shewhomust | Sunderland weekend

I remember my uncle Ralph, my father's second-eldest brother, as a quiet, reflective man, passionate about his garden, always ready to talk about books (with a particular enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Powell). I had no idea that he was a football fan, or that he continued all his life to support Sunderland, where he never lived as an adult.

Not only that, but he passed on sufficient of that attachment to his children that his family - his children, my cousins, and now their children (and indeed, their children) - make the pilgrimage once a year to see Sunderland play at home. After which

durham_rambler and I, as members of the family still living locally, join them for dinner.

This year fourteen of us gathered round the table, including three brothers and three generations of family. The Italian restaurant was large, full of cheerful noise and of large parties (while we were there, the big table down the middle of the room was vacated by a thirtieth birthday party and promptly reoccupied by a fiftieth). The food was OK, but the service was brilliant, good-humoured and attentive despite being overstretched. Having brought the main course for one side of our table, our waitress reappeared to confess with apologies that half our order had been overlooked, and was now being prepared - and then, moments later, brought us two more bottles of wine with the words: "Chef says, if he can't feed yez, then he's going to get yez drunk."

Conversation among that many people and with that level of background noise is always going to be a bit fragmentary, but it was a great pleasure to be part of the flow of random talk: how was your trip up, how was the match, a future school trip, the rest of the family...

We had a good enough evening that there was no way we were going to be up early enough to join the family for their morning walk along the beach. But once they'd put the idea into my head, it wouldn't be dislodged, so we went back to Seaburn on Sunday morning and walked along the beach as far as the mouth of the Wear, including a walk along the pier to Roker Lighthouse. The wind was still lively, though not as strong as it had been, the light was rich and warm, there are hellebores blooming in Roker park, and if this still wasn't long enough to be a "real" walk, it was longer than last week, and long enough especially given that much of it is on pavements - that my knees are still quite sore today.