Cycling to Krankenhaus is all about people and their places. Always returning after that first festival in 2019 meant cycling the same routes occasionaly, visiting places twice and more often. After the sixth time cycling to Muncaster this year I have done most of the reasonable and some more adventurous routes to go there and back again. I did the really long one from Dover twice. Three times I cycled from Harwich. And this year from North Shields.

Since the second Krankenhaus in 2022 I always take the ferry back home from North Shields to Ijmuiden. It is a quite long but relaxed overnight sail across the North Sea. It’s mostly used by tourists on their way from and to Scotland. It leaves fivish in the afternoon and arrives ninish the following morning. It’s not cheap because obviously you have to book a cabin. I don’t like inside cabins without a window, so that makes it even more expensive. But at least with a bicyle they only charge 10 Euros extra for the ‘vehicle’.

And there are always lots of cyclists on the ferry. You swap stories while securing your bikes after embarkation and especially in the morning when waiting to cycle off the ferry. Which can take some time, because there is no dedicated place for bicycles like on the Hoek to Harwich crossing.

North Shields has become a beloved place for the last night in England after Krankenhaus. There is a pub and music venue at Tanners Bank near the Fish Quay, The Engine Room. Old time Sea Power follower, music aficionado and Geordie gentleman Mark manages The Engine Room with his business partner Graham. It is quite a small pub under the Wheelhouse Cafe but a lovely place for small gigs and local beers. Next door is still a ship building yard. The building itself is listed and was obviously connected to fishing. As was once most of North Shields. Down by the Fish Quay there are still some trawlers in business. They mostly go out for prawn these days.

I met Mark briefly on the first Krankenhaus and found out later via Twitter (those were the days…), that he openend the place some time later. And had to close it down soon again due to Covid. From the first time I read about the Engine Room, I was tempted to go there. It sounded like my kind of place, deeply connected to music and Sea Power of course. So after my grand tour from Dover to Muncaster and further on to Edinbourgh in 2022, I finally followed the Coast and Castles cycle route to Newcastle. I stayed in the YHA there and took the Metro to Tynemouth. It has an amazing old Victorian station. And after a short walk to North Shields and down Tanners Bank I payed my first visit to the Engine Room.

I gave Mark a fair warning in the afternoon. So I knew he would be behind the bar that night. And he was aware of me crashing in after a long ride through rain and thunderstorms along the coast. Clouds thick with rain moving grey and low over the promenade and the waterfront. I still remember lightning flashing all of a sudden near Whitley Bay, quickly followed by rolling thunder. Huddled into my rain clothes it was that kind of day. But I couldn’t get a more warmly welcome in the Engine Room. Local beers on tap and not very busy it was a great opportunity chatting the whole night with Mark. We talked about the wonderful second installment of our beloved festival, so glad they didn’t give up after the poor turn up in 2019. And the forced wait due to Covid. Today I think it was maybe the best Krankenhaus to this day.

I left quite late after a last pint of the extraordinary Dark Side of the Toon, a stout brewed up the road in North Shields. It is a great beer to shuffle up Tanners Bank to Tynemouth Station afterwards. Under the railway bridge you can still imagine the rough place North Shields and the Fish Quay once have been. The dark side of the town for sure. And of course there is a thin sliver of a waning moon hanging lost between dark moving clouds. Getting the ferry is always a sad day after Krankenhaus, after all that cycling around the country.

After all these years of cycling to Krankenhaus the strangeness of England sometimes still get to me. It is not worlds apart and there is so much common ground, though I see differences and cracks between realities all the while. It is like gravitating around riddles, that sometimes can’t be solved. It is fascinating and irritating all at once. Sometimes it feels like I am cycling through another galaxy, children and grown-ups alike staring at me and my bicycle loaded with paniers as if it is some UFO just landed from outer space.

I have grown up with all this music from England. I could go on for hours about bands and artists from Manchester, Rhyl, Bradford, Blackville, Glasgow, Brighton, Crawley, London or Bristol that played or still play an important part of my life. And yes from Kendal of course too. They are part of the never ending soundtrack of long distance cycling in my head.

Music is a strong bond to connect to people, to give you lots of stuff to talk about, especially at Krankenhaus and on the way there and back again.

Though there are of course many people cycling in England, it doesn’t seem to be a very popular mode of travel. I always meet so many English cyclists on the ferries to France or the Netherlands with paniers on their bikes heading for the Rhine, the Loire, the Alps or beyond. But the idea of doing long distance cyling in the UK is almost always strange to them. In a nutshell cyclists in the UK go abroad to cycle. How bizarre.

I remember my first day of cycling in England. I was so nervous about cycling on the left side of the road, had planned a route to avoid even B-roads as much as I could. I made it to Cambridge in one piece, without being hassled a single time on the roads by some reckless driver. Which would have been quite wondrous doing a 60 miles ride across Germany. I told my host that night about it and he was quite surprised. He was a dedicated cyclists too and his experiences on the roads of England seemed quite different. But he told me how good the cycling infrastructure in Germany was. And I couldn’t agree with him at all. There you go, cracks and differences, different views and perspectives.

So we talked a lot more about cycling that night. Cycling seemed to me like a future mode of travel in those not so long gone days. To my naive mind it was to lure more and more people in the eye of climate change happening all around us. The age of fossil fules was finally burning out, I hoped. A journey in style could only be done cycling. Fridays for Future was marching in the streets of Germany. In England marches happened in Cambridge and elsewhere, even on that day I arrived, to stay in the EU. Hope was around. My host had been marching that day too.

And we talked about the extensive cycling tours of ghost story master M.R. James around Europe back in his days. What a dream it must have been in the early 20th century to cycle across rural France and Denmark. And he must have cycled in England too. Such less traffic back then, more horse carts and carriages than motor cars. So we hoped for better trains, more busses, extensive cycle networks and yes fewer and fewer private cars. It was a lovely evening. My first evening in England for many years.

At least the music never stops. Hopes shatter, dreams don’t come true, but still you can sing all the old songs from when these hopes and dreams were still alive, still breathing and buzzing. So in fact they aren’t dead or anything. It’s me who stil carries the possibility of them all. And as long as I keep going, cycling and belting out ‘Waving Flags’ or ‘Machineries of Joy’, all is not lost. Maybe nothing’s lost. But that’s totally up to you, not me.

Whatever happened to the golden birds, you can listen to, when cycling cross country. It took me many miles to hear their olden song over the hills. If you are lucky, a fox in daylight points the way. And of course it bids you to shun the pleasant inn as in Brother Grimm.

So I thankfully return to North Shields every year now to find an ever changing place but still rooted in tradition of days past, in other darkness, glories and dreams. But there is Mark and his amazing efforts to keep a small music venue afloat, to support the grassroots of art, to care about his place and its surroundings, about seabirds and nature. He is an inspiring guy, someone you meet en route to some better times and places. As small and hidden as these might be. Sometimes a chat on the dark side of the toon is all you need. And all there is. You know, it always could go both ways. Protesting on Saturday nights and all that…

Christoph x