But if you can manage to look at your site statistics from time to time without getting drawn into this sort of nonsense, you can determine some interesting things.

Browsers

Firstly, there’s the question of what people use to access the site. The large proportion of “unknown” users (around 16% of the total) suggests that maybe the statistics package isn’t the best and latest available (and it isn’t; it’s a full release behind the current up-to-date version of that package) and so I shouldn’t draw too firm a conclusion from any of this, since any browser could be up to 16% out, but it would appear that on my site Internet Explorer (22%) and Firefox (19%) are almost on a par in terms of visits.

This is actually quite plausible, as while the proportion of Internet Explorer users in the UK is, on the whole, significantly higher than this, techies (some of whom I presume read the techie stuff on here) are much more likely to use Firefox: thus if my site is skewed towards techies, it’s also likely to be skewed towards Firefox.

If I actually drill down and look at browser versions, then you see something quite interesting. In terms of Firefox, by far the biggest percentage of users using those browsers are using the most recent version (96%), whereas the situation is reversed for Internet Explorer (only 26% using the most recent version, compared to 29% still using Internet Explorer 6).

My theory is that the reason updates of Internet Explorer are lagging behind is because of its use as a corporate platform: it doesn’t get upgraded quickly but there is a significant lag time while the IT department of the appropriate organisation get their arse in gear to upgrade everyone to the newer versions. Well, there’s that and the possibility that people who are using Internet Explorer by choice are, on the whole, less fussy about using the latest version of their browser than users of other browsers.

Platforms

And what sort of platform are people using?

It’s fairly clear that Windows is the platform popularity king, and WinXP is still by far the most popular version. Goes to show that for all the hype about Windows Vista, people didn’t really want it:

(Note: figures adjusted to remove spiders/bots and ‘unknkown’; these are based on known user platforms only)

(Only figures > 1.0% are shown, meaning that the likes of WinCE, Win3.1 and SunOS are not listed).

Geography

Well, it’s actually a slight surprise to discover that the country which provides the most visits to my site is the US (56.0%), what with me being based (and hosted, and ‘domained’) over here on t’other side of the Atlantic (where the UK provides 19.6%). Then again, there are simply more people in the States, which could well account for it to some extent.

But again, it’s the sheer geographic spread that I find impressive: there are 10 countries which have generated 1000 visits or more in the last month, a further 22 countries which had 100 visits or more, and another 36 which were responsible for 10 or more visits, all the way down to my solitary visitor from Yemen, who viewed two pages. Hello!

Searching

The point hardly needs to be made, but Google is very dominant in the search market, accounting for 96% of all searches which drew people to the site.

What tends to be slightly more interesting is looking at what people were actually searching for. Until I excluded it via the robots protocol recently, a number of people were still finding my site searching for “find madeleine” and then obviously sending me abuse simply because I had posited the theory that she may in fact have been dead (note: not that I felt that this was a good thing).

There are quite a few people turning up here looking for “Reynholm Industries Intranet Password” (and variations on the theme). Those looking for that will be disappointed as I don’t say what it is — but I do give a clue. “John Harrison MBE MIDSC” is also quite popular, in relation to a chain email doing the rounds which doesn’t actually contain any facts but is quite anti-Islamic, so it’s nice to see that people are trying to check up on the supposed (but not actual) author.

Although I suspect the person who arrived here having searched for “home made porn” on Ask Jeeves was somewhat disappointed. I am more than happy to educate those people wanting to know more about the unique Andy Kadir-Buxton, and to give people an idea of “when was Furness Abbey built?”. There also seems to be an awful lot of people wondering if they have swine flu…

I’m quite into local history and finding out about stuff I didn’t know, so I’m quite a fan of Heritage Open Days, where you generally get a chance to see certain historical thingummies and find out about them for free. Obviously, the “for free” part is another thing which adds to the attractiveness of the event.

So I thought I’d try and take in a few things with the kids over the Heritage Open Days weekend. I booked up to attend the historical tour and the technical tour of Newcastle Theatre Royal, and I also had the plan to visit one of the Swing Bridge tours, get to see the motor control rooms and so on, but it turned out this was fully booked, which was a bit of a bugger.

But myself and BTP (who is six soon) were going to the Theatre Royal, which is something we were both interested in. Him because he still fancies the idea of being an actor, and therefore wanted to find out a bit more about the theatre, find out what it was like backstage and so on, me because of my interest in local history (and of course, my own pre-children theatre career) and also because of a family connection with the Theatre Royal.

My Uncle Andy died quite a few years ago now, but in my memory he is permanently associated with the Theatre Royal, where he worked. I don’t know if he ever worked anywhere else, but I do know he worked there — sorting out electrics, lighting, and generally being one of the unseen, but still vital figures necessary to the productions. As a child, I also got taken backstage after a pantomime once, although to be honest I can’t really remember too much about it.

And so I wanted the chance to look backstage again, to see Andy’s world, and both the historical and technical tours seemed to offer this opportunity.

The historical tour started in the foyer, where we found out some of the history of the building — that the original theatre had been built elsewhere, but as part of a redevelopment of the city, the old one closed, and the new, larger theatre opened in its present location in 1837.

We got to hear about how much the class system was in operation in the theatre — depending upon the type of seats you paid for, you’d have your own particular entrance to the theatre, meaning that the toffs wouldn’t have to mingle with the likes of me the working classes, and how in fact these separate entrances had remained until the 1980s.

There’s also some very interesting paintings of ‘backstage’ on the ceiling of the foyer in the theatre, and these are of a type called … oh, I dunno, it probably begins with an ‘M’ … where they were painted on canvas and then the canvas was attached to the ceiling. Anyway, they were apparently painted by a transvestite (now that’s a bit of local colour) who included himself — dressed as herself — in one of the corners, along with some other people, including a semi-naked man drinking a pint in one of the corners.

So the next time you wander into the theatre, don’t just look at the posters on the walls, actually look around yourself and take it in.

We then got taken backstage, where we got to see some of the technical equipment used during the performances. We also had the opportunity to wander onto the stage itself, which was interesting because despite having been to the theatre a number of times before, I had never actually noticed that the stage was on a slope (known as a rake), tipping down towards the audience at a 1:24 ratio, and angled thus to add ‘depth’ to the perspective. This also means that certain productions — particularly those involving dancers — need to have the chance to rehearse first, particularly if they have only previously been performing on flat stages.

While we were onstage, a large logo appeared from ‘the heavens’ and lowered itself down towards us. It read ‘Never Forget’, which was the logo for the Take That tribute production that was on at the theatre at the time. This was also the technical tour appearing in view during the historical tour, as the technical tour took place from the fly floor.

After the historical tour finished, we were straight onto the technical tour, where we were shown how scenery was raised and lowered. Out of interest, I asked the man doing the tour whether he had known my uncle, and his answer — that Andy’s passing had been a shock to all of them, and that he had been a ‘fine gentleman’ — I thought was a lovely testament to my Uncle.

I did idly wonder whether, if my Uncle had come back as a ghost (the Theatre Royal supposedly only has one, so it’s probably due a few more as theatres go) whereabouts in the theatre he would be, but then I decided that my uncle’s ghost wouldn’t be restricted to the theatre. He’d hang about watching people set up a performance, and then he’d most likely nip across to the Adelphi for a pint…

But getting back to the tour, and while the instructions for the fly floor looked complicated, the guy showing us round did his best to explain them, and what at first had seemed an incomprehensibly bewildering set of numbers and codes became clearer until finally it only comprehensibly bewildering. The codes relate to different ropes to shift different bits of scenery up and down, with instructions on whether they are coming in or out, fast or slow, whether they are being faded with anything else and so on.

It really was enjoyable to find out a little bit more about how the productions get put on, and about the history of the theatre, and I’d recommend both the historical and technical tours of the theatre to anyone the next time there is a Heritage Open Days weekend on: of course, if you can’t wait until then, you can gather together a group of people and get yourself on one of the paid tours (at £40 for 1 hour, for a group of up to 30, that’s not bad if you can get a decent sized group together).

As yet, I have not yet discussed what I need to do with the job centre, but I’m hopeful that by the time I’ve done that, I will know exactly what I need to do in order to start trading — and from speaking to HMRC I know that if I do start trading before getting this all sorted, that’s not necessarily a problem — I have a three month window in which to inform them about it before I would start getting penalised.

The course was around three hours long — scheduled for three and a half but obviously we managed to get through the workbook without too much difficulty — at was at the Greenesfield Business Centre in Gateshead. They give you a big workbook to make notes on which also contains copies of the relevant powerpoint presentations, and I thought I’d try and summarise what I’ve learned. You also got some cups of coffee, which were nice, although a bacon sandwich wouldn’t have gone amiss…

The first, and most important thing is that these courses are free. Book up to go on them — they run self-assessment ones as well, so if you’re self-employed, find out what and where the courses are in your area and sign up. The second, almost equally important thing is that the people presenting this course (mostly M. although D. contributed also) knew the subject matter. They didn’t know the answer to every query, but they could handle most of them, and advise where to get any additional information from. And if you have a lecturer/ trainer who is obviously confident in their subject, that makes the whole thing a lot easier, and gives you confidence in them…

The first thing I learned was that if you are self-employed, you pay two different sorts of National Insurance contributions. First is Class 2, which must come out of your money, not the business money, and amount to £2.40 a week at the moment, and can be paid monthly by direct debit or by a quarterly bill. Now you do not need to pay these if your business earnings for the year are less than £5,000 and you have applied for a Small Earnings Exemption, but you might want to, because if you don’t, you’re not paying towards your state pension and other benefits for which you need to accrue 30 years.

Then you’ve also got to pay Class 4 NICs from the taxable profits of your business — this is the bit which is net after business expenses, and beyond a particular earnings allowance. Obviously the exact figure may vary from year to year…

Similarly, you need to record all the incomings and outgoings of the business — either something as simple as a cashbook or some people will use excel spreadsheets and similar (although emphasis was given to ‘you must take a backup’ as ‘my laptop is broken’ will not excuse you). It’s also recommended that for simplicity you run your trading periods alongside the tax year — i.e. from 6th April one year to 5th April the next.

No-one was able to give me a satisfactory reason why it should be 6th April rather than 1st April to 31st March which would seem eminently more sensible, because as far as I am concerned ‘for some historical reason’ is not good enough. Sadly, this is the one area HMRC were unable to answer for me, but fortunately the internet could help — it’s to do with the change to the Gregorian calendar.

There’s a big list provided of the sort of expenses which are and are not allowable — working from home, you can claim a proportion of the utility bills based on the ratio of the office space to other allowable rooms in the house and the proportion of the time that room is used as an office; you cannot claim for entertaining clients and hospitality. You can claim car mileage either on a flat rate (40p per mile for first 10,000 miles) or as a calculated cost based on the costs of the vehicle and proportion of business use but you can’t swap during the life of one vehicle, and if you introduce a vehicle once you’ve passed the turnover required for the VAT registration threshold, you must go down the more complicated calculation of real cost route.

One of the things that initially struck me as a bit of a swindle was the tax liability. If we were to assume I do start trading, at some point on or after 6th April 2010, I’m going to need to fill in my self-assessment form. If I’m doing this online, I need to fill it in and provide the payment by the following January (with a paper form, the payment deadline is the same, but there is an earlier filing date).

If I made a taxable profit of £22,000 (effectively, my wages) then I would have to pay £4,408 (approx) in Tax and Class 4 NICs for that year. But I would also have to pay half of that again at the same time, on account for next year (with a similar payment on account 6 months later). In other words, I’d have to pay out £6,612 in tax. Initially I was thinking “well, that’s a bit steep, being taxed for stuff in advance…” until I realised that it wasn’t actually in advance at all.

If I’m earning in the tax year 09-10, I’m not actually paying any direct taxation on it until January 2011 — some 9 months after it was due. And it’s not unreasonable therefore to expect me to pay an estimated further 6 months tax at this time, as I ought to have worked more than that anyway.

And this is just giving you an outline of the basic thing — if you are going to go down the full self-assessment route, they run specific free courses on that as well. And if they are delivered to the same quality that this one was, I’d imagine they are worth going on. And while the material on the course wasn’t entirely new to me — when I’m looking for information in various locations, it’s only natural that there will be a certain amount of overlap, as I’m sure would also be the case with a self-assessment one — there is still likely to be enough new stuff in there to make it worth attending.

Besides which, they might have introduced bacon sandwiches by then…

Obviously, regular readers (or at least those who visit my blog via the actual site, rather than the feed-reader types) will know that I’m looking to go into business for myself, and that’s why the home page of this site has become The Pickards Information Services rather than simply the home of the blog that it used to be.

There’s a lot to consider when setting up your own business: what sort of company do you want to set up? Are you going to be working as a sole trader, as a partnership, or as a limited company? (It’s probably a bit early to consider getting listed on the stock exchange!) Then there’s questions relating to your income — will the business work?

There’s no real way of knowing, and that’s the tricky part. However, what you can do is try and ensure that you’ve planned things out as much as you can in order to minimise the stuff that you don’t know about. And that’s where it’s worth picking up the advice that is available.

I spoke to my local council, having found a page on their website advising how to go about getting started, and made an appointment to meet one of their advisers. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, I’d thoroughly recommend that you consider doing something like this.

What they can do is to help you with stuff like letting you know what grants are available for starting up a new business (generally not a lot, and can generally only be used in certain particular ways, but something is of course better than nothing). They can help you produce things like a business plan, to help you work out what your startup costs are going to be, to plan what sort of income you’re going to need from the business in order to make it work — how many ‘sales’ or whatever you’ll need.

Obviously in my case, it’s not quite that simple. I’m offering a wide range of different and high quality services (*shameless plug*) around information services — relating to accessibility, site audits, site designs, training, consultancy and so on — and obviously what I’ll want to charge for a particular task will depend on what is involved and how much time it is likely to take: it is self-evidently not a case of one size fits all. But producing a business plan will still help you to do this.

They might also be able to find you training courses in your area which may be useful to yourself — stuff like ‘Setting Up A Small Business’ and ‘Advice on Self Assessment’. These may even be free. They’ll be able to tell you how much income your business needs to be making before you need to be registered for VAT; the timescales within which you need to tell HMRC that you’ve gone self-employed. In short, if they are anything like the person I was dealing with, they would be absolutely bloody helpful.

In fact, so much so that I made a point of noting that I wanted to say on my blog how helpful they had been. Although if they wanted an absolute gold star, might I suggest that they provide a cup of coffee to the people they meet with. But given that this is the only complaint I can come up with — not only was the initial meeting particularly helpful, but so has been the follow-up support over email — then I think they could probably make a pretty good case for deserving a gold star anyway.

And then I went to see Business Link North East, who weren’t quite as helpful. This is perhaps being unfair on them: the main problem was that there was an awful amount of overlap between the two– if I had gone to Business Link first, I would quite probably have been saying that the Council hadn’t given me much in the way of new information.

For example, Business Link could provide me with information on the training courses they offer — which were precisely the ones the Council had told me about the week before. They had told me that it would be useful to develop a business plan — which the Council had helped with the week before. However, I did learn some new stuff: for example, you are not considered to be trading apparently until you start to receive an income. You can carry out preparatory work, and even actually begin work, but you’re not trading until the money comes in.

This seemed odd to me, so please don’t take my word for it — ask an appropriate someone in officialdom — but is certainly something worth knowing if it is actually the case…

And one of the reasons that I would advise checking this sort of information is that I know some of the information they provide isn’t strictly accurate. For example, in their section on website design, they say:

…you can check your website’s accessibility using free HTML validation services…Business Link: Accessibility Issues

Unfortunately, this is plainly bollocks. It is bad advice. With a HTML validator, you can determine whether or not your HTML validates. This has little to do with accessibility, other than a rough indication that well-written standards compliant sites are more likely to have been written by someone who knows what they are doing. But it is perfectly possible to have a standards compliant site which is a major accessibility fail.

And, on the advice of the person I met at business link, I used their email form to tell them so. Which is probably unlikely to win me any friends, although I did mention it to them nicely, before suggesting that if they wanted any consultation on accessibility or a site audit, I could of course provide just the very thing…

But by far the least useful thing so far has been the job centre. I am going to be made redundant: I have an official letter which gives the date and so on. Unfortunately, the job centre won’t even start dealing with me, or even give me an appointment for an interview to talk about what I need to do for being self-employed or anything else until I am definitively out of work. Who, exactly, does this help? Wouldn’t you think that if they could help people get back to work or start their own business quicker that both the individual punters and the taxpayer as a whole would be better off?

So please, if anyone works for the job centre, and can explain the rationale behind this (do bear in mind I have a letter confirming my redundancy), then I’d be delighted to be informed. There may indeed be a perfectly sensible reason for this — but I just can’t see it at the moment.

So, if you’re thinking of starting your own business, talk to your local council and business link; there’s a certain amount of overlap and whoever you see second will probably spend at least half of their time covering stuff the first did, but you’ll still get something useful out of it. Secondly, don’t bother even trying to get in touch with your local Job Centre until you’re officially unemployed: they won’t want to help otherwise.

And thirdly, do bear in mind that if you’re starting your own business, it is increasingly important to develop an online presence so people can find your contact details and information about your services and prices even outside your normal office hours. And here I would recommend that you contact me to see what TPis can help you with…

This is not exactly through choice; it’s because the recession has led to my employer feeling obliged to give me a month’s notice. After the initial bit of feeling somewhat shell-shocked, and saying things on the phone like “uh-huh. uh-huh” without really making a great deal of sense, I can start to gather my thoughts somewhat.

Firstly, I don’t have any particular axe to grind with my employers. These things happen, the recession isn’t their fault, and I’m sure that same as I would, they would rather things had turned out differently. Such is life.

Secondly, I’m not wallowing in self-pity. I know that some people, when laid off, feel worthless, and it can somewhat hit their self-confidence. Well, I’d like to assure my regular readers that you don’t have to worry about that with me. I am quite happy with my skill set and abilities (not that I wouldn’t be happy to develop new ones, mind you). Indeed, when you find people as brilliant as I am, it’s rare that they are as modest and self-effacing as me.

So this gives me a chance to be my own boss, work out something else (partnerships or some such) or otherwise find some other form of regular paid work. Possibly “in the middle of a recession” isn’t exactly the best time to be setting out to achieve such a task, but that is when these sorts of things tend to happen.

Obviously, should any of you wish to call upon my services, whether it be writing, web design, accessibility, data migration or whatnot, you can contact me through the usual channels.

And if nothing turns up quickly, I’ll just have to write a series of best selling novels about a boy wizard. Well, if it worked for J. K. Rowling…

When I was studying for my GCSEs, I did a project on Saltwell Park, looking at how much litter, dog shit and graffiti there was at the park. Although I have got a feeling that this wasn’t the precise terminology that I used. This project looked at twenty sites around the park, and assessed how many dog turds there were within 5m of a particular spot, how many items of litter there were, and how many pieces of graffiti there were.

Now the study wasn’t perfect for a few reasons, a couple of which I’ll explain here:-

• If I encountered a turd, I wasn’t going to examine it closely to determine whether it was from a dog or some other similar animal
• I did not actually sample 20 sites. I sampled about 14, got bored and then made up the rest of the results

But it did illustrate one major point. Saltwell Park as it was then (around 1990), was a pretty horrible place. Sure, it still had children’s play areas and a boating lake, but it did also have broken glass, dog shit and litter all over the place, lots of empty lager cans, graffiti, and it wasn’t somewhere you’d particularly feel comfortable in — or even safe if you’d gone by yourself.

But Saltwell Park now is a thing of beauty.

As you come in from the new car park area, you walk through the Grove area, which contain’s the park’s bandstand, and then emerge through a stone archway into the area called ‘South Park’, where Saltwell Towers dominates the view.

Saltwell Towers was built by William Wailes in the 19th Century as his own private estate. It was occupied by him until his death in 1881, and after that it served various purposes, including a World War I military hospital (1916-1920) and the park museum until in 1970 it was declared unsafe.

As a child, that’s how I remember it. Dark, brooding, decaying, fenced off and covered by scaffolding. Hardly something that would make the park seem welcoming. By 2005, though, Saltwell Park had received a £10 million restoration; Saltwell Towers was restored, CCTV was installed, and the park was nice, clean and safe. Somewhere you’d enjoy bringing the children again.

So we did. We’d been out for lunch at the Imperial Chinese Restaurant, Low Fell (lovely place, if you’re in the vicinity, do go, and tell them we sent ya), and popped along to Saltwell Park for a walk about with the kids.

After walking past the towers, we walked down to the bottom of the Dene, with a view of the pretty little trickling waterfall. If I recall correctly, it’s not exactly natural any more — water is pumped from the pool at the bottom back to the top, but the effect is no less pretty for any of that.

This is also the area where the salt well was located, from which the area and the park obtained their names.

Walking back up the side of the Dene, we took the opportunity to take a few photographs. One of them was more striking than the others. When I asked my three year old to stand still while I took a picture, I simply meant, “stop walking for a moment”. He obviously interpreted this as “strike a bizarre pose as if you were playing musical statues”.

Oh well, at least he was enjoying himself!

From there, we went onto the play areas (they have separate sections for over- and and under-eights), which are simply great for the kids. They’ve got all sorts of different equipment, with that kind of semi-spongy surface to reduce the risk of injuries is kids fall off. It’s simply a stunning park now.

And of course the landscaping and the restoration works to other parts of the park — the Broadwalk, the Northern Fields, the Almond Pavilion, the Octagonal Garden and the Maze (although it will take some time for the bushes in the maze to grow to their required height) — is just as good. There’s also a park map (pdf) if you feel that will help your understanding. I feel that I can safely say that while restoring the park cost £10 million (partly paid for by the Heritgage Lottery Fund) was money well spent.

Over by the boating lake we get to see the swans, ducks and geese. Both the swans and the geese had younglings with them — they were still covered in the downy sort of feathers as opposed to the more traditional “feathery” sort. Indeed, if I recall correctly, they were described by one of us (I’ll save myself the embarrassment by not revealing it was me) they were described as “all fluffily instead of feathery”.

On the way back we called into the beautifully restored Saltwell Towers for what, it must be said, was a truly awful cup of coffee, but that wasn’t sufficient to spoil a lovely pleasant afternoon stroll through a lovely pleasant park.

Thank you again to those involved in restoring it. You’ve turned the run down and rather scabrous park of my youth into something I am delighted is part of my Gateshead. It truly is a park to be proud of.

Either way, the mere possibility of this impression occurring is not something that is likely to occur on a daily basis (I fervently hope) and therefore I believe it is worthy of note. Incidentally, to anyone who is not a regular visitor to this blog, I feel it might be worth pointing out at this stage that I am not racist, a fascist, or a bigot. I can be argumentative and bloody-minded, but that’s not quite the same thing.

Anyway, when my son showed me the pretty blue snowflake he’d made in the thursday afternoon club thing his school has, I was suitably impressed, asking him if he’d done the cutting himself and so on. Yes, he had. He had made it all himself, he said. Only it wasn’t a blue snowflake, Daddy, it was a Nazi flag.

Oh bugger, thinks I. Now my son knows what the Nazis are/were (basically “baddies”) as seen in the Indiana Jones films. However, I don’t know whether he has told anyone at school what he was making, and I don’t really dare ask. If they thought he was making a snowflake, and I start asking them about the swastikas he has been making at school, we’ll get a little confused. On the other hand, if they do think he has been making swastikas then they will presumably think we are part of some neo-nazi group and that we have wallpaper with a repeating pattern like this…

…watching cartoons like Wacky Racists and going off on our holidays in the Mein Kampfervan.

Then of course you’re left wondering what is exactly the appropriate way to handle the situation. I am trying to explain that you don’t really want to be making nazi symbols in school, because you don’t want people to think you’re a baddie, but on the other hand he has a Dalek Sec and a Cyberman head from Doctor Who, and they are clearly baddies too, so how come it’s okay to draw pictures of one sort of baddies and pretend to be them, when it’s not okay to pretend to be another sort…

Arguably, it would be fair to say that the Daleks and the Cybermen were somewhat more unpleasant than the Nazis, being bent on exterminating the entire human race, but here the fact that they are clearly fictional removes a lot of the problem; whereas the Nazis were certainly not fictional, they were responsible for the deaths of millions, and people still deny this or try to pretend that the whole thing was somewhat less than the way it is presented.

Of course, Indiana Jones is fiction. And there are Nazis in that. And my son, so far as I know, has ever encountered any Nazis outside Indiana Jones.

But you try explaining the cultural emphasis, the history, the ideologies and the problems with the use of Nazi symbology to a five year old who has up until that point really just seen them as “the baddies from Indiana Jones” and see how far you get…

Just for clarity then: I am not a Nazi. Just wanted to make sure that was nice and clear, and that if when I pick the little lad up from school tonight I find he’s been forming a National Socialist movement in the schoolyard, Heil I’ll not be taking responsibility. Okay?

There’s currently an event on in NewcastleGateshead (the gestalt entity formed from Newcastle and Gateshead councils to promote events across the two) called EAT! Newcastle Gateshead, which is not, as it may initially sound, a command to consume the region, but is instead a festival of food.

This started on the 2nd May and runs onward until the 17th, but it was on the 2nd that we decided to go. There was a free event on in Baltic square called IncrEdible North East which basically involved a lot of stalls selling different foods, some storytelling activities, some sporting and nutrition things, and other exhibitions.

Add this to the fact that there were exhibitions on at the BALTIC mill art gallery that I wanted to see, and we seemed to have the perfect family day out plan. Visit the food thing, visit the art gallery thing. Two birds, one stone. What could possibly go wrong?

Well… we got there, parked in the car park, and headed down to the market square: me, the GLW and the kids BTP and SWP, where we had arranged to meet up with Grandma J and Grandad B. They had got there ten minutes earlier than we had and so had already picked up a leaflet to see what was available.

As we headed over to find one of these leaflets for ourselves, the GLW noticed a football related thing, where Newcastle United coaching staff would talk to kids about proper nutrition. This was aimed at primary school children, but at the upper end of it (i.e. ages 8-11) but as they weren’t too busy, they were happy to let BTP (5) go in, although his little brother was a bit too young.

No problem: we took turns ‘keeping watch’ outside the tent, while the rest of us went wandering off with SWP across the millenium bridge and back again; finding oversized jigsaw type things where you have to put the cuts of meat back onto the wooden animal (yeah, it seemed odd to me too), and, in my case finding a stall from the local Allendale Brewery where they were handing out little glasses (very little glasses — about half a mouthful) of their beers in order to try and entice people to buy some later.

Of course, I wouldn’t fall for a ploy as simple as this, and the fact that I bought a bottle of Allendale Black Grouse and a bottle of Allendale Curlew’s Return later on was entirely coincidental.

BTP’s half hour of listening to soccer coaches impart useful nutritional advice (“you shouldn’t eat ice-cream every day” — as if he’d get the chance!) also came with a couple of opportunities to win Newcastle United related prizes and he was absolutely delighted as he came buzzing out with an inflatable Monty Magpie that you can place over your hand and wear, presumably at home games for those children who have a Dad is willing to be seen next to someone waving one of them about.

Anyway, he was absolutely thrilled with this and we were just wandering away when one of the ladies from the tent came running up to me and said “didn’t he tell you he’d won a pair of match tickets?”. That’s kid’s priorities for you: £60 of free football tickets impresses no one: £1 worth of inflatable magpie and you’re over the moon…

So far, so good, eh?

Next it was the BALTIC itself. Sarah Sze’s Tilting Planet exhibition had been very much enjoyed by @infomixer, so that seemed worth a visit.

It was an art installation, using junk items as the raw material (empty water bottles, drawing pins, matchsticks, bits of paper and so on). It really was quite impressive. There was a variety of colour, of different items juxtaposed together; it was interesting llooking how the things were put together. And I’d managed to avoid questioning why they had been put together until I read the blurb on the wall outside.

…Sze’s expansive sculptural vocabulary uses these items constructively to precisely build structures that defamiliarise our preconceived ideas of these objects

BALTIC: Tilting Planet

And at that point the whole thing came crashing down on me. Yes, it’s interesting. Yes, it’s different. Yes, it shows you can create different shapes, patterns and sculptures which are pleasing to the eye out of commonly discarded things. But this really is nothing new.

The bloody Wombles (thieving, tax-avoiding buggers or no) had this corner covered in the 1970s with their “making good use of the things left behind, the things that the everyday folk leave behind” shtick. And it’s not high-falutin’ high concept art. It’s interesting, it’s clever, but if you feel the need to use phrases like “sculptural vocabulary” and “defamiliarise” to describe it, then it’s just a pretentious arty circle jerk.

I still enjoyed the art: it’s just the pretentious wank surrounding it I objected to.

The next exhibition was…

…which was a selection of different small exhibits concerning the natural world, or that of the Victorian naturalist. There was a video of a naked woman in a lake full of jellyfish (pretty jellies, and a woman with no clothes on both fine independently, but I’d not have considered putting them together), a video of some giant tortoises shagging (or “playing”, if there are kids within earshot), some various paintings, a rowing boat with a video display of what a rower would see rotating around it (quite bizarre but actually quite captivating).

On the next floor down, there was a strange styrofoam sculpture called “Overhang” simply made out of large styrofoam blocks stacked together in a way which looked like it was liable to collapse under its own weight at any moment but was surprisingly still vertical.

And then, on the last floor, was The Gainsborough Packet. This is a 9 minute long folk song with accompanying video inspired by a letter a John Burdikin wrote to his friend Pybus in 1828. Folk music is not, really, in any shape of the word, my thing, and so I had the intention of watching it for about a minute — just to be polite — and then wandering off.

Only after a minute, I thought that I might as well stay for one more minute, and everyone else was staring intently at the screen also. And then some seats became available, so we sat down. And sat, enthralled through the rest of the entire performance, as the artist Matt Stokes (who created the thing) and the singer Sam Lee (who, as the singer, was somewhat essential to the the song) related the tale of John Burdikin to his friend Pybus.

It was bloody brilliant. And The Guardian enjoyed it too. The only drawback is that it is only on at the BALTIC until the 10th May, so you’d better get a bleeding shuffle on if you want to see it. On the other hand, it is also being shown at 176 in London until the 28th June, so if you’re at that end of the country, you’ve got a little more time to pop along.

And, obviously, this is where part of this post title comes from, as the song contained the frequent refrain, “what do you think of that, my friend Pybus” (or possibly “that, then,”).

And that was the BALTIC. Brilliant: you won’t always like everything you see there, but there’s generally something you’ll like, and it’s generally something different that you wouldn’t tend to see elsewhere…

We’d timed our trip to the BALTIC extremely well: we left the BALTIC just in time to see the Millenium Bridge start to raise up…

This is quite an impressive sight, watching an 800 tonne 126 metre span glide seemingly effortlessly through about sixty degrees of arc.

There’s not really room here to include all eleven photos of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge gradually opening and the fishing boat (part of the Eat Me! Drink Me! festival thingummy) come through underneath it, so I’ve instead just included one where’s it’s only just opening, one where it’s half open, and one fully open here, although if ’tis your sort of thing to watch the Millenium Bridge opening, more of the photos can be found in my Flickr ‘Newcastle and Gateshead’ set.

After this, we popped along to the stalls again to buy some Sea Bass for tea, along with some Beer Bread, the beer highlighted before, and pick up a couple of ice creams for the kids before heading home. We had considered getting a squirrel to eat, on the basis that none of us had ever eaten a squirrel before and as it was claimed to be a grey squirrel (although in the packet with the fur removed it wasn’t really that easy to tell) then I’d be doing my bit for the red squirrel population, presumably. Only by the time we went to someone else had got it.

Then there was just time for a quick pose on the Gateshead Millenium Bridge with four other bridges in the background, and then it was time to go home…

…so, it pretty much turned out that nothing went wrong and we all had a lovely time…

Discovery Museum

At the start of April, my Dad (plus his GLW and their daughter) came up for a visit, so we had a combined trip out to the Discovery Museum. Now, as the more astute of you may remember, we have been there before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to go again some times.

We spent a little more time in the ‘Science Maze’ part with the kiddies this time (prior planning!) and generally had a lovely time. I don’t want to go on about it too much — you can read more details in my previous post about it — but as a free afternoon out with the kids, it’s not a bad place to visit at all. It’s fun, there’s lots to see — most of which would be easier to see if you weren’t yanked at breakneck pace through the museum bits by your children so they could get to the science maze faster — and, being located right next to Newcastle Central Station, it’s easy enough to get to as well.

Gibside

Gibside is not as easy to get to. If you plan on going there, I would recommend three things. Firstly, look where it is on a map prior to going. Secondly, go by car. Thirdly, be a member of the National Trust. Admission is free for National Trust members (which, fortunately, we are), and not exactly cheap (£6.50 adult, £4 child) for other people.

But, assuming that those things are okay with you, then it is well worth a visit.

Firstly, there are some views across the Tyne Valley which are simply stunning. There is also an awful lot to see: there’s Gibside Hall itself, which we didn’t actually get to, but we did see the chapel, the sundial, and an awful lot of nice green spaces to walk around in. There is also a lovely path flanked by trees on each side, and a lovely little dene to investigate.

Gibside has royal connections, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing, and used to be owned by the Bowes-Lyon family (think “Queen Mother”). It’s also a site of special scientific interest, for those of you who like that sort of thing. It’s got all squidgels and stuff.

There’s also another building, only I’m not entirely sure what it is. It has some lovely classic columns at the front, has some more lovely looking views over the Tyne Valley at the back, but all that I can remember about it was something about a boiler under the building, so despite the references to ‘garden rooms’, I presume this is the ‘ruins of a bathhouse and hall’ mentioned on the National Trust site. But it’s nice anyway.

What else was nice is that they sometimes have special events on. And, because we went on Easter Sunday, they were having (provided by certain chocolate company, who, if they are grateful for the plug, might be interested to know that I like Creme Eggs) a lot of activities for the kiddies.

These included an Easter Egg trail (pay £2, follow the clues, fill in the answer sheet, and get a chocolate egg prize) which we took part in, they had storytelling for the kids (again, someone else in a Cadbury uniform telling a story about how foxy loxy stole eggs that the Easter Bunny was supposed to deliver, only he ended up delivering them by accident), and they had free face painting.

Sadly, the face painting was only for the kiddies, who both went with the ‘dragon’ motif. And what tif they had…

There’s also a little shop where you can purchase various produce, including some venison sausages which we decided to have a try of (and were very nice, actually).

It’s worth a visit if you’re in the area, although do try and pick a sunny day, do try and pick a day where they are having some sort of specific event on, and do try and be a member of the National Trust, otherwise it’s quite expensive…

Preston Park

Preston Park is in Eaglescliffe (Teeside). It’s a park, which you might have been able to work out from the title ‘Preston Park’ there, but it’s not just a park.

“This is Stockton” sum it up quite nicely:

Preston Hall Museum is set in 100 acres of beautiful parkland overlooking the River Tees. The museum has displays of art, armour and social history. Visitors can discover what life was like in the home since 1825 and stroll back in time along a typical local street of the 1890s where the museum’s resident traditional craftspeople can be found at work.

As well as the museum, Preston Park also has a range of permanent attractions including exotic bird life in the aviary and wildfowl pond and many riverside and woodland paths. You can walk amongst hundreds of beautiful butterflies at Butterfly World, take a ride on the Tees Small Gauge Railway or boat on the river. There’s also a safe surface play area for children and a café.

This is Stockton: Preston Park & Museum

But what they seem to have missed out is that there is also a crazy golf course, which was our first stop. I wouldn’t exactly say that we demonstrated any ability — although we did have an enormous amount of fun, which I think was rather more the point of the exercise.

Next we went off to Preston Hall, and more specifically the Museum. Now this was something you actually have to pay to attend, but the price was hardly extortionate. The cost for this was £3 for a family ticket (2 adults and 2 kids) which was valid for as many visits as you like in a 12 month period. As admission prices go, that’s pretty darn cheap.

There were various “indoor” things in the Museum (including the Kirklevington Stones, which are from, well, Kirklevington, and date back to the era of the Vikings), but the best part of the Museum was the Victorian Street, which you could walk along.

This had the usual sorts of things like Victorian metal and enamel adverts, the not-so-usual things (like the Victorian urinals you could peer into), and also a water pump which very much entertained BTP and SWP who were completely shocked and vastly entertained by the idea that people didn’t always used to have water quite literally ‘on tap’ at their homes.

There was a wide variety of victorian shops, including a “registered hairdressers” with quite a disturbing collection of razors. You are able to go into some of the shops, where the Victorian items (or replicas thereof) are behind glass screens, so you can have a bit of a closer look.

But the thing I liked best was the Victorian cop shop. They had the classic blue police lamp outside, but it was what was inside that was more impressive, and somewhat disturbing. As well as a selection of solid-looking truncheons, including one owned by a previous Mayor of Middlesbrough, there was what looked like a vicious looking mantrap (although smaller) with sharp and unpleasant looking metal teeth.

However, what was even more disturbing still was the selection of brass knuckles which I can only presume were standard issue for Victorian police, being placed along next to the handcuffs. These really were vicious looking implements: ideal for the Victorian copper who wanted to do the 19th century equivalent of “beat up hippies”.

And there was still more.

When we had finally finished in the Victorian Street and the Museum, we went to the cafe for a well-deserved break (not particularly good value, but I certainly felt scalped less than in cafes in equivalent venues), and then went to the playground.

While the playground may not have great cultural or historical value, it is probably the bit that the kids liked best, having a climbing frame, some tyre swings, slides and monkey bars for the little monkeys to swing across (which they did, albeit with myself and my GLW taking some of their weight to make it easier).

And then — after the crazy golf, the museum, the victorian street and the playground — it was time to visit butterfly world (and watch another tenner flutter out of my wallet). This was basically a few enormous greenhouses shoved together, kept very hot and humid, and filled with plants and butterflies. Pretty much what you’d expect from this sort of thing, to be honest.

And then, finally, it was time to go, feeling absolutely bloody knackered, but like we’d crammed an awful lot into one day. And that’s the thing about Preston Park: there’s just so much you can do there — we had only a quick glance at the aviary, and missed out boating on the river and venturing on the small gauge railway entirely.

Still, there’s always next time. We’ll have to go back. After all, I need to get some value out of that museum ticket…

Next…

Well, I don’t know 100% what we’ll be doing next, but there are a few things worth doing. It’s been too long since I’ve paid a visit to Warkworth Castle, so that’s on the list, as is visiting the BALTIC art gallery, and there’s the slightly frighteningly named Eat Newcastle Gateshead festival thingy (not quite that hungry, thanks) which I think it would be nice to see at least some of…

Any other thoughts and suggestions always welcome (although if they aren’t in the North-East, they really aren’t much good to us for a little day out).

You can still see my blogger archives if you visit my last blogger-powered post. Some of them were migrated, but many were not. By my reckoning there were 48 posts which were not migrated, meaning that this is actually my 981st wordpress post, and in total, my 1,029th blog post.

Well, I think for such a significant figure as that (look, let’s just pretend it’s a nice round number, okay?) I am entitled to be a little self-indulgent, so what I have chosen to do is to selected one post from each block of one hundred published to date and link to them here for your delight and delectation (as I’m sure some of you naughty, naughty people haven’t yet read all of my archives).

• Post 66 (June 2006): The eternal question: should you blow your nose or watch for meteorites?
• Post 126 (September 2006): Living with thanatophobia
• Post 244 (December 2006): Blogswap: Christmas Message
• Post 350 (May 2007): I’m not a racist, but…
• Post 471 (November 2007): Accessibility vs. the free market — attitudes to Target
• Post 551 (February 2008): The Sudocrem Kid
• Post 621 (May 2008): WCAG 2.0 Release Candidate Part 1 of 5: Intro
• Post 776 (September 2008): Delightful Durham
• Post 825 (November 2008): What not to put on my Christmas list
• Post 983 (April 2009): 33^rd Newcastle Beer Festival — review
• Post 1001 (April 2009): Mind Your Language

But, as it’s a special post to commemorate the fact that this is my 1,029th blog post, I am going to mention one more. This was my 413th post, and it isn’t so much notable for the post itself — Hi, Barry Scott here… but for the You Tube video embedded in it. The Barry Scott / Cillit Bang Techno Remix. If you’ve not seen it before, it’s worth a look!