Spanish City Slickers

I’m delighted to say that my next book "Spanish City Slickers" is now available to pre-order!

The book is a collection of poems about growing up around Tynemouth, Whitley Bay and Spanish City in the 1970s — the Lido, Arnold Palmer’s crazy golf, the fairground, the Dome arcade, shellfish stalls, summer holidays, sea-fret, mischief and memory.

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.