As many of you know I have a deep love of the North East and its people, past and present. If you are not familiar with it, I warmly recommend a trip there and maybe even a pilgrimage. I know Keith and Lynn were due to be off on pilgrimage there and back to Keith's stamping ground early in lockdown. It has a beauty which for so many, is yet to be discovered, a history which is rich and varied and a deep spirituality runs through its veins.
Today we welcome again one of Phillip and Sheila's pilgrimage tours to the North East and in fact it is one of three trips that Philip has shared with us. Today we begin with Newcastle. This is a beautiful, elegant, vibrant city and I am sure you will enjoy this pilgrimage and experience. My son, James went off to University here in Newcastle and hasn't come back to Wales. We do enjoy our trips up North!
Thank you Philip for allowing us to dip into these three pilgrimages and may they touch us.
NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, ENGLAND - Sydney Beck
Half-Scot, half-English and ill at ease with the past,
Newcastle is sooty black from its coaly drama,
And the breathless town was always in a hurry to grow,
Narrowly avoiding destruction of its past or leaping over it.
Up on the plateau, industrial power-engine city:
Its earlier Norman Castle and Black Gate narrowly missed
By the frenetic hammers of eager Victorian builders.
Elegantly-proportioned Grainger Street and Central Rail Station
Pause unwillingly to admit the Scottish-style lantern-spired Sandstone cathedral
with its delicate shade of sooty industrial black.
Down at the riverside - an earlier town of shipyards and arms factories,
Quayside warehouses with watertight flood-doors,
Its precipitous narrow old port-streets carved into the gorge walls
And pierced by cold winds from the North Sea,
Is leaped over by a platoon of high-level metal bridges.
Across the Tyne, inelegant, they grab the opposite bank
and bind the city to England.
This is a very popular folk song from the general area. So do enjoy and see if you can follow the lingo! it also shows some of the countryside round and about.
Thank you Sheila and Philip and we look forward to next week.
Don't forget its QUIZ night tonight. So from about 6:00 tune in for the last set of answers to the mega quiz and then let me know your total from part one and two of the mega quiz. There is a small prize for the winner!