I’ve been in the UK for a week now. Since I didn’t have a ride to the Boston airport shuttle this time, the trip involved three buses to Logan and way too much sitting around waiting, but the only drama was a man on the second bus cut himself and bled all over his seat causing the driver to deviate from his route to drop him at a hospital. This made some of the passengers, including myself, late for the third bus. However, the third driver knew we were coming and would be stranded otherwise so thankfully waited for us. Other than that, it was twenty hours from my door to Paul’s, and I got to watch Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride” starring Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale who were both amazing and worked really well together. So far, this visit’s been non-stop, and I’m only now catching up on my NY Times puzzles and had just enough time to create the Loon collage above, but we cut up cardboard yesterday and I have plenty of tissue paper and xeroxes of bird images to make more.

In the meantime, we saw the Trish Murtha exhibition at The Baltic. As you can see from my snapshot above, the photography was brilliant but the curation was, to my eyes, unfortunate. We also spent an afternoon pruning and weeding the jungle that is Paul’s back garden and have done a lot of shopping. Mostly groceries, but there was a bus ride out of town to a DIY store for materials Paul uses in his art practice that we couldn’t find in Newcastle. I also bought a vegan leather motorcycle jacket while looking for something more suitable for rain. The raincoat, I found yesterday. It’s transparent, plastic and leopard print but looks very “Vivienne Westwood Cool” and will definitely keep me dry. There was a dinner party at Shehla’s for Ian’s birthday on Saturday and that was good fun and relaxed. Yesterday we were meant to rest because Monday we took the Metro to South Shields and then the ferry across the Tyne to North Shields where we had lunch before walking through Tynemouth, below, and up the coastal beach to Cullercoats and were exhausted. But yesterday was spent doing admin and errands instead. So tomorrow, perhaps, as today we’re shopping for an easel and watching the solar eclipse if the weather cooperates. No rest for the weary apparently - on with the day