So, I will admit it has been a while – just over two months to be exact – but the move went well and I have settled back into life in Carlisle. The job is going well and it has been fun catching up with a few familiar faces that I knew when I used to live here (between 2012 and 2019).

This post should have been yesterday but let’s just say I had some IT issues as my Mac laptop would not recognise many of my external storage – any tech people out there with any ideas how to sort this it would be appreciated.

Over the weekend my hometown of South Shields got its annual publicity as the finish line of The Great North Run – they even temporarily renamed the Bamburgh pub as The Finish Line last week because of its close proximity to that location.

The event started way back in 1981 when I was still at school and I remember in the early days that Kevin Keegan ran the route, of just over 13 miles from Newcastle to South Shields on the north east coast, in a top bearing both the black and white stripes of Newcastle United FC and the red and white stripes of Sunderland to pacify both sides of the ancient rivalry.

However, it was not until 1986 that I got my first SLR camera and the following year I decided to get a few shots of the participants as they passed The Marsden Inn which is at the top of a notorious steep bank not far from the finish line. I quite liked this shot because it shows the competitors obviously enjoying themselves and the crowds who lined most of the route.

A couple of years later and I had expanded my kit to a Pentax ME Super and a winder so it seemed a good idea to test the secondhand kit at that year’s event. This time, as I was still getting used to my cameras, I decided to head for the finish line and shoot a few shots from the crowd of the competitors as they passed by.

I do like this photo because it shows that the event was inclusive from the start as it shows a wheelchair competitor alongside able bodied participants.

By 1993 I was actually working on a newspaper (the North West Evening Mail in Barrow-in-Furness) but I was back in the north east of England at the same time of the Great North Run which by this time it had switched from June to the autumn. This time I opted for a few shots around the Tyne Bridge.

And by 1999 I was back in the north east at a news agency and I covered the start of the race and the end result was the photo at the top of this post. Basically there was a footbridge just down the road which made for a great vantage point of the front runners. The shot was used in The Guardian and I did get a phone call from the actor Chris Chattell, who played the character Eric Pollard in the TV soap Emmerdale, because, if you look very carefully you can see him very front and centre in his TV Times running vest.

It turned out he wanted a copy of the photo. Although I am a little concerned that the person in the orange top to his right might have been the disgraced and now dead DJ Jimmy Savile – although after many internet searches I have not been able to confirm this.