Days 5, 6 and 7: Alma Mater

"Why, it's a perfect little city.  If you have never been to Durham, go at once.  Take my car.  It's wonderful" - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island


The East Coast mainline has long been my personal railroad. My first ever journeys to London originated from the wildlands of West Yorkshire, as I gingerly boarded at Wakefield Westgate what was then a tired but proud GNER service. I remember as a teenager, Young Person's Railcard in hand and tiny rucksack on my back, sneaking a glimpse at the ostentatious restaurant car and the opulent (for me, at least) surroundings of the First Class carriages. I'd hurry quickly onto Coach B and realised I'd booked, yet again, a seat in the Quiet Coach, where at least one pariah of silence would look thunderously at my Creative Jukebox Zen and oversized wraparound headphones (this was long before iPods were de rigeur, of course). The journey to London lasted two decidedly uncomfortable hours, and I used to pass that time in expectant agitation until the confused microcosm of capital activity that is King's Cross Station loomed into view.


Fast forward to last Friday, and I had the pleasure of visiting King's Cross again. GNER has now morphed, via the disastrous National Express stint, into the safely anonymous 'East Coast', but the station is still one of the more unpleasant in London. A claustrophobic mix of greasy fast-food, frantic coffee-shop waitresses and unrelenting Tannoy announcements is disorienting enough, but add crowds of tourists efficiently wheeling their suitcases over your toes or sprinting en masse to the immensely unhelpful barriers and your departure becomes a Herculean labour of patience. Whilst the beauty and luxury of St. Pancras lies just moments to the west, East Coast passengers must tolerate the madness of King's Cross as their own gateway to the capital.  Its long overdue facelift cannot come soon enough.


Our train yawned and stretched its way to the North. The track unfurled past luscious green as we curved through Doncaster and York on our way to my university friends' long-awaited wedding.  The approach to Durham is particularly breathtaking, with the city's towering viaduct offering a spectacular view of the famous Cathedral and Castle. In the Friday evening twilight, the city lay twinkling below us, but its vista felt immediately familiar and curiously distant, as if the city was challenging me, three years after I had last visited, to rediscover its treasures and compare the glorious past with this suddenly inconveniently real present.


With the Friday evening drinking crowd in full swing down North Road and around the Market Place, I impatiently waited until Saturday morning to commence my re-exploration, satisfied with merely recounting memories of misspent youth to my long-suffering girlfriend on the walk to the hotel. Even a brief wander, though, made the years drip away, so that the sudden jolting appearance of a Tesco Metro weighed on my heart as much as the comforting immutability of that tiny pub I got drunk in lifted it. As I sat in The Swan and Three Cygnets with the groom and assorted ushers, necking Sammy Smith's cider on a drab bench overlooking the mighty Wear rushing below us, I was a drunken stumble home away from 2006.


As I was providing the music for the wedding, including ten minutes of 'incidental' music I had previously completely forgotten about and had to improvise on the spot, I had little time to get too sentimental, and once we'd scarfed down a fry-up at the Saddlers and strolled across Prebends Bridge (frustratingly enveloped in unsightly scaffolding), the nerves began.  Accustomed as I am to playing in public, wedding music offers little room for escape - the line between enhancing the poignancy of a bride's entrance and rendering it farcically amusing with a false note or chord is remarkably thin.  Fortunately, all went well, and bride and groom tied the knot with no accompanying musical hilarity. 


The wedding itself was beautiful, a real unpretentious, joyous occasion.  The venue was our old college, of which the ninety-two guests had pretty much exclusive use, and stalking the old corridors of the Junior Common Room, the Dining Hall and the Bar I noted how little things really had changed.  It was admittedly difficult not to wallow in nostalgia as I ordered the first round of drinks, but as I pulled out a twenty-pound note from my wallet, when years ago I would have filled the barmaid's hand with change, it dawned on me that we could not have had a better reason to revisit our alma mater. To return thinking that the city would welcome us irrevocably with open arms and envelop us in a motherly embrace would be folly.  We had travelled full circle from that evening at The Swan and Three; now we were celebrating a wedding of close friends with a meal where we had shared innumerable student dinners before, and where the bride and groom had blossomed to the beautiful couple they now are.  Now we were enjoying our appreciation of our past without allowing it to dominate our present, and as the Viaduct vista receded into the Sunday afternoon distance, I left knowing that while university starts us on our path through life, it is well beyond the student bubble where we must travel.