Yesterday was Saturday, and instead of treading the carpets in the vast halls of Mercuryvapour Towers, I decided to go on a hastily arranged trip to Durham, with Chris. On Friday, we had a few beers whilst ficking through the TV channels, doing our best to avoid anything even slightly “Comic Relief” related.

On Saturday morning, whilst I was enjoying my weekly viewing of Saturday Kitchen, the phone rang. It was Chris, sounding rather confused…

“Jamie, was I pissed lat night?”

“I replied negatively, as he seemed OK to me. Mind you, I’d been on the Stellas, so my judgement may have been slightly clouded by this fact. He explained how he’d tried to phone someone, and couldn’t remember who. Apparently, whoever it was, had been trying to phone him all morning, on a withheld number, and he couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed and answer it. Ah well.

As I settled back down to catch the end of the afore mentioned early weekend cookery programme, the phone rang again. It was Chris again, asking if I fancied a run out to Durham. Well, the weather was nice, and my camera needed an airing, so I wholeheartedly agreed.

To stretch my legs, I decided to meet him half way, and then we’d walk back up to mine. Great stuff. Daddykins wanted some pie, so I stopped off at the bakers on the way back and got him some mince pies, at the extortionate price of 95p each. I also bought the local rag newspaper, which seemed even more devoid of interesting news than usual.

After returning back here, I had a quick shave and wash, and we left, with me clutching my camera. The first stop was an uneventful walk to the cash machine at the Shell garage. This is on the way to the bus stop, so we lost nothing by talking this short detour. And I’ve probably lost a couple of readers by statiing that totally unnecessary fact.

We arrived and checked the bus timetables. According to the timetable, we’d just missed the bus to Durham, so we whiled away the time reading the graffiti adorning the bus stop and the wooden fence to the back of it. As far as I know, Hartlepool is the only place in the world that has such badly spelled graffiti. For example “CARL IS A FUKEN RARF”. A “rarf”, is purely a Hartlepudlian expression, meaning a gentleman/lady of small mental capacity, and I’m not even sure if it has an official spelling.

Luckily, it turns out that the Durham bus was incredibly, incredibly late, so we managed to get that a few minutes after we arrived at the bus stop. Bimler.

Up we went to the top deck, only to find that the prime positions at the very front of the bus had been taken by someone else. This meant, that while I’d normally be snapping away, taking photos of everything out of the windows, I had to hold off, until the fuken rarfs left the bus. They did this at some point in Peterlee, which means we immediately grabbed the prominent position. I managed to get some shots of the now increasingly rare gear-in-head Eleco Goldenrays, which would have been installed at some point in the 70s. I won’t bore you with the pictures, as I haven’t put them on flickr and I can’t be arsed opening GIMP and resizing one.

The rest of the bus ride was particularly uncomfortable. The bus was a wreck. The side panel next to my seat was hanging off, and the bus had little/no shock absorbing capacity at all. And, considering the bus visited numerous ex-mining villages with terrible roads, it wasn’t a comfortable journey. “On the way to durham. Bouncy bus” was the way I described it via twitter.

After what felt like an eternity, we began to leave the uneven roads, and began to feel the smooth, smooth tarmac of Durham approaching. Awesome.

We arrived at the bus station, and in a repeat of the April 2008 trip, oddly blogged about in May, the first stop was to Peters the Bakery, in order to pick up one of their awesome pasties. I must admit, I prefer the Peters pasties over Greggs. The Greggs ones have gone really downhill recently.

The whole trip was simply an excuse for me to dust my camera off (more on the dust in a minute), so the first stop was to the cathedral. They still don’t allow you to take cameras in, so I had to satisfy my photo urge by taking exterior photos. This was one I was particularly proud of…

OK, so it’s had a bit of post-processing done to it, and normally that’s something I hate, but seeing as I always shoot in RAW format now, (2x16Gb cards = laaarvely) that’s something I’m more willing to experiment with now. And, onto the dust. You can’t really see it on the small size shown here, but in the very bottom left, you’ll notice a spherical object. It’s a dust speck on either the sensor or the mirror. Fark. The camera has its own dust deletion features, so I might go through that instead of resorting to cleaning the sensor. It’s not in an important place anyway.

After I’d taken photos of the grounds (and a pile of sick) we headed inside the cathedral. Now, back in my 2008 post, I mentioned about the chior and orchestra in there. Well, they were there again, and still as awesome as ever. I was walking around the place with the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

This time, I abided (abode?) by the rules, and didn’t take one photo. My current camera is slightly less easier to hide.

We left the cathedral, and walked along the river. I wanted to get a shot of that cross from the reverse angle, only slight problem is that you can’t actually see it from the footpath, as the footpath is approximately 30 feet lower down, and there’s a wall in the way. Bugger.

We continued to walk along the footpath, as I’d never been along that way before, and I was interested to see what was there. I’ll tell you what’s there. A Thorn Gamma 6, mounted on an old Revo Moseley column, that’s what! Oh, OK. There’s a footbridge that takes you across the river. I broke out the camera again, as a…. boat thing went underneath… (mental block… these things have names, yes?)

We followed the path all the way along, to see what was at the end of it.

A roundabout and very little else. Oh.

We turned back and headed the way we came, but this time along the other side of the river. It gave me oppotunity to take more photos, naturally.

So, after that, we went into the city part itself. It’s not particularly big, but there’s a market square, where there was actually a market. Not the good type of market, however, this was your “fruit and veg” market. Sigh. Not a CD or record in sight. I ended up paying £1 for a small bag of cola bottles. Gah. We walked a little futher round, and stopped off at the same paper shop we’d been to 11 months before, in order to pick up a can of pop, or smoething to drink. All of this walking was dehydrating!

68p. That’s 68p for a can of 7-up. Sixty Eight New Pence. Still, I like 7-up, and it was a small (well, rather large) price to pay. We left the shop, and began to head in a randome direction, back towards the river. There’s a smail set of steps here, that you have to negotiate. And, despite my almost 30 years expereince in negotiating sets of steps, unfortunately, this time I’d forgotten how to manage them, and misjudged the fact that there was still a step to go.

Down I went, like a bag of shit. Not that I’ve actually ever seem a bag of shit fall, but I guess it would look something like what happened to me right about there. My knees made contact with the “ribbed” paving stones, which have raised sections, and let me tell you, those raised sections HURT, especially when certain body parts are scraping across them at a considerable speed. What’s even worse is that my 68p can of 7-up was now half empty, on the floor. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU…

The whole time, some random passer by was staring at me, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. I just nodded at her, in the best way possible to say “Show’s over, bitch”.

With my pride, and my articulatio genus dented, I hobbled away. We walked in a long circle in order to arrive back at the cathedral. The sun, at this point, was breaking through the cloud, and I was able to get a good shot of the cathedral…

I still keep meaning to go back here in the summer to get some summer pictures. The only ones I’ve managed so far have been early spring photos.

After I had sucessfully captured enough photos for a 700Mb flickr upload, we headed off back to the bus station. There was still a few minutes before the bus was turning up, so we headed into the shop to pick up much needed supplies for the jorney home. OK, it’s not that far, but when you’re sitting on a bus, staring out of the window at vast swathes of nothingness, something to chew on is essecntial. I opted for a bottle of water, and a bag of McCoys.

We boarded the bus, and headed once again to the top deck.

This turned out to be a mistake, as directly behind us, we got some type of family unit, consisting of three kids, who had clearly been injecting pure sugar into their veins, and their poor, flustered mother.

“OHLET’SPLAYCOUTHTHEBLACKCARS! BLACKCARS! ONETWOTHREESEVENTHRTEEN”…

I looked at Chris, and signed. This was going to be a long journey.

“Count The Cars” officially got boring to them approximately three minutes into the journey, and instead they began swapping football stickers.

“DOYOUWANTOWEN? HE’STHEFANSFAVOURITE! WHATTEAMDOESDAVISJAMESPLAYFOR? DOYOUWANTDAVIDJAMES?TOUGH!

There was a brief respite, when one of the kids began to feel carsick, and thankfully shut up. Unfortunately, this soon passed as we arrived into Peterlee bus station, slightly earlier than expected. The driver switched the engine off and left the bus at this point, for some unknown reason.

“THEDRIVERSGONE! HASHELEFTTHEKEYSIN? LETSGONICKTHEBUS LETSGONICKTHEBUS”

Joy. At least there was only a few miles to go. The parent, getting flustered, beings shouting at the kids, as the sugar rush failed to dissipate, and was still causing them to do 100-metre style sprints up and down the vehicle. Eventually, the driver boards again, and we leave the rolling vistas of Peterlee behind. The day was completed, with the parent calling one of the kids a “doyle”. It was a perfect ending. Start with “rarf”, and with “doyle”. That’s the reason I love Hartlepool. Two expressions that would make absolutely no sense anywhere else on the planet. It was truly Elish.