We arrive in Hull at the beginning of August, a couple of days after the riots that followed the tragic stabbings of three young girls in Southport, the other side of the country.  The rioting is, as usual, an excuse for racism, violence and looting, with far right extremists exploiting the tragedy to promote their own agendas. Hull and Leeds riots result in numbers of arrests. As we’re on our way to Leeds to visit friends and pick up a rental car for the next six weeks in England and Scotland, we have some trepidation. 

It turns out the greatest risk to our safety is being hit with a giant foam bone by Fred Flintstone.  A big group of people in cartoon character fancy dress board our train on their way to engage in a long running Leeds tradition: the Otley Run. Not for the faint hearted, this is a two-and-a-half-mile pub crawl, where the requirement is a pint at all 19 pubs.  Some days I do not miss being young. 

On a more sedate outing, our friends and their gorgeous new baby girl take us for a wonderful afternoon at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, about 30 minutes south of Leeds. It’s set in the 500-acre, 18th-century Bretton Hall estate, and is the largest sculpture park of its kind in Europe.  It rolls across gentle slopes, through wooded paths, around a lake. With so much spread over such a large area we give up on the map and just wander. We find Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man in its entirety, but miss Henry Moore’s bronzes; find wonderfully anarchic Damien Hirsts, such as the giant pregnant virgin below, and miss Andy Goldsworthy.  

As you can tell, I’m just name dropping the famous names I know – there’s a myriad of other just as famous (but not to me) artists dotted all over the grounds, and plenty of people to appreciate them. 

We’re driving to Edinburgh to catch some of the Fringe Festival, and have a few days before our booking. I randomly select a small coastal town about halfway from Leeds.  I choose it purely on its name: Amble.  And it is a pretty old fishing village that’s reinvented itself as a tourist destination, having decimated the fishing over successive generations. Same old story.

A good decision – mostly. Very excited to find we can do a boat trip out to Coquet Island where there’s a puffin colony. I’m keen to see these excessively cute birds up close. The small boat, with the name Puffin Cruises, takes us around the southern end of the island to the west, where there’s a seal colony. We watch them duck and dive, but  for us it’s ho hum, yes seals, heaps of those at home, bring on the puffins. We skirt around the northern end and meet a zillion kind of terns – arctic terns, sandwich terns, roseate terns – and hear about the lighthouse and former monastery.  Okay, I think, saving the best til last. Bring on the puffins. Then, a word about the puffins. Turns out they’ve shagged themselves silly and buggered off north and won’t return til next season. 

However Hadrian’s Wall is still around, and has been since AD122 so we’re confident that, unlike the puffins, it will be there when we visit. The wall, in various states of repair or ruin, depending on how you look at it, is 117 kms (73 miles) and straddles the country, built to secure the Roman Empire and prevent incursions by the barbarians from the North. It’s a shame Hadrian isn’t running Waka Kotahi (NZ’s transport agency), as the so called ‘roads of national significance’ would be built in a jiffy. It’s drizzling when we arrive at the access point, but we trudge up the hill and take a walk along the wall. What can I say? It’s a wall, a very old wall, that stretches into the distance. The marvel of it is that it was ever built, by hand, with no modern machinery. 

I was last in the UK sometime in the 2010s, but it’s long enough that the leftover pounds I had have been replaced by polymer notes.  I have to go to a bank to change them, and for the length of time I stand in the queue I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d changed currencies again. There’s a list of things I’d forgotten about:

• White transit vans, the preferred mode of transport for serial killers, are everywhere.
• Imperial measures, with distances in miles and speed in mph, which, weirdly, makes everything feel further. It also causes European drivers to drive very, very slowly, as when they see a speed sign of 50, they think it’s kph and crawl along.
• Random parking either direction. You need to be prepared for a car to veer across the street into oncoming traffic to snaffle a park on the other side of the street..Very unnerving. 
• Smoking, meaning piles of butts all over the street. We see this in Europe too, especially Estonia and Latvia, and in Germany. Very little vaping, just hard core tobacco. 
• There’s a law that requires every British person to have a dog and take it everywhere. Jumping ahead, on our ferry to the Orkney Islands, there’s a dog lounge. I check it out, and sure enough there’s a couple of pooches sitting back with brandy and cigars. 
• The lure of the fish and chip shop cannot be underestimated, especially by the sea. However, it’s tempered by the smell of rancid frying. I’m guessing nine out of 10 people order fish and chips and twelve out of ten of them are disappointed.