Notes on...

It’s late afternoon in the car park of Workington Asda. A little crowd is gathering in one corner, most of them clutching cameras and tripods. We’re not here to find ‘Workington Man’, the supposed archetypal voter who apparently all the parties need to court to win this election. Instead, Workington men and women — and a number of us from all over Cumbria — are here to watch a bunch of birds going to bed. The sun is at that dripping egg-yolk stage where it’s about to slip behind the horizon. It’s cold, and for a few minutes you can see the panic on the faces of the birdwatchers. Perhaps the starlings aren’t coming tonight. Perhaps we’ve missed them. Perhaps the other shoppers will think we’re a bit weird.

At 6.50 p.m. on 31 August 1997 a plane touched down at Northolt Airport. It was a lamentable and dismal evening. Prince Charles, wretched and ghastly, accompanied the coffin that carried the body of his former wife Diana. Watching from the wings was Tony Blair. The nation mourned. And Northolt Airport did the job it has done so often — being the receiver of the great and the good and the bad, dead and alive. As a boy I’d get on my bike and head down the road to Northolt Airport to watch the planes. Being from the suburbs, the airport held me in a grip. Friends’ parents recounted stories of dog-fights in the skies over Northolt during the second world war and of a German plane being shot down by the glorious and brave Polish Spitfire pilots.

In 1966, just as he was becoming famous, Michael Caine met John Wayne. The Holly-wood veteran offered him some advice: ‘Never wear suede shoes.’ The explanation? ‘One day, you’ll be taking a pee, and the guy next to you will say “Michael Caine!” and he’ll turn and piss all over your shoes.’ Urinals are tricky places. Women seem to think they’re temples of laddishness, all footy banter and lewd jokes. A few men are like that, the sort who stand with their free palm planted high on the wall (God knows why). But most of us find the whole thing rather awkward. The broadcaster Mark Chapman once stood next to his hero Bryan Robson.

Savannah GA is supposed to have lots of ghosts, but I’d forgotten that. It was an April morning and sunlight filtered through the Spanish moss. As I arrived at Wright Square, someone fell into step with me and we crossed the road together. At the other side I glanced to see who it was. No one. Huh. This is the Ghost Coast and there is an industry around it, including night-time tours in a black trolley bus that end in a visit to Savannah’s most haunted residence, the gothic Sorrel-Weed House. At dusk you pass groups of people being told unsettling stories — I caught a snippet about a cat that vanishes into thin air. One evening a friendly grey shadow wound itself about my shins. Was it an apparition?

Gisborough Priory was founded in 1119, although the gothic chunks which remain of it today — including the grimly magnificent east end — date largely from the 13th century. A fire had destroyed much of the original building. It has great antiquity, then, nestled on the northern edge of the North York Moors in the market town of Guisborough, within spitting distance of (still, just about) industrial Teesside. The place has always had a certain resonance for me, not least because it adjoins the graveyard of St Nicholas Church, which was an important venue for somewhat brusque and pragmatic courtships when I was an early teen.

The late Frank Johnson — former editor of The Spectator — had a thing about London City Airport. ‘I never want to fly from anywhere else,’ he would say, often after returning from Germany, a country he loved, not least because of its Wagner connections. He was right, of course. Even today, more than 30 years since its official opening, flying out of City is a completely different experience from any other airport in the UK. Size matters, of course. It’s merely the 14th busiest airport in the UK, just ahead of Leeds Bradford and below East Midlands. It only has one 1,500-metre runway and the terminal has a distinctly pop-up feel to it.

The first one was too straight. In the absence of a speed limit, early motorists on the M1 used the long sections without bends as racetracks. The record was set in April 1964 by two drivers testing their AC Cobra for Le Mans: they reached 185 mph. The following year new express trains appeared on the track next to the motorway, and some drivers tried to keep up with them. So the 70 mph limit was introduced. Subsequent motorways were built with curves even where they didn’t need them, purely to discourage speeding. As if driving itself wasn’t risky enough, some users of the new M1 stopped for picnics on the hard shoulder, with one family even doing so on the central reservation.