Gateshead

Board a train from London or the English Regions for Lancashire alighting at Liverpool. Being furthest from the dangerous and raging Continent of Europe here England is A Virtual Paradise. On the train, to Liverpool from Manchester (on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell) knowing the Manchester Ship Canal is across an Estuarine part of The Cheshire Plain, flat and to the south far enough away for me to have to imagine it.

Journeying west across Lancashire (the feeling of separateness as Liverpool is apart from Manchester as Darlington is to Stockton) is the feeling of going to a better place.

The most powerful and telling image of Englishness is to see Orthodox
Jews of Ashkenazi originals from Salford, Hackney and Gateshead, standing willfully apart from the rest of English holiday makers in unfashionable out of season resorts like Southport (ironically on The North Lancashire Coast): On The Beach, between seasons almost, they drift along the seafront (not spending money obviously) always charmingly affronted at any one of us having the temerity to address them.

How much does this tell of humanity's love of Freedom and of Silences?

Lancashire's joy is it's remoteness from Europe. The railway network is most intense here as if Beeching's wife was from Accrington. The towns though are fragmented but there is still time to overhear the pure disilled essence of Englishness: the rarified beauty of Lancashire small town (or Manchester Suburb of This or That) in local Lancashire speech patterns and dialects.

The strongest reserve of rational speech based talking England emanates from the girl's schools of The Wirral and Crosby.

Walk out into Morcambe Bay beyond Southport Pier and see Chinese Cockle Gatherers, faint crouching figures on The Event Horizon of where the tide currently is, linking Lancashire with Guangdon and Pearl River delta.

Here the silence is complete. We are furthest away from trouble than we have ever been.

Here is a potential for empty silences: Is it any wonder Orthodox
Jews of Ashkenazi* sought and found refuge here?

* Here on The Island (Der Insel in German and Yiddish parlance) The most the largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews of Ashkenaziare are in:
• Stamford Hill in North London in the five wards of Brownswood, Cazenove, Lordship, New River and Springfield in the London Borough of Hackney, plus the ward of Seven Sisters in the London Borough
of Haringey.
• Broughton Park in North Manchester incorporating the wards of Broughton and
Kersal in Salford, and Sedgley in the Borough of Bury.
• There are also haredim in the Borough of Gateshead in Tyne and Wear, and in the
wards of Golders Green, Hendon and Edgware in the London Borough of Barnet.