One more of the Living printed and delivered, on schedule as the series was planned, too. More of the wysiwyg way in doing time where it’s good To Make The Day Count.
For those who’ve not caught this before, I’m producing a Partwork in print. It’s just me being lucky enough to be able to stay enjoying and doing the sort of things from when I was younger. When the teenager, I was under the wings of people helping me become a newspaper and publishing guy. It wasn’t then what it is today, in those days letters got pressed. We drank more milk, someone told me to do that as I would be handling lots of lead. Got to writing leaders a bit later.
I am glad, happy, amazed too, those twenty six soldiers of lead still get to parade. On March 26 I was at Beamish Museum, in the printing office there I touched the stone of The Sunderland Evening Echo. It was a birthday treat, a catch-up, a memory lane time of this very day in Essex where I had first seen the stone in a printing shop. I got to touch type that day, saw a galley filled from a stick, the proof from compositors’ nimble fingers. The key to printing: lifestyle.
Beamish has more or less the same office as had Ebenezer Dilliway, the type faces and machinery he installed to produce his Burnham Advertiser weekly newspaper in 1907. Back in 1951 was when I spent my very first day at work, on March 26 this year, for me Essex came to County Durham. At my home office, to celebrate, that morning I wrote, planned the page, re-jigged it to join others that are in the latest Living. It’s a job that comes easy.
I have never seen it as work though, a past of whatever count of years I’ve been doing storytelling on the pages of printed newspapers, journals and magazines. Quite the privilege as for so much of the way to here it’s been the tourist and travel connection: luck, rather than intent. Ok, let’s say opportunity knocks: I didn’t look the gift horse in its mouth, and always so many hands then helped me discover the way forward.
Coming to the North East, across some decades then writing b2b stuff for business to business from a den within a few miles of Beamish itself. Hard to believe, yet it happened and now I am on another b2b – brekka to bedtime, beingThere, Berwick to Bradwell even. You couldn’t make it up, could you.
It’s the rolling on of the caravan with hike and bike habits, the sort of thing we’d always done at KSA. In 2026 it is still much the same fun of course, although covid killed off our journals’ forty year run. Now I am making up for that by producing a Partwork called Living. The No.2 issue was published on July 31, smack on time, there’s another is on the stocks for the autumn. Going with that is the fun-time of making a video or two, although not of the skilled and expert way my Scottish buddy can do: a case of wysiwyg of the something that I like doing. Some rivers to cross in the horizon heading, tide running ebb and flow as you tow.
Berwick to Bradwell, you could say Tweed to the Thames, is about something I have lived with for years. An interest sparked by the man who got to what is now Essex, built a Chapel at an old Roman fort on the banks of a muddy river. One more step down the coast and he’d have got to the Thames. Actually, he did of course, yet didn’t call it a day there. In between popping back to see his family at Lindisfarne he took to building more of his line in work at Lastingham. He was in step with a Pope and another Saint for a Synod before Whitby Abbey got to being roofless as it shows up on that Yorkshire headland today.
This week we can read of a ship called Brioc sailing the coasts of Britain, it’s a 10th century reconstructed version of something that perhaps St Cedd would have travelled on in his journeys. What goes around comes around, you can reckon. One thing about this 90 year celebration of mine is I am getting to have a lot of fun: and not just with this writing malarkey of travel and taking pictures. Isn’t that far better than couch raiding the tv and sleeping past bedtime. I’m keeping in my hand with the game that’s been lifestyle since back then. Writing the Living series is a way to express some thanks to the way Friends have helped “do the travel”.
This play with a Partwork series that now reaches Living 2, it’s a bit as was with Practical Camper, approach to helping things get to becoming Footloose: the ways of Bicycle Times and beingThere at mountain moor and meadow with in-tent people on a backpacking trail. A caravanner in Aschau, seeing the Bavarian countryside go grey, cold, lighten back again from a total eclipse. That was the last one, we were there to be part of ISPO.
Just the kiddy at heart looking at sweet jars and getting to choose. What a treat is storytelling, some humbugs, lollypops and sweets that can get to be chewed on. What I like about this number is there is tactility in print, it just happens to carry feel and the beingThere: you are catching the digital right now yes. We did that with the b2b journals: like them Living comes in print. And to think, just an handful of miles up the road from here is that Beamish Museum offer of seeing how things were in those growing up years. Go there, you’ll see the way of life with everyday folk and others who lived and worked in the North East. They read a newspaper which carried the news, for sure at some time or another there would have been a 15 years old lad getting to work where the presses rolled. Living in the making.
In Burnham on Crouch there is the Town Museum with stories of much that made this place: yachting, the ironworks, the farming community, its two football teams, the sailmakers and the railway line which ducked the Beeching cuts because there was a local nuclear power station. In a way what a pity it got built, yet that’s another story, one not told in the Burnham Advertiser. It closed years back.
There’s an illustrated Newsletter for the asking, some ideas on beingThere could point you along the tread of Cedd. Doing it gets you places.
