Fear of Gloating in Newcastle

 I am NOT one of those who will slag London off just because I no longer live there, I think London is a fantastic city, I just began to find it a very difficult place in which to actually live. This is my eleventh year in Newcastle and I have NOT regretted moving, in fact I regularly give myself a silent congratulation when I experience something that is very different to the experiences I had in London. I love being able to saunter across the city in under an hour, I love the pace, I love the scale. More people use London's Charing Cross station in the 'Rush Hour' every week day than live in the cities of Newcastle and Gateshead combined. 2.5 million people live in North East England, there are just 2 people per square kilometer living in Northumberland...

I have had some hard times, since 2011 in particular, but I am convinced that the effects of redundancy and clawing myself back would have been MUCH more difficult in London. I remember seven lean years I spent in Deptford/New Cross after the night club I was running closed, it was like a biblical famine for me. There isn't a huge amount of 'spare' cash and conspicuous consumption going on up here (booze aside that is!) and you simply do not need as much money to live in relative comfort. Areas that are officially labelled as "deprived" are (with some exceptions of course) difficult to spot by driving through them and shine above their London counterparts. Geordies LOVE to party! Newcastle has a reputation as a "Party City" and the week ends are a regular carnival of excess. BUT the violence and mayhem experienced in other places tends not to happen here. People get very loud and they posture but they rarely "kick off". I've lived around the corner from Queens Park Rangers and Millwall football stadiums so am not enamoured of football supporters, but found myself caught up amongst "magpie" supporters in Newcastle one evening and was surprised by how good natured and friendly they were. Mind you; that changes when they play Sunderland! Honestly: the tribalism up here is amusing; people separated by a river or a valley regard each other like aliens a lot of the time!

The road on which my house stands is very quiet by London standards- certainly not busy, a garden wraps around the house and I have two cherry trees and a leylandii (lone survivor of the giant hedge I inherited when I came here). I am lucky to have a bedroom with large windows in two of its walls, for several recent weeks I have taken particular pleasure in walking into my room to get ready for bed and relishing the freshness of the air and the quiet.

Yes, I congratulate myself on the good sense to migrate north and once I pass my driving test, I will be off exploring the castles and the coast and the countryside that I've only glimpsed when motoring friends come to visit. Being able to just nip off out and be lost in green fields and forests or the coast in well under an hour: that is a definition of bliss, at least it is for me.