{"product_id":"spanish-city-slickers","title":"Spanish City Slickers","description":"\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eI’m delighted to say that my next book \"\u003ci\u003eSpanish City Slickers\"\u003c\/i\u003e is now available to pre-order!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eBetween 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eMy 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eMy 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eWhich, as it turned out, was the making of me.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eIf 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eIf 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eAnd 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Shades 4 Seasons","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58830745043328,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0570\/4679\/4403\/files\/Front-Cover-SW_73742a0e-188f-4a7d-9d81-a970f66348c2.png?v=1788272243","url":"https:\/\/shades4seasons.com\/products\/spanish-city-slickers","provider":"Shades 4 Seasons","version":"1.0","type":"link"}