When the Chips Are Down: A Tale of Frustration, Sailboats, and Sharing

“Po-ta-toes,” said Sam. “The Gaffer’s delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly. But you won’t find any, so you needn’t look.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Two Towers” (The Lord of the Rings)

Thursday April 17, 2025 was a big day for me. I took myself on an adventure. It wasn’t a big adventure. Just a day out at the coast. But it was the first time I’d taken myself out for the day in almost a year. Last time it was a trip into the city to see an exhibition of paintings by the renowned English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner. There was no aim or goal this time beyond a sense of curiosity. How would it feel to be out of my usual environment after so long? I’d chosen a day when the weather promised to be dry and bright, but beyond that I had only the loosest of plans. I’d catch the Metro train to Tynemouth, walk to the sea front, then head north. Maybe I’d walk on the beach. Maybe I’d paddle. There were any number of cafes, coffee shops, and pubs I might stop at for something to eat or drink.

The one thing I did want to do was buy chips and sit eating them by the sea. There were a couple of options. The fish and chip van that often parked just along from Tynemouth Aquarium. The fish and chip shop at Cullercoats. Either of those would be perfect. There was a fish and chip shop in Tynemouth too, but that wasn’t as close to the sea front. Whatever else happened, whatever I saw or did, a tray of chips — even better, a chip stottie — would make the perfect memory of my day out.

Tynemouth Metro station was deserted when I arrived. I took a few moments to photograph the stunning architecture. The broad central steps leading to the footbridge to the opposite platform. The sweeping ironwork of the roof, renovated in recent years. I made my way from the station towards the sea front. The main street of Tynemouth was as pretty as I remembered it, lined with pubs, bars, and gift shops. A display of rubber ducks in one shop window. I took photos as I went along and shared a few in chat with Fran for when she woke. It was a little after nine thirty. Too early to stop for food yet. I’d had breakfast before I set out and had a flask of coffee with me. The thought of chips later spurred me on. A walk first, to give me an appetite.

I stood for a while before the looming mass of Tynemouth castle. Beyond the railings the moat fell twenty or thirty feet, then rose again in a steep grassy slope to the gatehouse beyond. I thought of my unpublished novella Playing at Darkness which is set within the walls of the castle over the course of one day and night. A key scene plays out in and around the moat. If I half closed my eyes I could almost — almost — see the drama unfold in front of me. There’s a lot of me invested in that place, emotionally and creatively.

I turned away and began my walk north along the promenade. King Edward’s Bay opened below me to my right. Memories of time spent on that little beach over the years, alone and with friends. I shook my head to centre myself in the present. Pausing on one of the many benches I opened my diary and began to write, holding the pages flat against the breeze.

10:05 am. Tynemouth. A bench overlooking the sea.

Well, I finally committed to my little adventure! It’s a quiet day, not many folk about at all. I guess the question I’m posing by doing something different is “what difference does it make?” Why did I come here instead of spending another morning writing at Costa? Is this better? The same? Or is the question itself meaningless? There’s no scale against which to measure any of it. Do this. Do that. The universe doesn’t care — or even notice — what I choose to do or how I choose to spend my time.

I closed my diary and put it away. I continued my stroll north, stopping to take such photographs as caught my eye. The castle and priory. The sweep of the shore. Shelters silhouetted against the skyline. A small wooden rowboat, anonymous save for the number 12 painted on her stern, converted into a quirky planter for tulips. It was another echo of my novella, which recounted a different rowboat marrooned high above the tide. The overlap of reality and fiction. Then and now. Real and imagined.

The old rowing boat is nothing special. For sixty years she worked the mouth of the great river, plying the dangerous waters around Black Middens until the old trade waned. Now she is the last of her kind. Five winters weathered her boards on the steeply banked pebbles of Prior’s Haven. Then men took her, painted her gaudy in blue and white and named her anew. Now the “Northumbrian Water” rests high above the water line, berthed forever in the turfed earth beside the Gibraltar Rock.

Ahead of me in the distance I could see the wide white bulk of the Tynemouth Castle Inn. It would be pleasant to sit outside there with a pint. I’d done that once or twice before. It was still early, though, and I wanted to eat before I thought of beer. Maybe on the way back after I’d had my chips. Beyond the hotel, the aquarium. More memories, old and less old, general and specific. The most recent was some six years ago. January 2019. Sheltering in the doorway from the rain as I waited for a friend. A few hundred yards beyond the aquarium carpark was where the chip van plied its trade. I could see a large van pulled up there, but as I got closer I saw it was selling ice creams and drinks only. A minor disappointment, but I consoled myself with the thought that the chip shop still lay ahead. That would be better anyway.

It’s no more than half a mile between the aquarium and Cullercoats bay but I took my time. I sat for a moment on another of the benches that line the promenade. How am I feeling?I asked myself. Right now. What am I feeling? It’s only a year or so since I learned about alexithymia. It’s a term for the difficulty many people — me included — have in identifying and communicating their emotions. I’ve written elsewhere about alexithymia and how it affects me. In a very real sense, it was impossible for me to describe how I felt as I sat on that bench in the sunshine. I was feeling something but I couldn’t label it. Even distinguishing my feelings as “good” or “bad” was a challenge. There was a sense of satisfaction, that I’d taken myself out for the day. But uneasiness too, because I wasn’t sure that it was meaningful to have done so. I had no real aim, beyond that tray of chips.

As I continued my walk, the broad sweep of Cullercoats bay came into view. I could pick out the lifeboat station, the slipway, and the steep slope that led down to the beach from the road. Across the road, the row of buildings that included a cafe, a couple of bars, the community centre I visited last year with my friend Aimee to attend a mental health event, and the chip shop. Maybe I’d take my tray of chips down to the beach. Or just sit looking out across the sea as I’d done many times in the past.

The chip shop was closed.

It was a few minutes before eleven o’clock so I wandered a little further to photograph the bay from the opposite direction. Eleven ten came and passed. Eleven fifteeen. There was no sign of light or movement from inside the shop and no indication of its opening hours that I could see. It might open at midday but that felt too long to wait around. I wasn’t sure what to do. The cafe was open but looked busy. There was another cafe around the corner and a coffee shop a few minutes walk away. I didn’t want a sit-down meal, though, and I still had coffee in my flask. Nothing I could think of was what I wanted.

I had a flashback to 2020 when hospitality began reopening after months of lockdown. I took myself into Newcastle city centre with the sole intention of revisiting my then favourite coffee shop, Caffè Nero at St Mary’s Place opposite the Civic Centre. I arrived to find a note in the window explaining they couldn’t muster enough staff to open. There were other coffee shops in Newcastle. There were at least two more Caffè Nero stores, any of which might well have been open. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I caught the next train home. I recalled how other people had reacted to my story. “If you’d held yourself open to opportunities instead of getting all huffy you might have had a great time, just a different time.” That was true, of course. But I hadn’t been huffy. Not really. Disappointed, yes. But by heading home I wasn’t giving up on my day. I was honouring my folorn hopes and aspirations.

It didn’t look like I was going to get any chips. It was a disappointment, for sure. More than I’d have imagined. Maybe I’d tied my hopes too tightly to the idea that at some point I’d be sitting on a bench with a tray of chips. Maybe a chip butty. With salt and vinegar and a dash of brown sauce. I could practically taste it. I took a few more photos of the bay and began walking back the way I’d come. I couldn’t think of anything else — or better — to do. What did “better” mean, anyway?

Passing the park my attention was caught by a flash of movement. White sails on the boating lake. There’d been none earlier. I recalled there was a model boat club that met at the park. I hesitated, wondering if there was any point in crossing the road to take a look. Without consciously deciding to, I found myself sitting on a bench in the park as maybe a dozen radio-controlled yachts raced back and forth across the water. For the first time in my day I felt fully engaged with what was happening around me. I watched the yachts for a while, recording a short video to share with Fran later. It was getting close to the time for our call. It was pleasant sitting there, but a bit breezy for a video conversation.

I found a shelter a few hundred yards along the promenade and settled in out of the breeze. While I waited, I recalled other times I’d been disappointed by events that failed to meet my hopes and expectations. One evening walk during covid came to mind, when a succession of small grievances left me feeling cold, wet, and grumpy. I smiled at myself, remembering it only too well. Other potato-related disappointments came to mind. The takeout meal that arrived without the chips that had been ordered. Another takeout, at my friend Aimee’s this time, when the chips had been so disgusting I couldn’t eat them at all. I smiled again. Potato-related disappointments indeed!

Fran messaged to say she was free for a call and in a moment I was no longer on my own with my thoughts. She told me she was proud of me for taking myself out on my little adventure. Rather than ask how I felt, she invited me to share what I’d been doing, knowing that’s much easier for me to describe. I recounted my day in brief, from my arrival in Tynemouth. I did share one emotion. The one I had no difficulty labeling. My disappointment at the lack of chips!

I told Fran about the boats on the lake and sent her the video I’d recorded. We discovered we each had childhood stories of owning a model yacht. As I described mine to her I could see it clearly. The solid wooden hull, the metal keel, the buff coloured sails, the rigging with its nylon fittings. The small flag I’d added, cut from a scrap of red fabric. Memories swirled around us as we shared our respective stories, like the sailboats on the lake.

After talking a while, we moved on. As we walked, I shared with her the sights and sounds of the coast. It reminded me of other times I’ve walked with friends beside the sea. We watched a huge container vessel as it made its way towards the mouth of the river. I showed her King Edward’s Bay and we stopped for a few minutes by the castle and moat. Fran recalled that I’ve taken her there on calls in the past. Prior’s Haven, and along the pier to the little lighthouse. It warmed me that she remembered.

Marshalls Fish Shop was open, but by now I’d settled into the idea of not having that particular expectation met, and we kept walking. We stopped by the stern bronze statue of Queen Victoria to say hello, but she declined to smile. We got back to the station and crossed the foot bridge to the opposite platform. Our train arrived within minutes. Fran stayed with me on the call most of my way home. We parted easily, both grateful for having shared my adventure.

Once home, I went through the many photos and videos I’d taken, posting the best to social media to share with my friends and followers. I may not have had my chips, but I’d had a good time and I was glad I’d taken myself out. Later in the day, I checked online. The chip shop in Cullercoats opens at 11:30 am. If I’d thought to check while I was there, or stayed another twenty minutes or so, I could have had my chips after all! It was fine, though. There was no more — and no less — meaning in my chip-free day than there would have been if my hopes had been realised.

When the chips are down what matters, what makes things meaningful, is less the things themselves — what you do or where you go or what you eat looking out over the sea — and more the opportunity to share them with a friend.

 

Photo by Martin Baker, Grand Parade, Tynemouth, September 2018.

 

Togetherness Apart: Walking on the Beach With Friends

I need the sea because it teaches me.

— Pablo Neruda

Being out in nature is often advanced as a counter to depression and other mental health difficulties. I’d never go so far. Mental illness can have many different causes and its symptoms are not so readily lifted. Having said that, spending time in the natural world can take us out of our present situation, both literally and figuratively. Alone or in trusted company, such times afford us the opportunity to gain distance from, and perspective on, whatever may be going on for us.

I was reminded of this the other day. Fran was telling me of the great time she’d spent the day before with a mutual friend of ours on Ferry Beach in Scarborough, Maine. The setting itself, the companionship, the conversation, had meant a lot to Fran. I thought back to when she lived on Peaks Island, when we were first friends. She’d walk on the beach there, occasionally sharing her location with me so I could follow along virtually. She’d return home and tell me about what she’d seen and heard and thought about. One spring, as she emerged from a crippling episode of depression, she’d bring me haiku-form poems that came to her on the shore, holding the words on her fingers until she could write them down. The title of the book we’d later write was born in the lines she brought home from Centennial Beach.

high tide
low tide
edgeness..

After our conversation ended, I thought of times I’ve walked by the sea with friends over the years. In its own way, each was deeply meaningful to me and is fondly remembered. I explored several of these occasions in poems, connecting my experiences across three decades and three thousand miles with Fran’s walks on Peaks Island.

Silverdale

January 1981

My first vivid memory of being on the beach with friends dates from January 1981, two months before my twentieth birthday. Somehow, I found myself sitting with friends by a driftwood fire on the shore of Morecambe Bay at Silverdale in Lancashire. I say “somehow” and “found myself” delberately, because that’s how it seemed to me at the time. I felt welcome, but these were mostly recent friends and being with them was new and strange to me. I was content go with the flow, experiencing things as they unfolded, but my amazement and delight came with an equal dose of uncertainty. A reality, a way of being, was being shown to me that I’d scarce imagined possible. I have no photographs of the day, but I wrote the following poem shortly afterwards.

Driftwood (no sunset)

No sunset flares breathless and photogenic
In the skies over Silverdale
As we light our little fire amongst the sheep and pebbles.

Nothing but these few flames to dare the dark
Gathering, oozing velvet from every rocky pore,
Caressing the shadows
Fluttering mothly where the firelight fails.

Few would share our vigil
Lost in a blaze to which we feed
Our driftwood dreams, our precious pasts,
In fire to purge ourselves of fear or false regret.
Dry and tear-damp — crack — in fragments burst
And burn, or shower their sad sparks skyward
With a little sigh
— Hot ashes scattered by a west wind.

Nothing to dare the dark …
But silver in the shallows
And high stars trembling

and the mercury constellations of the bay
map flights of fancy beyond Heysham Head.

What I recall most clearly is everyone sitting around the fire we’d built with wood collected along the shoreline. I lent one of my friends my coat and walked with her to the water’s edge. For reasons I never understood, she suddenly lay down in the water, still wearing my coat. It was a lesson in acceptance, emblematic of the in-the-moment approach to life I was being offered. I travelled home on the train next day wearing a coat that was still damp and smelled strongly of wood smoke.

That evening and the night that followed are among my most precious memories. One year later I recorded in my diary that “The memory is still deep within me, but it seems removed beyond the claim of Time, somehow. It isn’t really meaningful to say ‘a year ago’ because it is a part of me — then and now.”

Sheringham

November 1982

The second walk on the shore I want to share happened in 1982. I was on a six-month placement from university, working at the regional hospital in Norwich, Norfolk. One Sunday in November I accepted an invitation from Janet, one of the friends I’d made there and a fellow pharmacy student.

After lunch I went out to post Dawn’s letter. Later, Janet and I went out for a run in her car to Sheringham for a walk along the shore. It was quite wild and cold, but very Romantic [...] no less so because we were both thinking of Other People.

Those few lines from my diary belie the significance of the event, which is more fully commemorated by the poem I wrote at the time.

(In the depths of) singing

Down the western reaches of the sea i
Findme walking with a friend,
Wind and seasalt wildly in the sky, you on
My mind. Late november: pebbles in a
Wilderness of oceans and a fulling moon.

Something like the flesh of friends too
Raw for touching walkwe. Two
Investigating puddles. Our togetherness apart
We wander down our dreams while all the
Waves one water can involve strike
Sparks about our feet. From flints we
Gather in the night.
We gather. In the

(o i love the waves that break upon me like you)

nightly

Janet and I weren’t close friends and we didn’t keep in touch after completing our respective placements. I’ll always be grateful to her, though, for our afternoon on the shore. The “other people” I was thinking of, the “you on my mind,” was my best friend and first love, Dawn. Leaving her and other friends behind in Bradford for six months was hard, but we kept in touch by letter and phone call. Walks in and around Norwich, and by the shore that afternoon, allowed me space to think, and not think, to feel, and to let my feelings go. The phrase “togetherness apart” was my attempt to express the paradox of sharing time with someone yet experiencing it in an intensely personal way. My friend Janet and I walked the shore together, talked together, but also took time to wander separately or in mutual silence. Each of the memories I’m sharing here was like that.

West Wittering

October 1985

I described the background to this walk in a recent post on mental health in the workplace. Here, I want to focus on the walk itself and what it meant to me. I was working in London at the time, unhappy with how things were going and on the verge of giving it all up. Frustrated and uncertain about my future, I took time out to visit a dear friend from university. We spent the evening watching English singer-songwriter Judy Tzuke in concert in Guildford. That was a beautiful and intense experience in itself. I’d seen Judie Tzuke previously in Bradford and her music was part of my emotional landscape. The concert in Guildford reconnected me with my friend, with the years I’d spent at university, and with the people I’d known there.

Next day, I was supposed to head into work but I wasn’t ready to return. My friend suggested a trip to the seaside and I was happy to abscond with her for the day. After a little deliberation we settled on Wittering on the south coast. The hours we spent walking and talking on the beach are amongst the most impactful I’ve ever spent. The following is excepted from my diary.

For us both, shores are very personal places and we separated; [she] plotting the height of the waves with pebbles on one of the breakwaters, me just wandering along the beach.

The break away from everything I’d been going through and stressing about was exactly what I needed to gain perspective. I wrote to my friend afterwards.

Eloping with you gave me the opportunity to find some calm, and to remember that there are more important things than whether or not I’m 100% happy in work. Like people.

At the end of the year I was able to look back and write of that day on the beach:

All this [the concert and our time on the shore] brought me to the edge of decision. Suddenly, in a moment, all the months of anguish, distress, planning and indecision evaporated: and I realised (in that moment) that my reasons (legion) for leaving did not exceed the single, small, terrifyingly potent reason to stay. The love and support and Reality of friends and family: my life in London.

A year later as I was about to leave London for a new life in the north, I put it more clearly if less poetically. “It wasn’t just [my friend] it was the release she gave me from the terrors of the department.” She’s unnamed here because we’re no longer in contact and I can’t ask for or assume permission, but I will always be grateful for that day, and much more. In a spirit of disclosure I’ll note it’s the same friend who rolled in the sea wearing my coat at Silverdale four years earlier. Some friendships, some people, some lessons, are more important than a ruined parka.

King Edward’s Bay

January 2019

This story isn’t mine to tell, but it’s impossible to write of significant moments I’ve spent with friends on the shore without including it. “Togetherness apart” captures the day as I experienced it. Walking together and on our own. Words spoken and unspoken. Trust offered and accepted. Being there for a friend.

Other Times and Other Shores

Those are my key walking on the shore with friends moments, but others are worthy of mention.

PJ (Pamela Jane) and I never walked together on the beach, but one day in September 2005 I took a day off work and spent it at the coast. At the Rendezvous Cafe in Whitley Bay I wrote my friend a letter, as I’d done almost every day for two years, as her world contracted due to illness. I never posted the letter. That evening I got the news that PJ had died the night before. A month or so afterwards I repeated my walk along the shore, allowing myself to remember and re-feel all she’d meant to me.

I’m reminded of walking along the promenade at Crosby beach in Liverpool the evening before my mother’s funeral, and again the next evening. The following short poem came to me on the latter walk.

Wandering
Wondering

How do I feel
What do I feel

Release
Relief

Re birth

Stillness
Silence

Un known
Un homed

Un tethered

Still
Calm

Centred (thank you

— Liverpool, March 26, 2018

When Fran lived on Peaks she’d take me with her virtually on walks around the island. I’ve likewise shared many calls with her by the sea over the years. I specifically remember calls at Prior’s Haven at Tynemouth, along the shore on Holy Island (Lindisfarne), and the promenade at Whitley Bay.

My most recent coastal walk was this July when I visited Blyth Beach with my friend and fellow blogger Aimee. We didn’t venture onto the sand but had a marvellous time walking, talking, and taking photos. It would be good to visit there again and maybe go paddling together!

 

Photo by Yuliia Herasymchuk at Unsplash.