My choice

In the North East again. Dante this morning and we are at last reading ‘Paradiso’, having worked our way through ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatorio’.

Then we visited the Monastic Church of St Paul, Jarrow, another of those ‘why have we never been here before’ kind of places. A lovely, quite majestic, church that started life as the chapel of the monastery of St Paul’s built in the year 681. A fascinating place - the church, the chancel of which is the original Anglo-Saxon church, and the ruins of the medieval monastery. We were guided through it all by two very helpful ladies of the church.

So why not a blip of the ruins, as would have been expected from me? Well, I’ve done rather a lot of history blips lately and besides . . .

. . . we went on to South Shields to walk by the sea, stayed for fish and chips and watched as the sunset turned the sky the most beautiful colours and the colours were reflected in the sea - just magical. I rarely see this, so that’s my blip.

Now we are at the Sage, Gatehouse waiting for a concert with Martin Simpson.