my northern sky

JUNE 21, 2010
1920 HOURS
NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND

Adam met me at the train station. We caught the metro to Monkseaton and a cab to Tynemouth. The middle-aged driver had "Wichita Lineman" by Glen Campbell playing on her radio. (That kind of threw me for a loop.)

We rolled up to Adam's mum's house just as it was getting dark. We debated a bit about what we wanted for dinner; when Adam and Elaine discovered that I'd never had Indian food, they rang up Marks & Spencer and ordered some, pronto. In a little over an hour, two great heaping platters of naan bread and tikka masala rang the doorbell and deposited themselves in the living room. Ahhh, bliss, my friends, sheer bliss. I found tikka masala to have an intensely-spicy-yet-not-overwhelmingly-hot kind of flavor to it, a delight for the taste buds and the brain. And having that crumbly naan bread to sop up the sauce made the evening even better. I am now of the firm belief that the U.S. needs a more universal distribution of Indian delivery joints.

There remains little left to tell, dear reader. I took no more pictures after Edinburgh; no more notes are scrawled in my little red notebook after the evening of the 21st. Now, from here on out, I shall have to rely on my memory to finish the story.

...

Ha-ha-ha, I can already tell how this is going to go.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Well, some stuff happened, and then some other stuff, and a little more stuff after that. One thing led to another and I wound up on the point.

What's the point, you ask?

A "point" is, among other things, a projection of land that juts outward into a body of water. The particular point I'm talking about is just above the widest stretch of Newcastle Beach, where the surly North Sea sweeps onto fine golden sand. We were perched on a pile of rocks, dirt and grass about 100 feet above this panorama. This being summertime and all (or close to it) the sun sets in the northwest instead of the west. So you can sit on this point and look in a northish sort of direction and see the sun set over the rooftops.

It takes roughly three hours for the sun to do this. As I've mentioned previously, the planet's semi-spherical nature means that Earth has a remarkably small circumference this close to its northerly pole. Due to the shorter distance, and the constant speed of the Earth's rotation, it's as if the Earth is spinning slower the farther north you go. In Newcastle, the sun doesn't set swiftly like it would on the equator. It

slowly

creeps

down

toward

the

horizon

at

downright

sluggish

speeds. This means, then, if you happen to be a sunset lover like yours truly, Newcastle (and points north) should be a veritable haven for you. Particularly if you have a pack of fun-loving Geordies with you who like to sit on the point, drink beer, smoke, and jibe with each other.

...which is just what I did on the everlasting evening of June the 22nd. That pack of fun-loving Geordies and I had a ball. Jay was there, Mike and his girlfriend Vee, and Jon, and Adam & Elaine of course. We laughed, talked, sipped adult beverages, and just generally reveled in each other's company.

We'd spent most of the day watching the England and Algeria in the last slew of games before the Round of 16. England's performance was...disappointing, to say the least. The game was a complete deadlock. The Algerians were less interested in scoring than they were in preventing England from scoring. Focusing all their energies on defense, they utterly stymied their opponent. The big names on England's side—Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, John Terry, and Wayne Rooney—battered away at the Algerian goal with no success. The game ended in a miserable nil-nil draw.

The comments of the voracious football fans in Adam's mum's living room, watching this unfold on television, may well be imagined.

[Spoken in various species of Geordie brogue]

"This is disgustin'..."

"Come the fuck on!"

"Rooney looks fuckin' knackered!"

"We don't deserve to win this, do we?"

"Fuckin' hell..."

It was dispiriting. And as an encore, on behalf of the American in their midst, the company took in the U.S.A.-Slovenia game immediately thereafter. Another 0-0 tie. I was mighty disappointed in my fellow Americans. I expected more from Oguchi Onyewu, Michael Bradley, Clint Dempsey, Landon Donovan, Jozy Altidore, and Carlos Bocanegra—rather unfairly, as I'd never seen any of them in action before. I was somewhat ashamed. I felt that I really ought to know more about the guys playing on my national team, who represented my country in the largest international soccer (football) tournament in the world. The English guys knew more about the American players than I did, for Pete's sake! I kept my mouth shut during the game, only making generic comments about how disappointing the outcome was, and thus concealed my staggering ignorance.

But, at the end of the day, we commiserated over cans of Carlson out on the point, the fresh North Sea breeze in our faces and a staggeringly beautiful sunset unfolding slowly in front of us. This is my single greatest regret about the entire trip: that I didn't have my camera that evening. You'd have really loved the view. It looked a bit like this:

Only, like, you know, better. A lot better.

You'll have to take my word for it.