(beach.jpg) moving stage 1 “north shields into store” completed. i’ve left newcastle after just over eight years.

i think eight years is longer than i’ve ever lived anywhere before. my camera battery ran out after one final pic of the beach at tynemouth at twilight. it’s nice to have the one image though as i couldn’t see for tears.

no matter how good the reasons are for going it’s bloody hard to leave somewhere that’s such a gorgeously nice place to live. before i lived on tyneside my images of it were, if anything, of a grainy grey sort of an industrial place, shipbuilding, coal mining, that kind of thing. now there are images of bridges and galleries, beaches and markets, angels and architecture, sunsets and pubs, rivers and trains burnt into my retinas and a large chunk of my heart labelled “newcastle’s”. i’ve left plenty of places behind before but i swear it never hurt this much.