Berwick falls to the Dachs

Mount you, my lord; towards Berwick post amain:
Edward and Richard, like a brace of greyhounds
Having the fearful flying hare in sight,
With fiery eyes sparkling for very wrath,
And bloody steel grasp'd in their ireful hands,
Are at our backs; and therefore hence amain.
William Shakespeare (Henry VI Part III. Act II, Scene V)

WE'VE HAD A VISITOR FROM AFAR. Family, actually, my mother's long-lost first cousin from Lancashire, by way of Canada. Just for a few days, staying at the Harbour Guest House and Tearooms (that certainly sounds English, eh?) here in Amble by the Sea. Jack gave the Harbour Guest House a big thumbs-up. I did not see his room, but I walk past the place with Cailean a few times a week on that particular loop around the town, and it's in a great location just yards from the water as well as the Town Square. I noted that after Jack had finished the full English breakfast provided at the guest house, which he said was terrific, he was too full for lunch. So, I shall recommend it for my visitors who aren't up to camping in my flat.

Early on Wednesday last I got Cailean into his harness and we three boarded the 518 bus for Alnwick at ten o'clock, arriving a half-hour later. There we joined the 501 bus for Berwick-upon-Tweed. This is the slower service snaking north along the coast and diverting into any number of small seaside villages (all of which feature a castle or ruin or something rather quaint). The scenic route takes two hours, and it is worth it for the professional sightseer or journeyman with the time to spare and an eye for beauty.

One sees Alnwick Castle, the strange and bleak ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, the looming Bamburgh Castle, and distant Lindisfarne on Holy Island.

With early summer well under way this year, the countryside was green with trees and meadows and some crops, the rape fields are bright yellow just now. Our travelling day was grey (and windy) overhead. The North Sea was the colour of steel. In the open it was chilly.

The bus driver was something of a joker, taking the mickey out of two foreign ladies who had managed to flag down the bus from the wrong side of the road. We could not make heads or tails of their accented speech, the broken English as much of a mystery as the original tongue they spoke to each other. It was not a Latin language or German or Dutch. I wondered if it might be Finnish. Not that I've ever heard a Finnish person speak, but I knew an Estonian many years ago.

Then about a dozen ditzy women realised that they'd neglected to ring the bell to stop the bus at their destination, about a mile further on. They called out and walked down the bus and asked the driver what they should do. What they meant, I think, was: "Driver, what will you do?" The driver dodged that one and said: "Ladies, it's only a pleasant quarter-hour's walk back. You'll work up an appetite." The next bus in the opposite direction was not due any time soon, and he actually couldn't turn his bus around if he felt inclined to as we were on a narrow country road. The ladies bubbled out onto the roadside and we rolled on.

Cailean had drawn a good deal of attention, as he tends to do, ever since we began the day's jaunt. One group on the bus, about seven or eight youngish people with what I believe we now must say "learning difficulties", went mad for the pup, and he lapped it all up. Cailean looked over the tops of our seat, forward and back, as well as down the aisle, and between the seat backs. Nothing cuter than a dachshund's snout appearing between the seats of a bus! No barking, lots of waggy-tail.

I'd not been in Berwick-upon-Tweed before, just driving past on the way to and from Edinburgh. Berwick is famous for being the only bit of England north of the Tweed, which the Scots consider Scotland. Apparently, Berwick has changed hands between the Scots and the English some 13 times. The bus schedule says that Berwick is still at war with Russia in the Crimea. This is a folk tale, an error, and the odd situation that Berwick was separate from the rest of Great Britain was fixed centuries ago (see The Wales and Berwick Act, 1746). Berwick and Russia are not - repeat not - still at war over the Crimea since the 1850s. Perhaps the bus company should note this. Let's not promote ignorance, no matter how quaint.

We rolled across a newer bridge ... the northbound lane of the older bridge being closed to traffic, the other bridge to the west, a magnificent many-arched affair, is a railway bridge ... above the Tweed and into Golden Square. It was very nearly one o'clock and I was hungry, even if Jack was still happily digesting his full English breakfast. (Just so you know: bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, beans, mushrooms, fried tomatoes, toast and tea or coffee.) A hotel just off Golden Square had an inviting menu and the bartender said that while Cailean couldn't dine inside unless he was a guide dog (I must certify him as such!) the hotel had a lovely walled garden with dining facilities. We walked through a passageway and sat under grey skies, alas, but surrounded by flowers. Jack was coughing and wheezing, and as he'd just come from Canada, one was thinking "Mexican Swine Flu"? I was having a time with hay fever from birch pollen that afternoon. Still, I murdered a pasta lunch; Jack managed a bit of spicy carrot soup.

We then walked around the old town, down to the River, and up onto the fortifications. At times we were below and then far above the bridges.

Everywhere we went we met people with dogs. And Cailean was being particularly quiet (too tired to bark out with all the climbing about), but very grateful for greetings, and he was inundated with them. Dozens of people stopped us to ask after Cailean. Boy or girl? Cailean is neutered, but his todger is still there, for Pete's sake! How old? One year and two months. What kind of dog is he exactly? A dachshund. A sausage dog. A dash-hound. The last added because that's how they pronounce dachshund in Northumberland. How many people said: "Oh! I could just take him home with me. He's lovely!"

Trekking and the meet-and-greet having about done the three of us in, we headed back to Golden Square and sat on a bench by an ice-cream wagon. It was too chilly for ice-cream, to be honest. The bus home, the directly routed 505, taking half as long as the trip up, was very nearly due. A gentleman with what might be called those "learning difficulties" (or "eccentricities" if he'd been rich or posh) ... he was clearly mad as a box of frogs … did a bizarre jig for Cailean. Has the reader ever seen the episode of Seinfeld featuring Elaine's peculiar dance (and the slice of the Duke of Windsor's wedding cake, if I recall correctly)? This really weird jigging gentleman struck poses with limbs outstretched, balanced on one leg and then the other and he cried out to Cailean: "Hell-oo! Hell-oo!" over and over. And he wouldn't stop the dance, not for pedestrians and certainly not for my horrified stare. Cailean is a sweet-natured soul, and he ignored the dancing fool, which scored points with the crowd that had gathered around our bench. A bus was never more a sight for sore eyes than that 505 rolling into Golden Square.

Golden Square, by the way, is neither Golden nor Square. I didn't ask.

We were back in Alnwick at about four o'clock, and home in Amble an hour after that on the 420 bus. About five hours on buses that day, two hours hiking around Berwick. For those who enjoy the view from the bus, this is no hardship.

I'm thinking I might go up to Berwick again, with just Cailean, on the direct route, and spend more time looking down the back alleyways of old Berwick. Crazy dancers aside, it's a lovely town and it fell to Cailean's charms immediately.

The Most Important Meal

I do invite you to-morrow morning
to my house to breakfast …
Shall it be so?
William Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor, III, iii)

"Breakfast," my mother used to say, "is the most important meal of the day."

Of course, all mothers say that. And I don't suppose my own mother had made any study of nutrition as it applied to young children; she probably heard it from her mother.

As my grandmother, and then my mother, were totally inept in the kitchen, hardly able to make toast, our most important meal was cold cereal. I can actually travel back that far and recall liking Rice Krispies, which we always had with cold, fresh milk—delivered in glass bottles every other day by a milkman called Butch—and to which we applied several heaping spoonfuls of sugar. My mother left the sugar bowl out, and in the damp Bermuda climate the contents soon became as hard as a rock. We used our spoons as chisels.

One of my earliest memories of breakfast is of tasting my glass of orange juice one morning and discovering that the usual, sweet, fresh beverage tasted absolutely vile. We were told to drink it anyway. My mother had heard that cod liver oil was good for little children, and reckoned that spooning it into us was not going to be easy, so she mixed it with our orange juice. I simply stopped drinking it, and—my perceptions horribly altered—didn't let it pass my lips for over ten years. I was delighted to find, in my late teens, that OJ was delicious. I'd been programmed to think it was ghastly.

I outgrew Rice Krispies and took to Special K. I always added sugar, never fruit. That was in Bermuda.

At school in England, along with cereal—Weetabix—I started eating toast. English style: made the night before and served cold. And drinking tea.

Breakfasts always seemed to be hurried. School to rush off to until I was 18. Then an office.

As I progressed at my first major employer, American International Group, I discovered that I could do my best work at around seven in the morning. I'd leave home with nothing but a little toothpaste in my system, stop by The Buckaroo, or another greasy spoon, and get coffee, something fried and dripping with grease, and a sticky bun. That bag of goodies would be consumed at my desk, and I'd dribble on financial reports from Venezuela and the Philippines and think about Incurred but Not Reported Loss Reserves. It's a wonder AIG made any money out of me.

Those were the days, and nights. Now and then I'd be out clubbing until nearly sunrise, and arrive home quite the worse for wear. I'd have time to shower, shave if I didn't have a beard at the time, and, still off my face, get back on my moped to go to the office. Early mornings like that might call for hamburgers and French fries from The Spot. I allocated IBNR reserves, and I gained weight.

After too many years of reinsurance accounting, I worked for a supermarket. I had a staff discount. I discovered that, on a cold morning, a bowl of Frankenberry or Count Chocula cereal would become incredibly wonderful if hot milk was added to it, rather than cold. It had another desirable effect, the cereal would melt down and more could be added. In fact, I could eat the best part—okay, all—of a box some mornings. I gained more weight.

In the late 1980s I became uncomfortably aware that I was getting too heavy, and stopped eating most solid food and, instead, for over a year, consumed Ultra Slim-Fast diet milkshakes. Nasty. But I lost over 50 lbs, and kept it off.

Diet Coke suited my mornings in the 1990s. In fact, I drank about ten cans of it daily, most in the wee hours of the morning while watching the QVC shopping channel on TV. As a good Mormon, I didn't drink tea or coffee. I usually skipped lunch as well as breakfast. My weight was about right.

There was a time, about four or five years ago, when I was technically homeless. One morning, after eating nothing but some soup late the night before from a Salvation Army wagon, I was feeling terribly hungry. I recall with great clarity sitting on a bench outside the Bermuda National Library with my gut rumbling. Suddenly, a voice: "Ross! Ross!" A friend of mine, Sonny, homeless—you'd call him a tramp, he looked, and was, filthy—appeared and was carrying a couple of very small boxes. "Have you eaten yet this morning, Ross?"

The boxes were the individual packs of Corn Flakes. He'd got them at the kitchen door of a restaurant; they were being chucked out for having passed their expiry dates. Sonny had one pack, I the other. No milk. One of the best breakfasts I ever had, and most appreciated. What ever happened to Sonny?

I lost 35 lbs during my homeless period. I was getting emaciated!

On the wing again, and staying in a baronial mansion being converted into a country hotel—Eaves Hall, in the Ribble Valley, Lancashire—I rediscovered the Full English Breakfast. A week of that, followed by a few weeks on the road in hotels in England, Scotland and Wales while doing a rather nice tour, and I'd recaptured my lost 35 lbs. I was looking better.

I cannot afford to eat huge, cooked breakfasts now. In fact, I have cold cereal—Cheerios or Weetabix—with skim milk, no sugar, strawberries in season, and tea or coffee. Six days a week. One morning, usually a Friday at about eleven o'clock, I walk over to Jasper's Café on the other side of town (a few hundred yards) and have an omelette (mushroom, ham and cheese) with a small salad. I have a cappuccino. I also have a glass of orange juice; they squeeze it as you watch. I read the newspapers and chat with anybody I know.

Cailean does better. I cook him a little meat each morning, which is mixed with a dry dog food, and he gets a bit of ground cheese on the top. Cold water.

Clear mornings, we eat out in the courtyard if it is warm enough. The jackdaws get some bread this time year. I make my tea or coffee last, reheating it a few times in the microwave.

Less pleasant mornings, we stay in my kitchen-office. I have a good-sized desk, and Cailean bunks under it.

We get a good deal of exercise, Cailean and I, and we are both nice and trim. And in good physical health, apparently. My blood pressure is steady and normal after nearly fifteen years of running dangerously high.

When Cailean gets fussy, which he does from time to time, like most puppies, and turns his nose up at some freshly-prepared lamb's liver, kibble and cheddar, I shake a finger at him and say:

"Kid, you know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day!"