We have just spent a wonderful week in the North East on holiday with our eldest daughter and our grandson. I had two main objectives for the holiday: the first was putting the new mobility scooter through its paces and secondly, as my daughter puts it perfectly, making memories for our grandson.
During the course of the week, we visited places like Northumberland, Lindisfarne, Bamburgh Castle, Seahouses, Alnwick Garden and on Friday we went to Beamish, the living museum near Stanley County Durham. In the process of making memories for my twelve-year-old grandson I found myself reliving memories from my past, when my parents took my brother and I to this part of the country for our holidays for several years and that was when I fell in love with the place and the people of the North East.
The age difference between my grandson and I is about the same as the age difference between my father and I, Beamish Museum was much smaller when we visited for the first time back in the early 1970s soon after it had first opened to the public in 1972. I can remember being enthralled on my first visit all those years ago and wanting to see every exhibit. In more recent years we visited not long before the end of my father’s life and it is only now that I fully understand that some of the exhibits we look at as relics from a bygone age, were far more memorable for my dad, who was born in 1903 and lived through two world wars in a world that looks very different to our modern day.
There were three things that struck me as we walked around the 350 acre site with over a quarter of a million exhibits.
• Firstly, there is way too much to see in one day. Our first port of call was the coal mine and with my grandson being a devotee of the computer game Minecraft, he wanted to see every exhibit, I was conscious that we had only just set foot in the place and there was so much more to see and we needed to move on. In the end we possibly saw less than half of what was on offer, meaning that we need to go back.
• Secondly, I became aware of the difference in pace between my grandson and I and for maybe the first time in fifty years, I could empathise with my father, who never complained about running around with my brother and I. It is only now that I can start to understand how drained he must have felt at times.
• Thirdly, I became aware of the difference in pace between life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and our modern-day world. We had to queue for over an hour for fish and chips cooked in coal fired pans, everything moved at the pace of several generations ago and I started to understand that maybe it does us good to slow the pace down every so often.
I apologise for the quality of the photograph, having stood in a queue for over an hour for my dinner, then walked downhill for over a mile, trying to keep pace with the scooter, then shove my way through crowds of people queueing up for the sweetie shop I had to find a bench and consequently, exhausted, I took this picture. Finally, I was reminded that there is sometimes a cost to making memories, but that is soon forgotten as we look back and treasure those moments.