The Loves

I very nearly titled this 'My Favourite Year'. Perhaps I'll use that one another time.

My teacher training year in Durham was one of the best of my life. It's a ravishingly beautiful 'city' (one of those 'Top 800 World Heritage' sites - along with the likes of the Taj Mahal), yet it really has a homely, small-town feel. It's compact enough for you to swiftly become intimately familiar with it, and to be able to get around everywhere on foot (despite the challenging hills). I was fortunate to have an extremely warm, laid-back, winningly quirky supervisor who encouraged us to approach teaching as a journey of self-discovery rather than another arduous academic slog; so, the study was a refreshing change of pace from my years at Oxford (where I'd really become very unhappy, trapped doing a course I didn't like [thwarted in my initial plan to switch from Classics to Law], with tutors I didn't like, in a college that took its academic ranking way too seriously and needled its under-performing students rather viciously). And I soon found - as I had long suspected - that teaching was something I had a natural flair for, something I could do with ease and confidence. And the close community of the trainee teachers (sharing the same lectures every day, mostly living in the same college, having the same focus and the same concerns during our early teaching practices) produced some intense, if short-lived friendships. All in all, I had a whale of a time!

And then there were the pubs. Durham is a city of pubs - it has dozens of them, of many different sizes and styles, almost all of them (back then, anyway) pretty good in their own way.

I, however, could not afford to live in Durham itself; but I had been fortunate enough to find myself a little terraced house to rent in one of the old mining villages dotting the countryside around, Ushaw Moor. There were a couple of very passable pubs in the village itself, but the best and most interesting hostelry was a mile or two down the road - in the exact middle of nowhere! 'The Loves' (a strange, probably unique name amongst British pubs: it had a pair of love-birds on its sign) was a fairly unremarkable bar, but it had decent beer, a pool table, and a livelier atmosphere (it was once the scene of one of my greatest embarrassments in quizzing, as I recently reported on my brother-blog, Froogville) than the places closer to home. Its chief claim to fame, however, was that it was a favoured off-duty hangout for warders from the local prison and police officers. Hence, it was in effect exempted from any enforcement of the licensing laws: it would quite often, if custom was sufficient, stay open virtually all night (without even the need for declaring a 'lock-in' - the standard fallback for publicans [at least, before the recent liberalisation of the regime on opening hours], especially in remote country areas, who wanted to keep serving late; they'd have to close the front door, and put up the pretense that the drinking was now strictly a 'private party', with no money changing hands).

I remember particularly fondly one time when my parents came up to visit me (one of the advantages of renting a whole house - albeit a tiny one! - was that they could stay with me), and I took my dad down to 'The Loves' for a quick drink on Saturday evening. We fell to playing pool, and completely lost track of time (well, I didn't quite, but he evidently did). Ours was often a tense and difficult relationship, and this is one of the very few times that I can think of where we just enjoyed each other's company for several hours in a thoroughly relaxed way.

Then, I asked him if he would like "one more, for the road".

"Haven't we missed 'last orders'?" he queried, suddenly realising that it must be a bit late. 'Last orders' in those days was supposed to be at 10.58pm.

"Dad," I explained, "they don't really have 'last orders' in this place."

"Why, what time is it, then?" he asked, suddenly worried.

"It's about 2.30."

"Your mother," he observed ruefully, "is going to kill us." And then he accepted my offer of another drink.

That really is one of my happiest memories of him.