Harry Pearson is a man who has a way with words. It’s a gift - and one you are receiving today. More than one million people in the UK have dementia - which means that many millions more are having to deal with it. Harry’s been dealing with it.
This paragraph gives you a flavour of what’s to come: “Things return to relative normality. My mother makes a pot of coffee in a hot water bottle and takes to wearing a Royal Lifeboat Institute baseball cap around the house to protect her head from the lightbulbs she fears will fall from the ceiling.”
It’s a must-read. But first, a few Eyes & Ears Extras…
To boldly go…
The North East has been promised £1.1 billion to spend on social housing as part of a 10-year Government programme. Housing secretary Steve Reed urged councils to “go big, go bold and go build.”
The £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) sounds good. It’s a lot of money, but let’s wait for more detail before getting carried away.
Mayors will help shape what gets built and where. But final funding decisions will be made by Homes England based on local bids - and there was me thinking that this government had stopped the costly and time-consuming bidding processes for central funds.
Shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly said: “Labour are refusing to say when the money to actually build the homes will be made available - and how much of it, if any, will be up for grabs before the next election.”
Levy overhaul call
The company running Teesside’s natural gas terminal claims thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of investment in the UK will be lost unless the Government rethinks a levy on oil and gas profits.
Energy firm Kellas Midstream said the energy profits levy introduced by then Chancellor Rishi Sunak in 2022 is contributing to the regular loss of jobs in the industry and needs to be overhauled in this month’s Budget.
The BBC’s political editor Richard Moss says it has come together with trade body Offshore Energies UK to propose a revamped tax which would only apply to profits above a certain agreed level.
In case you missed it
Friday’s edition of Eyes & Ears included the massive benefits of the world’s largest wind farm being on our doorstep (well, in the sea actually) and the miner’s son from Peterlee at the heart of it; deprivation failure on Teesside; the machine that repairs potholes four times faster at half the cost; and the need for another air ambulance.
Plus, the interesting reason why Newcastle council turned down an FOI request to see emails containing the words ‘Newcastle United Football Club’ and ‘Leazes Park’ - it would take too long to go through the correspondence apparently - because there are 31,680 of them!
Festival shelved
Hardwick Festival has been cancelled for 2026 - with bosses saying they are “unable to bring everything together” for next year’s event.
The team behind the three-day music event, which has been running for 12 years, admitted that times had been hard in recent years and that ticket sales hadn’t matched ambitions amid rising costs.
“But this isn’t goodbye. It’s a see you later,” they said in a Facebook announcement. “We’re taking time to regroup, reflect, and reimagine what the future of Hardwick Festival could look like, and we’ll be back when the time is right.”
A quick word
Newcastle’s New Year’s Eve celebrations will include a 5km elite and fun run event for the first time. The run, organised by former world champion athlete Steve Cram, will begin and end at the Civic Centre before a planned fireworks event. Fenwick has narrowed its losses for the second year running and noted a particularly strong sales growth in the second half. Chair Sian Westerman said: “Fenwick is becoming a more focused, agile business with a clear plan for profitable growth.” Hays Travel has made its fourth acquisition of the year, taking over Leicester-based Millington which has 14 branches across the Midlands. Residents and councillors gathered outside the Collingwood Centre in North Shield in protest at the proposed opening of a 24-hour slots casino. A decision that could determine whether Teesworks hosts a new hydrogen plant or becomes an AI Growth Zone has been postponed until December 4. “Yes, I called him a prat. Yes, I pointed a finger at him. But how much abuse do you have to take before you respond?” The words of Darlington councillor Colin Pease after being cleared of misconduct following a “wrestling match” at a parish council meeting.
Mine of music
A limited-edition vinyl record has been pressed to play a part in tackling climate change. The transparent disc, embedded with coal dust, was given its first public airing to delegates at a clean energy conference at Redhills, the newly restored former headquarters of the Durham Miners Association.
The record venture has been led by Cullercoats-based climate hope charity Threads in the Ground, which seeks to help people tackle climate change through creative projects.
Titled Ancestral Reverb, the record features a vintage 1902 recording by the St Hilda Colliery Band, which is arranged in a “duet” with the current Durham Miners’ Association Band. Tony Henderson has the full story on Cultured. North East.
Record year
The display of three rare Magna Cartas has seen Durham Cathedral Museum achieve its highest-ever attendance this year. The total of almost 30,000 visitors was more than 40% above the predicted figure.
The last week of the Magna Carta and the North exhibition was the busiest the museum has seen since it opened in 2016, resulting in a record-breaking surge of over 2,500 people visiting before the event ended on November 2.
Meta doesn’t care
An investigation by Reuters has found that 10% of Meta’s revenue in 2024 came from running ads for scams or banned products. That amounts to $16 billion.
Internal papers seen by the news agency suggests that Meta failed to stop billions of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users - that’s likely to you, and definitely me - from being exposed to advertisers that were suspicious enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems, only banning them once the prediction for fraud reached 95%.
So, if Meta is even 94% sure that an advert is a scam - it’s allowed to continue. Even worse, the company makes more money from those ads - because it charges a higher ad rate as a penalty.
Where’s a decent regulator when you need one.
2025 ad break
A break with tradition this week. Normally the ad break is in the Friday edition. And normally it’s a TV ad from the past, a piece of nostalgia that many of you seem to like because it’s the most clicked link every week.
Well, it’s a different day, and not a hint of nostalgia this week. Here’s the recently-released Christmas ad from Barbour - another collaboration between the South Shields-based brand and Aardman Animations, this time featuring Wallace and Gromit.
Poignant mystery of the hunting horn
By Harry Pearson
I realise things have started to go sideways for my mother the night she tells me of the bicycle accident.
I phone at 4.30pm, as I have every day since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mum answers. Her tone is flustered. “You’ll never guess what’s happened,” she says. “I went into Middlesbrough on my bike this afternoon. I was just turning that corner by the bus station when, Bang! I ran straight into the headmistress, Mother Mary Monica, coming the other way on her bicycle.
“I knocked her right off in the road. I didn’t know what to say, so I come straight home. I’ve been sat indoors ever since waiting for the police to knock on the door. Do you think I’ll get arrested?”
I tell her I think it’s very unlikely. “The police have more important matters to deal with,” I say.
My father comes on the phone. He sounds weary, worn down by the constant battle to push back the tide of weirdness. I ask him what this business with the bicycle accident is all about. “God knows,” he says. “Your mother hasn’t been on a bicycle for 70 years, it must be an 80-mile round trip from here to Middlesbrough, if Mother Mary Monica was still alive she’d be 167-years-old. And I never saw her on a bicycle. In fact I’ve never ever seen a nun on a bicycle, have you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Where,” my father asks
“In Belgium,” I say.
“Well,” my father says. “That’s foreigners”.
“Any other news?” I ask.
“You know that hunting horn we had on the mantelpiece?” Dad asks. I do know it. It was in the house when I was born. Ten inches tall, made of brass and copper, nobody could get a note out of it, not even one of Mum’s nephews who played the trumpet in the Redcar Boys Brigade Band.
All that came out when you blew it was a sound like a walrus sitting on a whoopee cushion. “Well,” Dad says. “It’s disappeared. Your mother’s hidden it somewhere. I’ve been all through the utility room”.
The next day when I phone, my mother answers. I ask how she is. “You’ll never guess what’s happened,” she says. “I went into Middlesbrough…”
When my father comes on he sighs. We don’t talk about nuns and bicycles. We talk about the brass hunting horn. “I’ve no idea where she’s put it and it’s driving me mad,” Dad says.
The next day when I phone, my mum tells me the story of Mother Mary Monica and the bicycle again. When my father comes on he says: “I’m bloody exhausted. I woke up at three this morning and I thought I knew where the hunting horn must be – in the airing cupboard shoved in amongst the bathroom towels”.
“And it was?” I say hopefully.
“No it wasn’t,” Dad says. “I’ve emptied every drawer in the kitchen…” I tell him he should forget about it. Like many people with dementia, Mum has hidden lots of things – money, ornaments, jewellery.
If you take a book off the shelf and open it there’s a fair chance a tenner will fall out. She has done it to keep these valuables safe from a couple of mysterious ladies – “those awful women” - she says creep around their apartment at night. We find them all, eventually.
My father continues to fret about the hunting horn but, after a week, my mother stops telling me the story of the bicycle accident.
Things return to relative normality. My mother makes a pot of coffee in a hot water bottle and takes to wearing a Royal Lifeboat Institute baseball cap around the house to protect her head from the lightbulbs she fears will fall from the ceiling.
Then one afternoon several months later I phone. My mother answers, breathless, “You’ll never guess what’s happened,” she says, “I went into Middlesbrough…”
“Why has she suddenly started on about that again?” I ask my father.
He yawns. “We switched on the television this afternoon and they were showing the Black Narcissus,” Dad says. “The sight of Deborah Kerr in a wimple has set her off again.”
I tell my father they should have one of those pre-programme advisory warnings just for him: “The following programme contains violence, nudity, alcohol consumption and nuns.”
“It’s easy for you to laugh,” my father says. There’s a pause and I can hear him dragging on a cigarette. “You think she might have put that hunting horn in the rubbish bin?” he asks.
My mother stops talking about Mother Mary Monica and the bicycle. As the months pass she talks less and less. In the autumn she moves into a care home. I phone my father twice a day, I visit every week and do his shopping. Sometimes he asks me to get a stepladder and check on top of some cupboard or shelf unit in case the hunting horn has somehow found its way up there.
When my daughter, Maisie comes with me he sets her to searching for it through hat boxes and drawers. “She’ll have squirreled it away somewhere,” he says. “We’ll find it one day.”
We do, too. It’s Maisie who discovers it, at the back of a cupboard in my mother’s bedroom buried amidst a pile of old brassieres and soiled incontinence pants. Dad would have been relieved to see it again, but by then he’s been dead a fortnight.
“Perhaps we could hire someone to play the Last Post on it at Grandad’s funeral,” Maisie says.
I picture the bugler from his old regiment, the Green Howards, putting the hunting horn to his lips. The black-clad mourners standing with heads bowed. A momentary silence and then a flatulent paaaaarp echoing around Darlington Crematorium.
I suspect Dad would have enjoyed that, but in the end we decide against it.
Harry Pearson is a former columnist for The Guardian and is a regular contributor to the magazine When Saturday Comes. His book The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble through North East Football is widely regarded as a cult classic.
If you enjoyed Poignant mystery of the Hunting Horn, then you will want to read his earlier contributions to The QT and Eyes & Ears.
This was his first column, a moving account of the impact dementia was having on those closest to him.
And here he recalls a conversation with his father and contemplates the ‘weighty’ funeral instructions he had been given…
And finally…
A Tweet this week from Leeds-based data expert Tom Forth - and a reply from Nick Gray, a Research Fellow at Teesside University. Both are worth listening to.