Postcard from Newcastle

Reflections on a trip to a changing north-east England

Photo by Gabe Fender on Unsplash

Last week I returned to Newcastle Upon Tyne for a few days to see my elderly parents. My dad is in a care home nowadays - my mum and I visited him in the dementia wing, to which he has recently been moved.

We had a surprise on entering his room. He was asleep in his chair, and on the bed next to him was a woman, also asleep! The old rogue. But apparently this happens a lot: she wanders in because she believes he is her late husband. Although she believes that most of the men in the wing are.

We chat with my dad. He’s very confused. He believes he’s 98 (he isn’t) and last year, when he was 97, he gave up playing rugby. He accuses my mum of not coming in to visit him (she does) because she has set up a teaching academy, and that takes up all of her time. He tells a staff member that I’m my mum’s husband. He whispers to us that they pick on him there because he’s intelligent. He believes the two women opposite his room are men, one is bright and one is ‘thick’, and I knew them at school.

Such is the sad and sometimes blackly comic world of care homes for people near the end of their lives. I take solace when I see glimpses of the old dad, when he smiles, when he asks me what I’m up to, when he expresses shock when I tell him that Bath City have been relegated. He’s still there, in part, inside that fragile body.

After a couple of hours, my mum and I head home (which Dad simultaneously thinks is downstairs, and can’t remember). My mum just about copes alone, with the help of two carers each week. Talk between us is small but still mostly makes sense. I enjoy cooking for her. We watch old family videos of times when a mass of young grandchildren made life vibrant and hectic. Much of her time is spent in her chair in the lounge: life in your eighties appears to be falling asleep with your mouth open in front of daytime television.

My mum’s postal vote for the local elections has arrived. She says she’s voting for the three Conservative candidates. “But Mum,” I cry, “they barely did anything conservative in 14 years in power!” and I list their crimes. “I’ve always voted Conservative and I always will,” she intones. There’s no way she’s switching to Reform.

Talking of the May local elections, I see just two party posters in windows as I wander round the district. One says ‘Vote Labour’ and is in the window of a nice terraced property on a well-appointed street. There is also a Ukrainian flag on the house.

The other one is ‘Vote Green’, decorating another middle-class house which has an inordinate amount of plants in its windows and garden. As I pass, I see the occupant, a middle-aged woman in what might be a home-knitted cardigan, tending her greenery. I bet she has cat, rather than a husband. To be fair, I think she would suit the hijab that might become compulsory for all women if the Greens get into power.

There is also a house in the neighbourhood that for several years has been a showcase for the owners’ desire to remain in the EU. Neon light signs in windows read ‘The Future is Europe’ and ‘Brexit has failed’. A big flagpole out front hosts a (now somewhat tatty) EU flag, while the vehicle in the driveway (an electric vehicle, natch) also sports many pro-Remain messages. He must be the most religious person in town.

When I go to the barbers to get my hair cut, politics also raises its ugly head, when my barber reacts to the news on Smooth FM that Keir Starmer is in a spot of bother. Badenoch and Farage are heard, criticising the PM. My barber implies that it’s easy to criticise. He then says “It’s worse in America though”, mentions the T-word (Trump) and tells me that he has some terrible people on his team. (I think he has some rather good people, but I can’t be bothered to say that.) He tells me that he watched Pete Hegseth on YouTube failing to correctly name countries in NATO (I think). “He thought Singapore was one of them!” I doubt this - and I’ve just done a quick search and I can’t find the video he’s on about - but who am I to cast aspersions on my cutter’s tale, so I parry. He’s the one with the scissors.

All those flats, all those lives, in one small place…

Newcastle people lean Left, always have done - although I never tire of reminding folk that Newcastle Central had a Conservative MP (Piers Merchant) at the height of Thatcherism, between 1983 and 1987. It’s not as Lefty as, say, Liverpool, or Ireland, but still quite Lefty. It also has a sizeable amount of workers in the public sector. Fact: four-fifths of Geordie women between the ages of 18 and 65 work in the NHS (not actually a fact, not true at all, but it sometimes feels like that).

As for taxi drivers, they may be more Right-wing. Good luck finding find a native Geordie one, though. Thirty years ago they were nearly all white Brits here, now they are virtually all Asian. I use several over the week and they all seem perfectly pleasant. It’s a bit disconcerting, though, when they communicate in a foreign language with their base over the car radio.

You’d like to hear more about Newcastle’s race demographics, you say? Well, when I was born here it was around 99% white. A couple of decades later, in the 1991 census, it was 93% white. In 2001 that had dropped to 91.7%, by 2011 to 85.5%, and by 2021 to 80%. It’ll be much less than that now, thanks to glorious genius Boris Johnson, who knew what we wanted in our hearts, even though we didn’t realise it, and that was more frazzled discourse and ravaged public finances. The white percentage of Newcastle will go on shrinking, changing the city’s character irrevocably.

I certainly see a difference when I traipse my old stomping grounds. One afternoon I pass my old primary school, which in my memory was literally 100% white British, and a teacher is holding a small class in the playground. There appear to be more non-white children than white. Oh well. Maybe some will grow up to be scientists, surgeons and philosophers who will make a vibrant contribution to British life.

Actually, one of the many taxis I take is driven by a white man! He tells me and my mum that he only serves certain areas now, he won’t go to the likes of Elswick, which he says has changed greatly (I just looked it up: it’s now about 40% white, one of the lowest in the north-east, down from 93% in 1991). He wonders out loud why it’s got so bad. Not feeling like coming out with my fun-killing theory that we are in the process of historical civilisational collapse, I mumble something along the lines of “probably various reasons…” and he agrees: “Yes. Various reasons.” Cowardly of me? Perhaps. But you have to be careful what you say out loud nowadays (as he probably would have also thought).

I leave my former home town on a late flight on Friday evening. I’ll be back soon - I have to be. But there will soon come a day when there will be little point in returning.