Harry was 11 last week and the timing for child-averse bachelors like me could not have been worse. It was half-term and there was no escape.
The money-pit was to be delivered to his godfather at some unearthly hour, the choice of entertainment all mine. He may as well have come with a slit in his head to feed the money in.
“He’d love a day out with you” claimed Power Mum, clearly devoid of any other alternative. I tried to plead work pressures but she saw fit to collapse in a heap, laughing uncontrollably.
As a last resort, I plunged the house into darkness at the anticipated arrival of The Chosen One but his No Shit Dad was wise to all my tricks and dumped him mercilessly on the steps, howling monsoon or not. Tough love lives on.
In he came shaking and shivering like a soggy rat, feet up on the sofa in an instant, hand out for refreshments and the remote.
In truth, I had actually put some serious thought into this latest day out, largely because the default option of taking him to the cricket field clearly had no mileage in late October. Kids just don’t do cold these days it seems.
After hours of research – largely based on what would not melt my wallet inside an hour – I had suggested to Power Mum the choice of an educational visit to the National Mining Museum.
She clearly had her suspicions but beggars cannot be…as the saying goes. Harry was keen too although I suspect he knows me inside out and, as long as I fed him at regular intervals anywhere would do.
Normally he lands equipped with more gadgets than an astronaut but strangely this time he arrived almost bereft. Were we going to have a day of flowing conversation?
Sadly not, as he whipped out his iPhone 3 faster than Dirty Harry’s Magnum and Google had him goggle-eyed in a flash.
As far as my choice for the early part of the day was concerned, it is fair to say that the mining industry and the strikes of the 1980’s are almost as far removed from Harry’s generation as World War Two was from mine.
We reached the museum in not much more than forty-five minutes. A pit mothballed in the strike and sadly never re-opened, part of many communities devastated by pointless, petty power-politics. The winner takes it all?
It’s far from pretty, then again it probably never was, but it stands as a monument to days gone by.
The last few men that used to work the seams now work the crowds who arrive to wander and wonder, saying a silent prayer that it was not them who went down the hole day after day.
For the price of a pint you get to experience a world from another age; the real Northern Powerhouse turned into a Northern Playhouse.
We were greeted by men who, tough as their old lives were, would swap today’s existence in an instance. The brotherly bond, the endless tales and the unshakable camaraderie as rich as the seams they ploughed.
Before we descended we got to peer down the 450 foot shaft, carved by hand hundreds of years ago, a glimpse into where we were headed, where men earned a living, on which families survived.
The men still inspect this hole, almost lovingly, each day.
Down we went mercilessly mobile and gadget free – Heaven after all found in the bowels of the Earth – where generations had vanished into the pitched black to bring back the black stuff.
A young man, driven to tears by fear, was expertly soothed by one much older, a very gentle man who had seen it all.
Down in the belly of the Earth, the abandonment of this once mighty arena gave off the aura of a ship-wreck. Machinery abandoned, still in place, ghostly images of yester-year.
We switched off our lights in unison to feel the pitch black our forebears had endured as normal; not for a second did we envy them.
No noise, no dust, no unbearable heat and jagged walls covered in consumer-friendly plastic, still nobody wanted to stay down here a minute longer than they had to.
We were taken through the ages from when five year-old boys – now you really are a man Harry – worked with their parents in pitch black because the candles they needed were luxuries. Food or light, make your choice if you will?
Parliamentarians took years to decree that five was too young; nine was now okay and so dirty money continued to roll down the seams into their gilded pockets.
I swore I would never attest the failure of the internet to having a “bad day” ever again.
Today’s politicians, in part descendants of those that reaped the labours of young and old from long ago, deem this industry done and dusted.
Far cheaper to let the Chinks and the Poles dig with our old sold-off machinery and for city boys to make a turn on the trades as the commodities flow. Real lives traded for invisible earnings by invisible, soulless people.
You want a Northern Powerhouse? Then what about the miners and the industries they supported: steel, engineering, haulage and the thousands of pubs, clubs and sandwich shops?
I urge you to go see this place if for anything else to see what, in large part, so many of us owe our comfortable, easy lives we have today.
For make no mistake, we have it bloody easy.
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