Salut! North

Angels of the North (2)

So who was the dark-haired beauty at the Redworth bus stop?

This was not the most important of the questions that gnawed away at me for several weeks of 1966. There was another that needed answering first: how to meet her. And this, the need to meet her, was easier said than done

I would see the girl on weekday mornings as I was driven to my dreary dead-end job in the offices of Cummins Engine Company on the outskirts of Darlington.

My companion was Mike, easily distinguishable from me because he was not only 10 years or so older but actually knew and cared about the things that were being made at the factory. He could be said to be Doing Well in his job. The arrangement was that for an appropriate weekly sum - which, in keeping with the early traditions of these reminiscences, I can no longer recall - he would pick me up and drive me to work, though rarely home again at the end of the day.

Mike did not much like inconvenience, and stipulated that I should walk down Byerley Road and pass to the southern side of the Shildon railway crossings, where I was to wait for him. He did not want to risk being held up as shunters ambled to and from the wagon works.

Redworth is a small village roughly a quarter of the way into the eight-mile journey from Shildon to Darlington. And there without fail, as we passed each morning in Mike's sensible Hillman Imp, would stand the girl, satchel on her back, waiting for her bus to school. I was 17, and I guessed her to be about the same, but clearly bright enough to have stayed on for her A levels.

Angels of the North (1)

Ann, Barbara, Anthea, Dorothy, Christine, Rosemary, Margaret, Trish, Irene, Belinda. And the dark-haired beauty at the Redworth bus stop.

This is not a Salut! North version of that harmlessly silly song about having "a little bit of Monica in my life/a little bit of Erica by my side......". It is just the list of girls who occupied places of varying affection in my heart when I was single.

Even if you add a couple of missing names, it is not a particularly long list by the standards of today or, for that matter, the not quite so liberated 1960s. It becomes shorter still if you filter out one or two that scarcely qualify for inclusion as girlfriends.

My friend Len had much greater success. We'd prowl the rec path on spring and summer evenings, giving the eye to - and hoping to get it back from - any pretty girls that came our way. Actually, it was Len doing most giving of the eye. With perfectly good reason, he would tell me that when it came to chatting up, I had neither boldness nor finesse.

Sunshine, snow and the road from Paris to Prospect Terrace

The day after tomorrow, I shall climb on board an Etihad Airbus, hope for rather more leg room than Sir Richard Branson thinks is appropriate and fly home to Britain for Christmas and New Year.

This means leaving the sunshine of Abu Dhabi, a climate to which I have managed rather easily to adapt, for a week and a bit.

It is likely still to be gorgeous when I return - this is said by all the seasoned expats to be by far the nicest part of the year - and will remain so for a few more months until the onset of the traditionally fierce summer. And that will be a test of my powers of endurance; in place of temperatures currently hovering just below 30 degrees, we can expect a punishing 50.

In the much shorter term, I need to prepare for the sharper climes of home (well home-ish....I fear a trip north may be out of the question, forcing me to miss two chances to see Sunderland at home).

Bear in mind that our cat, Monette, having grown up as a chic Parisian apartment pet before taking happily to a life chasing lizards and crickets in the south of France, is already turning up her nose at grey, London skies and a distinct chill in the air.

But I am experienced at moving from hot to cold and vice versa. My return from honeymoon - that's a photograph taken by the Stanley News at Lanchester shortly before my wedding in 1971 - involved only a journey from Paris to the North East, but it felt when we made it as if we were passing through a succession of climate zones.