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.

908 - Yesterday

E made me a Birthday/ Anniversary cake!

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? ]

955 - Continental Market

Whitley with its high street closed, and a marquee erected on the roadway. E and I buy roasted chestnuts cooked to near-charcoal in a small Belling oven. The chestnut man is adjusting the gas flow using a pair of pliers, because the oven has baked its plastic knobs off.

Earlier we stood in line for a couple of crepes, which we ate outside The Bedroom, listening to the Shiremoor Salvation Army Band carolling Christmas round and round in the mileage of brass fluting of its tubas, trumpets, trombones and horns.

975 - Jack Frost

Fickle thing, the Spirit of Cool.

With my test card pattern sweater and pimpin' fake fur winter coat - the one with the fur at a downward slant, the one that ratchets the sweater sleeves down my arms and over my hands whenever I swing them - I was - admit it - drop dead gorgeous. And I'd drawn a pretty nifty picture for the front of our annual Christmas Card. And then I'd dropped into Waterstones to hunt for a book of Bob Dylan lyrics, and explained to the girl behind the counter that it was for a piece of art, and she'd more or less said so: "Cool," she'd said.

So I was high on Cool.

After lunch I took a trip to our local supermarket, basketing the BOGOFs nonchalantly, sauntering to the checkouts. I unloaded the basket onto the empty conveyor belt, and waited.

"Two minutes," said the checkout girl.

Uncoolly, I bridled, but collected myself. Though there was no queue, a handsome lad on the other side was waiting by the plastic bags. Perhaps he's her bloke, I thought, perhaps they've just been arranging to meet up. Then, as the girl started running the groceries through, he began to open one of the bags.

"Don't worry," I said, suavely sliding my rucksack off my back and onto the checkout. "I've brought my own."

"I'm not packing for you," he said, "I'm waiting for a DVD."

It arrived. He took it. I felt a bit more cool evaporate. I packed my rucksack quickly, pinning in my card number, fiddling shut the zipper, and walking away, subdued.

But the girl called me back. "Hey!" she said, "You've left your card in the machine!"

So that's the Spirit of Cool. You've either got it, or you haven't. In the morning I had it and in the afternoon, it went.

This is like the occasion I visited the Alnwick Gardens Treehouse Restaurant with E, when, in the Gents, admiring the sleek new shape of the upmarket urinals, and contemplating quite why there was a need to stick taps on them, it slowly dawned on me why the man at the urinal opposite had looked at me so strangely. I left without washing my hands.

977 - Amore

... is the name of a great new Italian restaurant, where Casa Bellissimo used to be (corner of Whitley and Station Roads, opposite The Station pub - which, by the way, looks like it is about to reopen).

E and a couple of friends and I went for a meal. The food's good - solid homespun feel, with a little extra that's not just down to the presentation (though marks for that, too). Nice mussels dish, with canneloni beans and spinach; meatballs that feel beefy enough they'd stand up to a game of squash; chicken livers in a thick, sweet wine sauce; pizzas and pastas and some top end dishes around the fourteen quid mark. Home-made apple pie for desserts.

The owner's got an infectious enthusiasm about the place: it's the first he's owned, though he managed the place when it was Bellissimo, up until a year or so previously, before moving to a restaurant in town. Now he's back, bravely. It's a tough time to grow a restaurant, I've heard. He's taking the patient route and, not least because the food is so good, I hope it pays off for him.

990 - Icing for Whitley

Whitley Bay has an ice rink. It is built like an aeroplane hangar. I've never been inside. It's a kind of rite of passage in and out of tweendom - like the stretched limo party-ride from St Mary's Lighthouse to Newcastle's Millenium Bridge. It's also home to the Whitley Warriors, who, Wikipedia says, were big in ice hockey in the 1980s and early '90s. They ice for Whitley still.

As I left the Metro at lunchtime I was called back by a trio of students. They wanted to walk to the ice rink, and had journeyed all the way from Sunderland to do so. Actually they'd travelled even further - one from New England, USA, the other two from Dortmund, Germany. They were argumentatively amazed at each other for attempting the journey on a day when the Metro system was snarled up, and frankly a little pissed that there was another twenty-five minutes' walk to go.

We passed our house and I gave them a smart old A to Z, and waved our dog-eared new one at them to say, hey, it's okay, we've another - which, thinking about it, may not have convinced them too much - and they went their way.

My gran on my mother's side grew up in Chile. We treasure lots of stories from them. As my gran grew older she suffered Alzheimer's, but could still remember a pair of penguins she kept as pets, briefly, when very young. There is a photo of them, by a brook, on the family's land. They didn't last long in the Santiago heat. Two sailors had brought them as gifts for the family all the way from the Antarctic. The story goes that Gran's family, and other colonial townsfolk, had put Shackleton's exploration party up as they passed south on one of their journeys, and again on the way back.

So after today I figure we're not so different from the heroes of the past after all. The fascination of ice; great explorations; reciprocity. Isn't it great the way history repeats itself, mostly? Except in smaller doses, of course.

Another organisation that ices for Whitley is the Cake Dec Centre, around the corner from us. In case you're peckish.

997 - Charity Dash

From Age Concern to St Oswald's Hospice to the Sally Army to RSPCA to Mind and Scope and back to Age Concern and on to Red Cross and Barnardoes, skipping PDSA and Relate (hit them earlier), to trawl for new shirts.

Bagged one: a white, heavy cotton, steel buttoned, all-weather Timberland. Time to embrace my inner lumberjack.

Briefly tempted by: half a dozen multi-coloured Next shirts, a writing desk like a rostrum with drawers set down one side, a green-tiled kitchen table, a wooden horse, a flank of cushion covers, a large cake in the steaming, people-filled coffee shop (no. 129) on Park View.

So many people inside, escaping the rain, that the only way to fit them and the pastries into the same premises must have been to have fitted the pastries into the people like so many petrushka dolls.

Inspect my straw-slender torso. The cafe bulging like the blouse of a bactrian on the back of a dromedary. I'd not fit. My act of charity to stay outside, I'm telling Emma. I'd have broken the camel's back. Take a bit of pleasure in my off-centre halo.

But the cakes I missed...