiologists refer to the basic infection rate in an epidemic as R₀, but I understood exponential growth very well and the doubling of UK hospital cases every four days before the UK went into lockdown alarmed me. I would have been even more alarmed if I had believed that the government was genuinely considering a ‘herd immunity’ strategy which would obviously have involved a death toll in the millions; I thought the rumours of such a strategy couldn’t possibly be true. I’m less sure now.

When Imperial College published their paper on suppression strategies, and the government started waving it around to justify the lockdown, I was quite relieved. I could see that it clearly meant suppression (that is, lockdowns) lasting years, not months. Bizarrely, by the summer,  the government appeared to have completely forgotten the graph showing that if lockdown was lifted, exponential growth of cases would immediately resume, and become catastrophic within two months. They lifted the lockdown, and even incentivised people to mingle in restaurants (it was called Eat Out To Help Out); one year on, the UK’s death toll from COVID-19 is around 150,000, well inside the top 10 worst countries in the world for death rate per capita, despite being an island. We could have imposed quarantine restrictions like Japan and Australia, but we didn’t. For much of 2020, the UK had the worst death rate per capita in the world.

We’ve also largely failed to get a contact-tracing system working, even 15 months into the pandemic. When one of my team at work caught COVID-19 recently, only two of us who had diligently downloaded the test&trace app were told to self-isolate. Another person who had the app found it wasn’t working, and the rest of the team never were contacted by test&trace. (Our employer sent us home for a fortnight.)

Although we’ve turned out to be far worse at dealing with COVID-19 in the UK than I thought we could be, the overall impact hasn’t been as bad as I thought it might be. We’ve got better at treating it so the fatality rate is lower than it initially was in China, and national governments (especially India, which dominates vaccine production) have surprisingly refrained from stepping in to control distribution of vaccines for political purposes, instead simply letting the free market determine rationing as usual. And astonishingly, we started to approve vaccines after just 9 months, not the 18 months I expected.

Consequently, only just over a year after the UK’s very late lockdown, I was called up to my local hospital to have the first of two ‘jabs’ (as we are calling them) of vaccine. I got flu-like shivers that evening; the next day, I had a killer headache all day and couldn’t get out of bed; I spent most of the following day in bed too, and part of the day after that, due to constant nausea. It was unpleasant, but not unexpected and at least I was confident of quickly recovering, unlike if I’d encountered the virus itself.

Even with increasing proportions of the population vaccinated, life isn’t going to go back to normal. It will be late 2021 before most UK adults will have been vaccinated, and indoor venues (restaurants, cafés, theatres, cinemas) cannot safely reopen before then. So the coronavirus will have dominated life for nearly two full years. In the meantime the decline of high street shopping has been strongly accelerated; shops won’t come back, nor will the use of notes and coins for payment. The wearing of masks by people feeling ill or vulnerable has been normalised, and won’t go away (I hope). Working at home has also been normalised; it’s been a long time coming, but it’s here to stay now. International travel may never go back to being the casual affair it used to be.

This is how things look in March 2021: very different to my thoughts in March 2020. In another year, perhaps things will have turned out differently again. That’s why I wanted to capture my thoughts here.

My flight landed at Siem Riep airport after 11pm. Seoul had been cool, but as expected, Cambodia was very hot and very humid, and the airport was crowded and noisy and a blur of colour. My driver and guide had a sign with my name on, the only time I’ve been met at arrivals that way, though I’d seen it happening to other people at a hundred other arrivals gates.

On the short drive to my hotel, there was nothing much to see but jungle, and a scattering of distant lights through the light, warm rain. The reception desk was busy, and my guide queued for me, allowing me to sit down with my suitcase. Around midnight, a group of young women, who I took to be cleaning staff, entered the lobby, and sat near the reception desk where they were called up one by one, and passed through into the office behind. One of them sat opposite me and smiled, and I smiled politely back, as I would anywhere in the world. The girl fidgeted, obviously wondering whether to come over and talk to me, but I gave no encouragement, desperate for sleep and with no energy to talk.

It was long afterwards that I realised that cleaning women don’t enter luxury hotels through the lobby, and hotels are cleaned in the middle of the day, not after midnight. I think those girls were there to be given some other kind of assignment by reception. Perhaps it’s because this was my first experience in Angkor that this is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about this trip, or else it’s because it was a human moment, while most of what I saw in Angkor was thousand-year-old carvings with hundred-year-old trees entwined among them.

For three days I drifted around the ancient city. A thousand years ago, it was the only city in the world with anywhere near a million people in it, a wildly successful Buddhist kingdom that’s still almost unheard of in the West. They built the world’s most sophisticated water management system and dozens, if not hundreds, of Buddhist temples. The largest temple complex, Angkor Thom, has an area of nine square kilometres, making the Forbidden City look provincial.

When I visited Beijing, the year before, I felt that lack of research meant I didn’t get the most out of my trip. This time, I had read thoroughly and knew a lot about the Khmer kingdom, but I hadn’t thought carefully about what time of year to visit. The rainy season was just beginning, and the skies were more often grey than blue. I still got up before dawn on the off-chance that I’d see the famous sunrise over Angkor Wat, but in the event, the skies were dull and most of my photos blurry from over-long exposure.

In hindsight, it’s clear that I was searching for something spiritual in the early years of that decade. A couple of years before I visited Angkor, I had been on a spiritual retreat at  the Harbin naturist commune in California, and the following year I went on a more serious retreat in a Buddhist temple on top of Mount Koya-San in Japan. While in Angkor, I went for a water blessing from a Buddhist monk. But although the temples of Angkor are stunning in their scale, and touchingly pathetic in their millennium-long struggle against the encroaching jungle, I found the idea of a successful Buddhist kingdom ultimately no more than a kind of intellectual curiosity.

Cambodia had entered my consciousness in the 1970s when the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge were mentioned on John Craven’s Newsround. It’s still a very poor country today, with people selling fruit from baskets at the side of mud roads. Amputees make paintings and carvings for the tourist trade, and some of the temples I visited are only metres away from live minefields. The street market I visited was more vividly colourful, at least in this season, than the jungle. I was taken out on a boat on the Tonlé Sap lake, where houses sit on stilts six or seven metres above the ground, because that’s how much the lake rises in the monsoon. They have nets slung under the floor, and when the lake is high, they can simply pull up the nets from the verandah and eat whatever fish have been caught.

Among the Buddhas and the elephants, one of the most common motifs in the carvings that adorn every surface of every temple in Angkor are apsaras, heavenly dancers. Their dances are always erotic, legs spread wide, and they sometimes have their tits out, much like in Greco-Roman sculpture.

I take all this as a reminder that, grand in scale as temples and cathedrals may be, religions can only ever seek to divert or manage the flood-waters of human desires, in particular to eat and to fuck. The fortunes of buildings, cities and particulour flavours of religion are tides that ebb and flow, and all buildings like individual people are forgotten sooner or later, but life goes on, with an inextinguishable continuity. And that humanist idea, that human life and thought is passed on forever, is how I understand the Buddhist idea of rebirth. Not as some spooky supernatural process like reincarnation (which plays no part in the teachings of Guatama Buddha), but in the tangible connection in my head from the etherial dancers envisioned by a royalty-appointed sculptor a thousand years ago, to the memory of the brown-eyed ‘cleaning girl’ smiling shyly at me under the dim lights of a hotel lobby at midnight. The passing on of live thoughts, ideas and feelings from one generation to another, that’s rebirth.

My room key was ready a minute later, and I didn’t stay up until midnight again: I arrived exhaused, and stayed exhausted for my whole time in Cambodia thanks to spending long days picking my way through the jungle and over the ruins of Angkor. But perhaps the sculptor of a thousand years ago and I – perhaps both far from home – after dining on fish from Tonlé Sap, both fell asleep and dreamed of rows and rows of heavenly dancers, doing their exuberant sexy dance before disappearing off into the hot, humid mist.

Two years ago today, a long-ago ex-lover of mine died. The most important one, the one that I had the most intense love affair of my life with, the one who used to write me love-letters on pink graph-paper. In one of my circles of friends, they refer to that one most significant ex (which so many of us have) as TOTGA, The One That Got Away. But in my case, they didn’t go away. We remained friends for 25 years afterwards. We hadn’t met in person for a few years, but we had just spoken on the phone a couple of days earlier, a long rambling conversation, but I remember talking about the night sky. I like the stars, but my ex was drawn to the dark.

“Not even the stars stay in sight forever.” But the stars that go out of view leave an afterimage on the mind’s eye which can last a lifetime, especially when it’s a star that burns as brightly as my shining bipolar ex. When I was in my late teens I wrote a poem cycle called At the Aphelion in which I imagined myself as a lonely comet, but I didn’t appreciate how easily the gravity of a passing planet can deflect you from your previous orbit, changing your path for evermore. Since then, each new romantic attraction altered my trajectory, almost always changing me for the better. I learned what I assume most parents know: that love isn’t a finite resource; it’s additive, and it accrues. I discovered that I don’t stop loving people when I stop sleeping with them. Nor even when they die.

Mankind made star maps long before we began to make maps of the ground beneath our feet, even though – or perhaps because – the stars are forever out of reach. When you can’t see your lodestar, it may make navigation more difficult, but we travel on anyway, into the distant dark.

Stories are like crows circling in and out of sight in the mist overhead: there’s no simple distinction between one of them and another, and the precise flight path of any one particular crow is known only to itself.

But writing a story is like taming some crows, and training them to stand in a row, wings held unnaturally in semaphore poses. There’s no more flapping and swooping, no more possibilities. To write a story down is to eliminate all other options, all the other paths not taken, to choose one and shut your eyes to all the rest.

The line of domesticated crows shuffles and fidgets, eyeing the author accusingly. Standing still is not soaring, never whirling, nor gliding. The crows are restless; the writer has made them forget how to fly. Writing is destroying, the wanton wrecking of potential beauty, latent arcs of winged flight.

I have written a story of a hundred thousand words this year, and I mourn for all the better stories I did not write, and can no longer even imagine.

This is another post about Newcastle history and old maps (my last was about chares); it is the story of the decline and loss of what was once the nicest place in Newcastle.

My interest in Newcastle’s ‘Forth’ was sparked when doing some work on OpenStreetMap: after mapping the now-derelict Forth Goods Yard west of the station, I noticed how many nearby streets had Forth in the name. There’s the steep Forth Banks which connects to Forth Street, and there’s Forth Place and Forth Lane, at the corner of which is the Forth pub with its space invader (NCL_13). Clearly the name referred to something important.

Looking at some older maps, I opened Corbridge’s map of 1723, and there is is: a tree-lined square labelled The Forth, south of the Forth Gate, which was between Gunner Tower and Pink Tower (Pink Lane, which still exists, ran just inside the town wall between these two towers).

Mackenzie’s history of Newcastle relates the history of The Forth from various earlier sources. It was in use by the 1500s, being used for the playing of bowls and archery. It began as a square field of over four acres, fenced to keep animals out, and used by people of all ages for their leisure: a playground for children, dancing square, ‘trysting ground’ for lovers, meeting place for the guilds before they built their own guild halls, and a place for the old to stroll and enjoy the view.

Sited above the steep part of the Tyne Gorge but well outside the town, it must have had the best views in the area, across the Team Valley to the south and the Tyne valley to the west. Away from the noise of workshops and the stink of tanneries and open sewers, it must have been a paradise for the Elizabethan townsfolk. By the early 1700s it was reached by a tree-lined walk from the Forth Gate, and double rows of lime trees from Holland were planted to shade the walk around the four sides of the green space. Sporting events took place in a field to the south (marked on some maps as the Forth Field), and further south, in what is now the almost-forgotten Redheugh Bridge Park, wrestling matches took place.

I’m not completely sure where the name Forth comes from. Place names that include forth are usually related to fords, and the site was about halfway between the town wall and the Skinnerburn, so it could have been named after a route that crossed that river by a ford. Alternatively, since it was outside the town wall, the inhabitants had to ‘go forth’ through the wall to reach it.

For hundreds of years, at Easter and at Whitsuntide, the mayor and aldermen of the town would go in a grand procession to the Forth, with the mace and all the symbols of the town corporation, which shows what an important place the Forth was. By the 1600s the land was formally recognised as common land, and widely used for airing clothing (impossible in medieval streets so narrow that the tops of the houses on each side almost met). A house was built on the north side, at public expense, for the keeper of the bowling green. After the Restoration, the Forth House was extended, becoming a large and welcoming tavern which can be seen on the 1723 map above.

Sadly, it was mostly downhill after that. Use of the field for military training degraded it, and the lime trees died over time; in 1802 the town council banned the use of the Forth for anything but leisure and replaced the lines of trees. But now factories were being built along the valuable land adjacent to the river, and Newcastle’s population was exploding, spreading far beyond the crumbling town wall. Within a few more decades, the Forth had lost its views, was no longer quiet, the tavern of 1680 was falling down, and pressure of population was becoming overwhelming. What had begun as a small cattle market alongside the Forth needed more space, and in 1842 the last tree was uprooted as the cattle market was expanded into the Forth, which was no longer recognisable as a place of leisure.

From the 1840s to the 1960s, Newcastle’s corporation pursued, with destructive zeal, a policy of tearing down anything that stood in the way of development. History was never obliterated faster than during the 1840s and the 1960s. Nowadays, things have changed, and the city council’s plan for the ‘Forth Yards Opportunity Site’ demands that developers keep all features that have roots in the site’s industrial history; the disused railway line alongside the former Forth Goods Yard is going to be turned into a pedestrian and cycle path like the High Line.

So where exactly, I wondered, was the fabled Forth, which for centuries was the loveliest place in Newcastle? It can be located by comparing old maps and newer ones, because other nearby features survive, while the Forth itself did not. Maps from 1838 are the last to show the Forth Walk, with the top section of Forth Banks forming its western side. Forth House was still there, just southeast of Forth Place which still exists today.

Marlbrough Crescent, on the west side of the Cattle Market (now superseded by the Centre for Life), also still exists today. The street on the east side of the cattle market is nowadays called Central Parkway, a suffocatingly bland name which must have surely been thought up by a bored PR consultant. But on the 1892 OS map, it was still considered part of Forth Banks, which passes the Cattle Market and goes all the way up to Forth Place.

Given that the Forth was recorded in 1649 as consisting of four acres and one rood, that would be a square of about 130m each side. The former railway building east of Central Parkway, now a creche, is about 100m long, so here’s my best guess where the Forth once was:

So there we are: the railway was not only driven right through the middle of the castle, but was also built on Newcastle’s finest park, or rather its pathetic remains.

I’m not quite sure what I find so compelling about the sad story of the Forth. I suppose it’s a combination of things: solving the mystery of where it was and what happened to it; pride in Newcastle (what other city had a fine public park and bowling green with a fantastic view, maintained for the common good by the corporation, 500 years ago?); the interest of learning more about life before the industrial revolution; and my ongoing interest in how traces of the past can be seen in the landscapes of today, if you know where to look.

The Forth may be gone, but as an example of the past shaping the present, today’s Thomas Bewick Square exists only because a gate through the town wall was made on that spot in the reign of Queen Anne, so that people could go more directly to their Forth to enjoy a stroll around the shady square of trees, listen to the songs of birds, and gaze across the Tyne valley to the unspoilt uplands beyond.

Watching the rise of transphobia in the media through 2020 has filled me with a sense of déjà vu. We’ve been through all this before, with homophobia in the 1980s. Through the Thatcher years, homophobia was rising, with a survey in 1987 finding that 75% of the UK population thought homosexuality was ‘always or mostly wrong’. People like Michael Portillo and Michael Howard championed Clause 28, Andrew Neil published stories in the Sunday Times claiming that heterosexuals couldn’t catch AIDS, and Mrs. Thatcher herself said, at the 1987 Conservative Party conference, ‘Children [...] are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay; all of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life. Yes, cheated.’

The response to this political pressure was the coalescing of the LGBT+ movement, a loose coalition of oppressed groups coming together to put forward the argument that we should be treated equally with everyone else, and young LGBT+ people should learn that they are normal. By denying them this education, LGBT+ youth are in reality the ones being cheated of a sound start in life, which is why we still on average have lower incomes, poorer health outcomes, higher suicide rates and are the victims of all kinds of discrimination, though less blatantly than in the past.

When Tony Blair repealed Section 28 and gave sexual orientation minorities almost full legal equality, with an equal age of consent, protection from discrimination at work, pension rights and civil partnerships, it looked like the equality argument had largely been won. But a few within the LGBT+ movement were never comfortable with the consensus approach, and have continued to pursue an agenda of separatism and discrimination. Julie Bindel is one example, having sadly been given a platform time and time again by the UK’s only independent newspaper, The Guardian, to vent her prejudices against bisexual women. Now, joining with a wider movement of radical feminists, she has turned her hate against trans women. They are rapidly gaining political ground, and not just via a flood of transphobic articles in The Guardian and influential hangers-on like J.K.Rowling with her 14 million twitter followers. Now the transphobes are having an increasing impact on legislation, most recently defeating proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act to make gender recognition a less humiliating, protracted and medicalised process.

The arguments of the transphobes all mirror those advanced against homosexuality in the 80s. Here’s a ‘top 10’ list of them:

It's clear that what we are seeing is a rearguard movement. Having largely lost the battle on equality for people identifying as different sexual orientations, regressives have shifted the battleground to oppose equality for people with different gender identities or incorrectly assigned gender (trans people, non-binary gendered/genderqueer and intersex people). This battle has been less completely won. So the agenda of transphobia is ultimately the same as that of biphobia: to ‘divide and conquer’ the LGBT+ movement, as a first step towards rolling back the rights of others too.

The fact that the arguments are always the same shows exactly why we must continue to stand together. I’m not transgender but I’m against prejudice – which, some people need reminding, means pre-judging everyone in a group based on the actions, or imagined actions, of a group member. That’s why I support, and have always supported, trans rights, and follow the lead of trans people themselves, who can best tell us what they need. Trans men are men, trans women are women, and also, intersex and non-binary people exist. We are LGBT+ and we still, mostly, stand together. That hasn’t changed since the 1980s, and for good reason: none of us are free until we are all free!

Nowadays everyone seems to take professional driving lessons, but when I learnt to drive, I didn’t have any money. Instead, my dad taught me, in our slightly rusty Peugeot 304. He was a good communicator and knew how to explain things in ways that I would understand, and by the time I was 18, I had my full license. Having moved back to the area where I grew up, I regularly drive along the road where I had my first ever driving lesson, so I’m often reminded of it.

The 304 wasn’t an easy car to drive, with its four forward gears, manual choke, lack of passenger-side mirror, and terrible rear-end visibility. But once I’d mastered reversing round a corner in that, I could do it in anything.

When he was teaching me how to approach blind bends, the technique he taught me to judge the maximum speed to take the bend at, was this: imagine a crashed motorcyclist in the middle of the road, just out of sight round the bend. Always take bends at a speed where you could stop before you hit this imaginary motorcyclist. On the twisty, bendy rural roads around here I still heed this advice, picturing a motorcycle in the road, just round the bend.

Of course, it could just as well be a sheep (more likely around here), or a stray dog, or a toddler, or a perhaps cyclist doing the Walney-Whitby route. But I still picture a motorbike because that’s what Dad taught me to do, 35 years ago.

Recently I mentioned this in a conversation when my mum was present, and she told me something I never knew: that this had actually happened to them. Dad was driving their first car, an ancient Singer Le Mans, and came round a bend and there was a crashed motorcyclist. It had never occurred to me that Dad’s advice had come from lived experience: I imagined it was just a vivid image invented for my benefit. Unfortunately, the biker died, but at least they didn’t hit him.

I don’t know anything about who he was or why he came off his bike that day, or why Dad chose not to mention that his scenario came from experience (maybe he would have told me eventually, but he died the year after I passed my test). Still, much as I enjoy driving my sports car fast, I never go round bends so fast that I couldn’t do an emergency stop if there’s something in the road just out of sight. My father’s advice could yet save a life. And perhaps this advice also applies to the metaphorical bends in the twisty road of life.

It’s been a strange summer. It can’t be the first year I haven’t had a holiday, but it’s the first year that a global pandemic has forced me to cancel my holiday and stay at home for month after month. Since the “lockdown” on 23 March I haven’t been more than three and a half miles away from the river Tees.

I’ve had plenty to do, finishing my MA in Creative Writing. In fact, I’ve done almost nothing else besides writing. By next weekend I will have spent 100 days working on my novel. It’s been the first time in my life that I’ve been able to do such a thing (and may also be the last, unless I live to retirement age). It has been a very interesting experience: working on the same project day after day has meant a very low ‘start-up time’ each day. In the past, working on my writing only one day a week, I would often spend the first hour or two getting my head back into the story, but working on it every day, that hasn’t been necessary and so I’ve been far more productive. Often, I’ve had an idea one day and used it the next day or a day or two later. If those days had been spread over a month, I wouldn’t have remembered all those ideas and would have ended up, again, spending a lot more thinking time dreaming up something new.

My 12” MacBook has been the perfect tool for the job. I’ve loved it since I first got it, back when I had a job and wanted a light notebook to take with me to meetings which were often in other countries. The MacBook weighs well under a kilo so is perfect for this, and I chose the gold colour so that when everyone comes back after lunch to a table with closed laptops all round, mine would stand out from the rest (and because it’s beautiful). Having spent five months doing little else but type on it, I have to say I really like the keyboard and appreciate the vividness of the retina screen very much, especially after looking at any other computer. The crispness of fonts on the retina screen is a beauty to behold. I love my MacBook so much that I’ve started to have stress dreams about losing it somewhere. (Oddly, the MacBook has now been discontinued in favour of the new MacBook Air which is a third of a kilo heavier, deterring me from ever upgrading.)

I would also recommend my Acme Made Skinny Sleeve cover, a zipless, water-repellent sleeve for the MacBook, though I wish it had a cable pocket.

I’ve also had a good experience using the Scrivener software for writing my novel. In recent years I’ve done all my writing using a no-distraction markdown editor, but having bought Scrivener last year for my course on screenwriting, I thought I’d give it a go, and its organisation features have proved invaluable for marshalling the amount of stuff you need to write a 100,000 word novel. I especially like being able to put each scene in a separate document, giving me a scene index which I can use to flip between scenes instantly. I like the corkboard feature for organising the plot and the separate areas for character sheets and notes. Scrivener makes Word, with its File menu and Load/Save functions, look like a dinosaur from the floppy disk era, which it is. It doesn’t belong in the same world as my solid-state, fanless, 900 gramme MacBook.

The final hand-in deadline for my MA course is at the start of September, and effectively that will end my two years as a mature student. I enjoyed the classes, the cameraderie with classmates, and the access to university facilities, until the COVID-19 lockdown ended all that in mid-March. I’m still enjoying the coursework.

When I went back to university in September 2018, I decided to try an Instagram project, posting a photo every day to my instagram while I was a student. I’ve managed not to miss a day yet. I’ve done similar projects before, like when I took a photo every day for a year. Besides practice at photography and editing, the value I get from doing this is to make me look around myself more carefully. I knew that there would be lots new to look at, in and around Newcastle.

COVID-19 has got in the way of that. Since mid March I’ve been ‘in lockdown’ in Teesdale and haven’t gone as far as 15 miles away from home in that time. But so late into my two-year project, I’ve looked at most of the things around here already. To help keep myself going, for the last three months I supplemented my local photos with text art. Again, this is an ongoing interest of mine: I’ve been interested in the intersection between words, typography and photography and had done experiments in this area before. There are lots of quotations to be found on the internet which display text on a photograph. What interests me is doing this in such a way that the image and the typography actually relate to the text.

You can put any text in front of a pretty sunset, but I think it’s far more interesting to use an image which works with the text, whether directly or subliminally. Typography, another long-standing interest of mine (I bought books on it in the early days of the web), can subtly support the meaning of the text as well.

Having made 30 new text art images, mostly using stock photography, and posted them to Instagram over the last 90 days, I think I’ll leave it at that. The end of my photo-per-day project, and of my unexpected late-in-life student adventure, will come in 42 days.

yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity - Andrew Marvell

Time and space are important issues in the novel I’m writing. It’s mostly set in the early 80s, because there were a lot of things I remember that I wanted to write about. That’s not a problem at all.

Space isn’t a major issue. I wanted, from the outset, to write a novel with a strong sense of place. In this I was spurred on by reading Fiona Mozley’s novel Elmet, which was nominated for the Booker. I grew up in what was once the Saxon kingdom of Elmet; a railway line was within sight of my bedroom window, and on the far side, just out of sight, was the church at Sherburn-in-Elmet, which stands on a hill that where there was once a palace of the kings of Elmet. So I picked up Elmet expecting to recognise the setting, but I didn’t. There were a few references to landscape and fauna in the first couple of chapters, and from then on, the setting was bafflingly generic. The protagonists live next to a railway line, but it’s almost never mentioned, apart from a vague mention of getting to know the train times. This is obviously just invention, since having actually lived there, I know that most of the traffic on those lines is freight, which does not follow the strict timetables of passenger services. I have never read a book, that is named after a place, that has so little sense of place. My novel will be different, full of the sights and sounds of coal-mining Yorkshire as it was in the late 70s and the 80s.

Time is a much bigger problem. I’ve set myself the task of writing a novel that follows my characters right through the Thatcher era. But there must inevitably be gaps, which need handling in some way. I’ve recently read Box Hill, Adam Mars-Jones’ gay dom-sub novel, which spans 6 years, and he insouciantly slips phrases like “the following year” into the middle of paragraphs; and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which titles each chapter with the time that has passed since the previous one. I don't think either of those techniques are right for my novel. My two parallel protagonists go off and do different things in the years when they are apart, so if I simply skated over several years for one character in a couple of paragraphs, I’d then have to rewind and do the same for the other. Inserting something diagrammatic, like a timeline, feels too un-literary. If I just ignore the problem and pick up a character three years later it would confuse the reader too much.

If there’s some other way that I haven’t thought of, please feel free to email me, or DM me on Twitter or other social media; my addresses are at the bottom left of the page.

Cover image: I had in mind “this is the age of the train”. Image CC-BY Phil Sangwell via Flickr.

When I started my MA course in Creative Writing, I told a few people the story of how I started writing. I've been doing this for many years: parcelling up little bits of my life to tell people, friends or lovers or random strangers sitting next to me on an aeroplane. A little gift, inexpensive and probably more fun to give than to receive. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve realised that what I'm doing when I do this is storytelling: making little stories, anecdotes, out of tiny fragments of my own life.

In talking about how I started writing, I’m answering the question (often unasked), how long have you been writing? It follows on from: what led you to become a student of creative writing at the age of 50? The answer is I’ve been writing stories, in my own time, since the age of 9.

Miss Pinner was a supply teacher, filling in for the 1977 autumn term following the retirement of the teacher who had taught my older sister at that age (come to think of it, an event which shouldn’t have taken the school by surprise). She must have been younger than any of our other teachers, and had modern ideas. Anyway, she clearly loved English, teaching us about verbs and adverbs and adjectives with flash-cards, which we hadn’t seen before. I don’t know if she was an English graduate, but her English lessons are by far the most vivid in my memory. But I owe her more than my solid grounding in grammar.

She used to set us writing exercises, and sometimes set us the task of listening to a short piece of music, imagining a story to fit the music, and writing that. In a way it was exactly the kind of exercise we were sometimes set on the MA in Creative Writing: here’s a prompt, you have 20 minutes, and there’s no time for plotting or thinking about character, you just have to go with your first idea.

The first piece she played us was Grieg’s In The Hall of the Mountain King, which starts quietly and builds up to an energetic crescendo. I wrote a story which started slowly and built to a climax (I no longer remember what it was about), and received unequivocal praise for it, and again for later writing exercises. But even if I hadn’t had the praise, it had opened my mind to the idea that writing down a story can be a fun thing to do, an activity enjoyable in itself, enough so that it became one of the main things I did when left to myself.

One inspirational teacher started me on writing stories, at the age of 9, and I’m still doing it. That’s the shortest version of the story.

I was heartbroken when Miss Pinner left us after just one term. At the same time, we moved from the high-ceilinged Victorian junior school (where my class of 36 rattled around in a classroom big enough for 60, with a dais at one end for the teacher) to a brand new building provided by the County where the windows steamed up and 36 of us had to cram into a classroom designed for 30. Miss Pinner probably spent the rest of her career in similar schools, since the rising population meant that the high-maintenance old buildings were being decomissioned (and turned into posh apartments with mezzanines). I wonder if she ever told stories about the quaint old Victorian school in a tiny Yorkshire village that she once taught in for a term.

In hindsight, Miss Pinner was my favourite teacher at junior school. Who knows if I would have ever begun writing if not for that spark to ignite the tinder of my imagination? Perhaps she was my favourite teacher overall, though I more often think about Mr. Watson, one of my English teachers for A-level. Come to think of it, what they have in common was they both went out of their way to expose us to a lot more ideas than the syllabus required. Some of them stuck. My strongest talent is probably my ability to be analytical, and Mr. Watson was able to connect this to literature and unlock an aptitude for textual analysis. I always got As and I wonder if he was disappointed that I didn’t go on to read English at university, which I clearly could have done. Sometimes I wish I had.

I’m sure I never gave either of them any indication that they were my favourite teachers at the time. I hope that when teachers retire, they know that they were some pupils’ favourite teacher even if it wasn’t obvious at the time, and that their teaching changed lives.

Interstitial spaces are defined by what they are between. They are non-places, between other, proper places. Here is one.

In web design, an interstitial meant a “please wait” screen displayed to deter the user from closing the browser whilst the server was busy – since XmlHttpRequest came along, they’ve disappeared. In architecture, interstitial spaces are found between floors of building, through which ducts and cables can be routed. And in lung physiology, interstitial pneumonia is a disease of the space between the air sacs and their supporting structures, where scarring can prevent oxygen reaching the bloodstream and cause collapsed lungs. It's the reason for COVID-19 patients needing to go on a respirator.

But to call something interstitial, you have to focus on the the things that something can be ‘between’. What if you focus on the thing in the middle, like the web designer whose job it was to design the first please wait screen?

You give it a fancy latin name, I guess, just for a laugh. Only people who look carefully at the URL bar would ever notice, and how many of them would be word geeks who would look it up in the OED and remember it 20 years later? Only me, I would have thought. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in life, it’s that nothing is ever only you. There must be other language-geek-web-designers but, as with so many of my interests like Vangelis and Buddhist ethics, they must be out there, I’ve just never met one. So much for the internet making the world smaller, eh?

Yes, it's a post about the COVID-19 pandemic, because this year nobody is talking about anything else. But I've been holding off because the situation changes every day. Last Friday, my University announced that it would stay open until the end of term, two weeks away. On Monday, they announced the immediate end of all face-to-face contact with students, and on Tuesday they emailed all students saying go home if you can.

The problem with COVID-19 is that it is so infectious that the growth of cases is exponential. This became apparent in China two months ago but the western world somehow remained in denial that it would come here, or be as infectious here, until now. Hospital cases of COVID-19 in the UK are now doubling every 4 days.

In the last couple of weeks, the internet has been full of graphs explaining why it's so important to slow this exponential growth: because unchecked growth soon overwhelms the ability of hospitals to cope with new cases, and people die for lack of treatment (oxygen and ventilation), as well as uninfected people dying of other causes because they couldn't be admitted to hospital. This one is a good example:

These graphs are great at explaining why protective measures are needed to bring the growth in new cases of COVID-19 down below exponential growth. But they don't tell us where we are in that picture now, because there are no labels on the axes.

Then, a couple of days ago, Imperial College published a report showing graphs with numbers specifically about the UK, comparing suppression strategies. It shows that we are now just two weeks away from hitting the red line. I can't stop thinking about the implications of this.

It shows why we have to close pubs and universities and, very shortly, schools: to keep the number of cases within the hoped-for ("surge") number of ICU beds. Otherwise, with social distancing alone, the NHS is utterly overwhelmed in June, July and August.

But it also shows what happens when we stop the drastic measures (the shaded area). COVID-19 growth resumes its exponential growth, and five weeks after things re-open, it's wildly out of control again. As we have all understood in recent weeks, curve flattening is essential to stop the exponential growth. But the potential for exponential growth remains until the disease is eliminated.

I can't see how this means anything other than this: everything has to stay closed until after most of us have been vaccinated. They say a vaccine is probably 18 months away before mass production, and the countries able to mass produce vaccines will surely use it for their own populations first, because of the absolutely staggeringly huge economic advantage that will give them to restart their economies before everyone else. As a tiny, insignificant (post-Brexit) country we aren't getting it here for probably two years.

I'm getting a dozen emails a day from theatres, cinemas and the like saying "we're shutting down until at least late April". I think we're shutting down for two years.