Sunday 13th September 2026

Venue: St Mary’s Function Suite, The Spanish City

Doors Open: From 2pm

Reserve your (free) place on Eventbrite Here

Introduction

Between 1975 and 1979, from about the age of eight to twelve, I spent a good part of my school summer holidays living a temporary second life on the North East coast.

My parents both worked full time — my dad in the steelworks, my mam in the Civil Service — and, inconveniently, school holidays lasted much longer than annual leave. So each summer I was packed off for two or three weeks to my Aunty’s house on the Marden Farm Estate, near Tynemouth.

My Aunty had a son, my cousin, who was five years older than me. At that age, five years is not a gap; it is a geological era. He tolerated me in the way a sophisticated teenager might tolerate a small, excitable dog. A board game or two, perhaps. A brief display of cousinly duty. Then he would vanish to meet people his own age, leaving me to make my own entertainment.

Which, as it turned out, was the making of me.

If the weather was glorious — and the summer of 1976 seemed to last for roughly three years — I would head down to Tynemouth Lido, then on to Arnold Palmer’s crazy golf course for a round. Or twelve. Or twenty-seven, depending on how badly the wind, the lighthouse, or my own incompetence had treated me.

If the weather was less kind, I drifted towards Spanish City, spending my money on the Dodgems, the Jets, the Waltzer and anything else that promised speed, danger or mild injury.

And if the weather was truly North Eastern — horizontal rain, bruised skies, the sort of day that made August feel like November in a cardigan — I was pulled into the arcade inside the Spanish City Dome like a small planet disappearing into a black hole.

This book is about those summers. Not exactly as they were, but as they remain: half-memory, half-myth, lit by fairground bulbs, sea-fret and childhood imagination.

Event details

Date: Sundary 13th September

Time: Doors Open 2pm

Venue: St Mary's Function Suite, The Spanish City

Format: Author Readings, with Intros by the Watson family, following by Q&A and Book Sales / Signings. Food & Beverages available on the day (details TBC)

Please Note: This is a free ticketed event with a limited capacity. Get your tickets on Eventbrite Here.

Please also Note: The event falls on the same day as this year's Great North Run. Allow extra time if travelling to the Spanish City by car.

Excert from the Poem Arcade Fire: 

"The Penny Falls sat fat and smug,

spilling copper like a drunken thug."