681 - Long time

no post. Here's a haiku:

Now, Whitley's dome, a
Cake-iced white, or plaster cast,
Sweetly heals within.

694 - Spanish City Dome

A sketch of the Dome for use in the logo of our new games-making company - Bay Games Ltd.

(Overheard yesterday that they've plans to divert the coast road behind the Dome, presumably so that the area can be pedestrianised. That'd be cool!!)

717 - Memory, Nostalgia and Civil Rights

Imagine if the memories of Whitley Bay submitted by you and I to Francis Frith were manipulable, erasable, through targeted pill use or disruptive stimulation. We could forget the Dome ever was, our trip to the seaside having been prevented from forming. That kiss-me-quick under the wurlitzers? The dodgy B&B we stayed in? Gone. Or last week's return trip - how downbeat, compared to the childhood memory, how disappointing. You could lift it, replace it with happier times (though the physical buildings, and our bodies, would still degrade).

Well, they are, just about. A report on Radio 4 this morning described one recent experiment where memories of traumatic images from old public information films were prevented from 'developing' - it takes six hours for them to set in place, it seems - by having viewers play Tetris after watching (the cognitive processes used are so similar, the brain 'forgets' to remember the film images). The Today programme interviewed Anders Sandberg and AC Grayling afterwards. Both agreed that such technologies are useful for dealing with disfunctional memories - induced, for example, by post traumatic stress - but they raise profound questions about what it means to be human.

We are our memories, bad as well as good. Or is that actually true? Perhaps we can 'dress up' in fresh memories, the way you'd wear a smarter dress if you had the choice. Why, in a meritocracy, let a shoddy past hold you back?

This is why, in a blog dedicated to Whitley Bay, I've spent so much time getting my thoughts straight about communal and personal identity. It really does impact on the real world. Whitley, a nostalgia-buff's wet dream, has a stronger identity than most, and one, perhaps, more often let down. The seaside town's journey to find a new identity offers a perfect case study for reflection on the kinds of questions raised by neuroscientific and biotechnological research into identity formation. (Perhaps a bid could be prepared for some of the new seaside town regeneration money, also announced today on the programme, to fund a research project into nostalgia and its cure.)

I call the creative use of fresh and manipulated identities storying, because I believe stories, in all their beauty, are both the outcome, and the best tools by which we may get a handle on our identies. The potential is huge, but scary, and I suspect attempts will be made to control such technologies, not always for the best of reasons.

I reckon I'm pretty much on the money, too. The joke in the interview was that our grandchildren will look back at us as Neanderthals, exclaiming, as James Naughtie put it, 'They didn't know what pill to take!'. More pertinently, Sandberg explained, our right to control what goes on cognitively in our own heads should be "considered one of our basic liberal freedoms".

Storying is a civil rights movement.

718 - Whitley Bay Memories

"But kindly lower your gaze to the lone car. It is a Vauxhall 14 and it is parked outside 7 The Links, my old home. Despite being 16 years old it was the coveted company car of my dad, Eric, works manager for a firm that made concrete lamp standards at the old Cramlington Airship Shed." (Colin Henderson)

From a short collection of Whitley Bay memories submitted by users of the Francis Frith website - worth a read!

757 - Sexing Whitley Bay

But it's not just the Kiss-Me-Quick heyday, or the post-nineties Nuts generation Stag and Hen hostels on South Parade.

More important than these - got to be - are the Lighthouse and Dome. Classic rod and cup imagery. That St Mary's Lighthouse - on the site of an illicit and rowdy tavern, souwestered keepers gone, but up-thrust tower still in place, north end of the bay, outcropped in the sea - is masculine, is more obvious. Even though night sees it sheathed in pink, it's the deep pink of a raspberry condom.

The Dome at the south end of the bay is perhaps a little less sexed. There's a hope tentatively floating that it becomes the headquarters of Mind Sports UK, and, as one myself, I agree it does look like a slaphead with a wonky crown. But that might be to miss the point. Crowns and bald heads are male, but the milky-white dome is a smooth breast, nippled (the flagpole on top a not-so-subtle disguise), and fronted, when the statues on its towers are in place, by the twin girl-muses of dancing and song. Tonight I noticed the dome, too, was lit up, or at least part of it: a circular window, from below, ringed in white light - an invitation in, as the pink light on the lighthouse is an invitation up.

That North is masculine and South is feminine is well recognised: the positioning of these edifices, at either end of the curved bay, suggest a provocative beach-long celebration of our whole, and wholly sexy, humanity.

A recent news report in the Journal suggested the dome might be abandoned. Why the dome, and not the Lighthouse? These two landmarks need equal weighting, or the cultural politics of Whitley will be left decidedly lop-sided. There's no place for that any more. Instead, seize the moment: sex our seaside properly for the 21st Century!

762 - Through A Letterbox

Stuck my camera through the letterbox of Rainbow Arcade and took this picture. Apparently it may become a martial arts studio.

There's a fern growing inside the arcade, halfway up the wall, where it has seeded itself. Only tiny, though. And not in this photograph...

This pic for a reader who grew up in the Arcade, overlooking the rollercoasters.

765 - Halloween, Whitley Bahamas (1/2)

Ice cream from Delaval Ices...

795 - Playhouse and Dome

Both the Playhouse and the Dome have dropped their scaffolding in the past few weeks. Here they are together...

816 - Elephant Seen In Whitley Bay

This life-sized wooden elephant's head looks great on the refurbished curry house at the corner of Marine Avenue. Siam Bay Cuisine is going to sell Thai and Indian food: their website (still in progress) is here.

821 - Ocean Weekend

A big thank you to North Tyneside Council, who, under the guidance of Keith Barrett, supported by Whitley Bay's community of artists and performers, laid on a great weekend of art and crafts the length of the beach between the Spanish City Dome and St Mary's Lighthouse.

And there were donkeys!

We went down on Sunday afternoon with family friends, and all the activity gave the place a real lift.

Great to see, on Tuesday, the grafitti display still up by the skate park, and the odd daub of paint in the shelter near Rendezvous Cafe, where tile-decorating, felt fish-making, craft stalls and circus skills had been on offer, and a marvellous dry aquarium strung up, with a giant whale, and fish, and sequinned seaweed. There was a small scattering of coloured lentils still by the shelter, and I watched a bird pecking at them.

I'd poked my head in at the planning stage, way back in March, but in the end did not get involved. I was certainly a little green with envy at what the group achieved. Really brilliant stuff. Next year, I hope, it'll be even bigger and better.

831 - Games

On Wednesday I joined E and half a dozen others at the Culture Quarter offices opposite the Playhouse for an evening of Mind Games.

We played Bananagrams (a kind of speed-Scrabble, with a heavy banana motif), Othello, and a complicated game based on the German postal service, with tiny wooden houses, a map of Central Europe, and several decks of cards.

In addition, this game contained a written endorsement by the heiress of the family who rolled the postal service into being, portraits of whose patriarchs graced the board, intimidating modern players from a century and a half beyond the grave. This was a little disturbing, and you were left half expecting to get an invitation to join the Bilderberg Group if you scored high enough.

Whatever conspiracy of events led to Whitley Bay becoming the first North East team to play at the new Wembley, play and win, whilst three of the four teams wrestling it out to avoid relegation from the Premier Division tomorrow are the big hitters from the North East, I don't know.

Similarly I struggle to fathom the depths of local politics, and doubt there are any big conspiracies behind the power-play talk of regenerating Whitley Bay, despite the games asserting the opposite regularly played on the letter pages of the News Guardian.

I feel strangely comforted by my ignorance. Bilderberg can wait.

850 - Whitley and the Regeneration Myth

Many moons ago I wondered whether it would be possible to tell the story of Whitley Bay according to the various genres listed in Robert McKee's book Story.

But I've been wedded to the idea that, whatever happens, Whitley must regenerate. Only now, reflecting on the possibility of wild and multiple plotlines, do I begin to ask, Does Whitley have to regenerate after all?

John Gray, in Black Mass, argues that the political pursuit of utopian visions is just the tail-end of apocalyptic religion. The regeneration of Whitley Bay is nothing if not a political football. Regeneration is about the death and rebirth of a town, newer and better than it was in its prime. The big myth it is incarnating is the Christian vision of a new Jerusalem. That myth's as bred in our Western European political bones as any.

But there are other myths, perhaps as powerful, perhaps more appropriate.

The myth of Pandora's Box. The myth of Order out of Chaos. The myth, encapsulated in evolution, of unending growth, variation, consolidation, regrowth and replacement.

Regeneration implies a crisis, and, whilst it is easy to imagine Whitley as having undergone a crisis, especially when the crisis is talked up by opposition politicians, over the years, of both hues, the idea is emotive, and can obscure a million mini miracles, growing all the while the Spanish-City-Saurus dies.

The point, perhaps, being that regeneration is too backward-looking a term - too re-, not enough new.

Just as we wee furry buggers were in no way the regeneration of the great reptiles, I wonder if the true inheritance of Whitley Bay won't be measurable in rebuilt playhouses and swimming pools, thriving commercial centres and sheer bulk of people, but something else, unexpected, entirely?

How's about, for instance, letting the grassland on the site of the old Marine Park First School, between Coquet Avenue and Marine Gardens, keep growing into a piece of meadowland. You could call it the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park. Then knock down more old buildings and replace them with allotments?

Or what else? Suggest something!

851 - Saturday at the Spanish City Fair: Artist's Impression (2)

Close-up of my face during, and for a long while after, ride on aforementioned spinny thing.

919 - Sloth Man

Dug this up in a stack of papers I was sorting.

Sloth Man is hanging from a surveillance camera down by the Spanish City Dome when a heinous crime takes place beneath. What will he do? To be continued...

[Click for larger image.]

936 - Nursery Rhyme

Hey Whitley diddle
Two bids in the middle
The Great Ox jumped over the Dome
The Five-Legged Rabbit
Laughed "Art ain't just 'grab it':
It's passion and freedom to roam."

941 - Rabbit!

...And around the time he was marvellously and meticulously engraving the Whitley Great Ox, Thomas Bewick met, for the first time, the Five-Legged Space Rabbit of Whitley Bay.

It's impossible to know whether it was the Rabbit itself who inspired him to leave behind his boxwood and engraving tools and try random splashes of paint instead. (Though it probably wasn't.)

But a fruitful dialogue undoubtedly ensued.

How the banter must have resounded, to and fro, between the three figures in Whitley Park: Bewick, naturalist, observer and Geordie through and through; Great Ox, cud-chewing capitalist grazer, bountiful and brutish, and Space Rabbit, five-footed, fleet-witted lord of misrule....

The kind of banter that'd look good illustrated in pen and ink....

The kind that, from time to time, post-Christmas travels, might find its way, through a scanner darkly, here.

[Some idle first thoughts about the Space Rabbit and Thomas Bewick. Why else would Bewick have chosen so insistently to call his book A General History of Quadrupeds, if not as a rebuke to the rambustious and contrary Quintroped? What relationship, if any, might the Space Rabbit have with his American Trickster Brother? What better symbol of the discovery, in postmodern times, of a farm-wise hunter-gathererdom, than the Astronaut Coney on Whitley Links, whose scions can still be found, wild and resilient, cocking a snook at the over-developed Townies across the way? And how tasty might the Space Rabbit find all those flowers with which they're about to gild the Great Ox? ]

992 - Dome and Daisies

993 - The Dome

994 - Kind Hearts and Coronets

A fortnight ago I described the frame structure around the Spanish City Dome as a coronet. A low fence of scaffolding surrounded it, with a platform amid the poles.

Yesterday the coronet had grown into a birdcage, encasing the Dome from bottom to the pinnacle on top. Photos, on the next sunny day from now, will follow.

It's not a simple birdcage, either. There are three tiers, platformed, a man-height apart. Then a layer of golden gantries, spun more refinely, over the bow of the dome. And finally, the pinnacle, which itself looks like a lopsided crown, is boxed in more scaffolding. The Dome looks like a vastly obese, concretely regal budgerigar. The kind that Alec Guiness, or perhaps Alastair Sims, might play.

Further along the coast, abandoned buildings are being boarded up and whitewashed. The latest, like the outline of a Playschool House ("these are the windows: one, two, three, four,"), invites someone with a steady hand to doodle curtains and a vase of flowers, a TV and perhaps Mummy and Daddy on it (the house, not the TV).