When I started this journey my mental map of Britain had marked everything between Leeds and Edinburgh with a big question mark - terra incognita? - which is now quickly being erased and replaced by bright green fields, red brick houses and generally friendly folks surrounded by daffodils. I've mentioned before that people are strangely possessive about their daffodils; in fact many seem to believe that no daffodils grow further 'insert town name 5 miles north of wherever they live'. This is always entirely untrue - there are daffodils bloomin' everywhere.
My mental map is only a tourist's map, of course, so it also has the sparkling Sage centre in Gateshead and Durham cathedral in all its splendour marked in technicolour. But I've added in my own colour too: a couple of Sikh temples and the location of every Greggs bakery within 100 miles.
Today we also passed the Angel of the North, Gormley's glorious celebration of human imagination and brawn, which was a definite and dramatic sign of being in the North. It's an apt time to pass it, because yesterday we hit the halfway point of our journey time-wise. In terms of mileage, however, we're well over halfway, which is why we've been slowing down a bit and taking the opportunity to stay more than one night in some places.
Last night was spent in the relative luxury of a room in one of Durham university's colleges - St Chad's - directly opposite the cathedral. In the morning we met a professor who described the meteorological recordings being taken near the university's 19th century observatory (originally housing a telescope) and what these revealed about spring. As he left, we were invited into the old observatory by the caretaker and given a guided tour. The lovely old building is sadly sinking into disrepair and occasionally gets vandalised but is still used for Gamelan (Indonesian music played on beautiful instruments) sessions and to house the caretaker's plants. The original domed roof is also still there, including the mechanism that would once have swung it round to align the telescope, as a reminder of the cutting-edge science of Victorian England. Apparently bits of it have had to be cut out because wasps were nesting in it...
Unfortunately it does seem as if spring has started to overtake us; the oilseed rape is in flower, the bluebells are making an appearance when they definitely weren't around further south, and some varieties of daffodils are on their last, bristly brown, legs. This is partly due to my timing miscalculations (thanks for mentioning it so subtly Matt), partly because the weather has been so good and partly because spring does not move fluidly up the country. I can feel the desperate blossoming and bursting of March, which fuelled the frenzy of the first weeks of Chasing Spring, starting to mellow and bed in, and it has been reflected in our slower pace of travel.
Now comes the hard work. From here on we're ignoring the flat, easy route to Edinburgh and pushing through the forests of the Northumberland national park; this is currently a generic green blob on my mental map and I'm looking forward to changing that. If we don't update the site for several days it's because we have no reception. If you never hear from us again it's because the wolves, or possibly bears, have got us.
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