As I get older, 69 on the 24th of this month of October 2023, I wondered what my life would be like if it weren’t called on ‘to go on pilgrimage’, somewhat as Chaucer’s pilgrims were, by the plastic and other arts (a range of them), and wide learning interests that sometimes feel so boundless that time is always at a premium. On Thursdays, when hubby Geoff goes to the Oxfam bookshop to value and sell second hand books as a hobby, my dog Daisy pulls me to the local café, The Blue Stone, named after a dolmen carried here by a glacier from West, from the Lake District as is now, but the 🪨 stone is sometimes named the Devil’s Stone. The Stone itself, and some near relatives, sit in the Market Square.
Daisy, who pulls me to the Blue Stone on these days, is accustomed to being bought 2 eggs; boiled, poached or fried – her tastes are Catholic. Once replete with the dish eggs for which she came, sits quietly under the table awaiting the walk home as I eat my Briam, a Greek stew of courgettes, tomato and potatoes, a speciality that you have to book ahead for.
But would this be my life I wonder, all the time in the absence of art. Is it the equivalent of the Snug after which it was named, that little room in which ladies congregated in pubs in the past when public bars in the North of England were for men only, by convention but also sometimes by the rule. It was still the rule in the Cockfield Working Men’s Club when we first moved to County Durham.
The room got its name of ‘Snug’ in fact because the owners of this café, with its home-made scone reputation, David and Paul, were friends of Tony Warren, the originator of Coronation Street, and a photo of that fictional pub’s snug, run by Jack and Annie Walker, adorns it’s wall, featuring in it the snog regulars of the then Rover’s Return the same three old ladies: Mrs. Ena Sharples, Miss Minnie Caldwell and Mrs Vera Longhurst.
I wonder if the Snug I now inhabit, regularly on Thursdays, is the equivalent of that place of ritual leisure for the almost marginal in their community. I think I could fairly be described as such for you have to live in County Durham a long time to be local, as Ken Loach’s latest film, The Old Oak show. Geoff and I have lived here now for a considerable time (20 years?), but that’s a miniscule moment of full acceptance. At least, I am not quite made to feel different because I am a battleaxe of the Sharples variety, or at least not only that. I sit here in my Pride braces and survey the scene, not part of it but recognised in it.
Routine, as I age more, might have to take over from the role of the arts in my life, although most of that is bound up with Geoff, the hubby. Perhaps that will be the birth of a late style of living, like those careless daubs that characterised that of Titian but that paradoxically marked his greatness. I have no expectation or wish for that, luckily, or even of lesser celebrity, but communality has its value. It really does, especially if it embraces diversity.
Come and see the Blue Stone: café and dolmen. Crook is quiet – over quiet for most City dwellers who claim to like the businesss and social resources that open late and swing hard. I love it. But let me keep the arts visits too. For at least a while. Crook ain’t so bad. Lol.
Love
Steven
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