Unsurprisingly, in the north east they’re not expensive compared to the rest of the country. Average house prices across the region (for some unspecified value of north) here on the BBC website’s calculator are £137,188, with £105,398 for the average terraced house. Here, terraced houses are high ceilinged and airy, the streets well maintained in a combination of local authority and private ownership efforts to keep our housing stock sellable and lettable.

In Co Durham the valuations overall are probably among the lowest in the country averaging £115,204 with terraces a mere £82,266 but those averages are raised by the high cost of living in Durham City itself, the few gated footballers’ estates like Wynyard, and very pretty rural villages like Hawthorn and Dalton le Dale. In the Easington district you can buy a fully refurbished terraced house for less than £70,000. If you look around on Right Move, in the nicer villages it is still possible to buy one for £60,000.

Here, we’re asking “why are house prices so low?” and the young newly independents: “why can’t I get a mortgage?”. The banks won’t lend. Simple as that. If anyone is doing social studies into the effects of this era of bank behaviour on social housing sector, it would be good to know. I’ll add in anything I find.

You can substitute the cream cheese for a vegan version (just Google it) or the @lactofree twitter person was quick to tell us theirs is now available at some supermarkets.   There’s a genius addition of a sour cream topping to which you could add fresh fruit or a light compote, or for a winter version, a cinnamon-brandy caramel (recipe to come). The sour cream can be easily substituted with a dairy-free sour cream or a yoghurt. I haven’t tried any of these substitutes, but I will, and will let you know.

YOU WILL NEED:

8 large or 12 small biscuits, crumbed in a blender. A combination of digestive & ginger biscuits is good, and I’ve occasionally added a  chocolate digestive and/or half-and-half oat biscuits for extra crunch.

Nutmeg, cinnamon. Use a fresh nutmeg, grated, and freshly purchased cinnamon powder. About half a tsp or 2.5ml of each is fine.

2oz or 50g butter, or half-and-half butter and margarine, or your favourite non-dairy substitute.

1lb or 45og cream cheese. That should be 3 tubs, but check. Supermarket own label and value brands are absolutely fine and can cut your cost by as much as 2/3. Loose cream cheese from an independent delicatessen is usually the cheapest.

5oz or 150g ordinary granulated sugar. I’ve substituted unbleached cane sugar here, and it makes for a lovely nutty flavour and a golden colour.

2 eggs. This is where my attempt at going dairy-free with the recipe staggers a bit. There are egg substitutes out there, but I haven’t tried them. But some people who can’t do milk on ethical grounds, can do eggs, especially if the’re from your best friend’s hen house.

1/2 tsp or 2.5ml vanilla extract. Make sure it’s proper vanilla extract, not that flavouring stuff.

For the topping:

4 oz or 100g sour cream or a substitute.

2oz or 50g caster sugar, the finely ground stuff. If you can’t get it, put your ordinary granulated in a blender and whizz a bit.

1ml or a couple of drops of vanilla extract.

METHOD:

Whizz your chosen biscuits in a blender or place in a large poly bag and bash with a rolling pin until you have crumbs. Add the nutmeg & cinnamon. Melt the butter and combine. Press the mixture into the bottom of a loose-bottomed cake tin, approx 8″ or 20cm will do nicely.

If you haven’t got a loose bottomed tin, line an ordinary one with greaseproof paper or foil and make several wide double-layer strips of greaseproof to go underneath the bottom layer of foil, under the cake and up the sides. Two of these strips is minimum, three is good, four is best. Make them long enough so you can use them to lift the cake out later, but not too long that they’ll drift about in the oven. About 2″ or 5cm higher than the side of the tin is enough.

Bake the base for 5 mins in a hot oven at 200ºC or 400ºF, then take out and cool.

Beat the eggs with the 5oz sugar until the mixture goes pale and creamy, then start adding the cream cheese a spoonful at a time. Beat with a wooden spoon until it’s smooth. Or do what I do and use a little hand mixer. My lovely mother-in-law bought me a Kenwood hand mixer back in the day for my birthday. It only cost about £10 then, and you can certainly buy nice ones like this simple Russell Hobbs Hand Mixer for a similar price now. I use it a lot, it’s been a great present, and I think of lovely Audrey every time I use it. It’s quite respectable to ask for one for your own birthday.

When your mixture is smooth, add the vanilla. It’ll be quite runny. That’s fine, don’t panic. It’s only inferior refrigerated cheesecake mix that needs to be stiff.

Pour onto your cooled base and bake for 30-40 mins at 180º.  The time will depend on your oven, but you might take it out and check after 30mins. If the middle is still very runny, put it back in at 160º for another 10 mins.

Judging when it’s done is a bit of a fine art. It should look like this phone pic, cracked around the edges and smooth and slightly wobbly though not runny in the middle. If you overcook, the surface will crack badly. If you undercook, it will be too soft. Either way, it’ll be delicious, so don’t worry about it.

When the cake has cooled it will have shrunk away from the sides of the tin, although you might need to loosen slightly with a knife. You can lift it out by dropping the loose-bottomed tin onto something like an upturned bowl or a tin of soup. Or use your paper tabs and a friend to help lift it gently out if you used a rigid tin.

Make the topping! Whizz up or beat together the caster sugar and sour cream with the vanilla until the mixture thickens slightly. Pour over the cooled cake. There will be exactly the right amount to cover the top, and fill any cracks if you have them.

Cut small slices – it’s rich!

Serves 8-10.

Great for a birthday tea or to hand around the neighbours if you’ve just moved house. You don’t have to eat it all straight away – it keeps well in the fridge for up to a week. But you’ll find it’s gone in no time.

This recipe originally came from a leaflet containing a selection of recipes by Bernice Hurst, scribbled into my own recipe file and adapted over the years. It’s foolproof, really. My copy of her Effortless Entertaining is much loved. Thank you Bernice.

It’s amazing how often this happens on open social networks, where you’d think people would be a little more circumspect. Do you always screengrab? I do. On a Mac it’s Apple+Shift+3 if you’re in a hurry. That gets the whole page. If you just want a selection, Apple+Shift+4 provides you with a crosshair cursor which you can drag over the specific section you want. On an iPhone you can hold down the round button below the screen whilst pressing the off button on the top.

No idea how it’s done in PC applications, and I don’t know how you do it on an iPad. Anyone know?

So yes, anyone/everyone can always screen capture one’s idiocies, and they probably will. Here are a few from 2011 you might enjoy.

So this fellow booked me to photograph his degree-show glass, then didn’t show up. He did a huge freakout when I invoiced him for the 2 days work, and obviously those screen captures are far more entertaining than this one above. If you follow me on Facebook you may have seen them. My Facebook pages aren’t public, so he did look slightly less idiotic than if they were publicly searchable, but still. And Ms Niceperson doesn’t name him here, you note.

So when is it acceptable to name someone who disgraces themselves in real life? We have public shaming by television – Rogue Traders, Rip-Off Britain and so on (I won’t link) – and my Twitter feed is pretty much at it all day every day.

What about this one?

The poster already hides behind the anonymity of his/her account name, but the commenters don’t. Facebook pages like that, for towns and so on are pretty much public, aren’t they? The comments in this case were on the whole hugely supportive of a live-and-let-live approach in favour of the travellers, a total credit to the people of Seaham with its open and friendly atmosphere and legendary kindness to strangers. But a notable few, posting presumably in their own name, weren’t, spewing a brand of rabid racism you only see at BNP rallies.

What about the personal stuff? When someone calls you ‘horrendous, obnoxious and condescending’ on a public timeline? Do you screencapture that for future reference? By damn yes of course you do! There’s a whole blog post pending around the circumstances leading to that one. When you pay serious big money for a training course, you do expect a little more circumspection from one of your tutors, even if you may actually and in fact be the horrendous, obnoxious and condescending one.

How about:

‘Save you (sic) gasbag tweets for knitting groups and Facebook’

Loved that one. Again, absolutely great on his CV and look how he demonstrates his unwitting misogyny and lack of grasp of how Twitter actually works. After all, if not for gasbags, whom is it for?

What would you do, oh my dear readers? Name and shame, as publicly as the original insult? Or delete where possible and move along in nothing-to-see-here mode?

The accounts in the cases here have been blocked, but they do insist on making contact. One of them uses a different account to send me the occasional @ reply, so I presume he is now reading my gasbag tweets. Another has emailed and is presumably ranting now and again somewhere I can’t see him. Scotland, hopefully.

Does anyone think if they’re being blocked on all the social networks going, that they’ll get a reply to an email? Seriously?

Back in the early days of  The Photography Pages controversy was feted. There’s that Flickr/Fluckr is f*cked post, another that generated huge amounts of inbound traffic about children smoking, and one shaming a fellow whose name now escapes me who followed me around Middlesbrough with his robustly Parr-esque  approach to ‘street photography’. There were others, all posts with points worth making, and I’m sure they contributed to the traffic over there.

So now that there is much more digital noise among the sweet sounds of the internet, do we want to court controversy for its own sake? Do we think it’s responsible to name and shame when we see something disturbing or just plain rubbish?

Duckrabbit recently raised plenty of heads with this post about VII, Ron Haviv and the world’s largest arms manufacturers. More on that over there when I get around to writing it. Not funny, eh? What was amusing though, was a tweet accusing Duck of irresponsible journalism followed rather quickly later that day by a little spate of sock puppets badly parodying the Duck’s modus operandi.

I’ve been trolled, rather badly, insistently and with malice, by a succession of sock puppets. Everyone who’s spent any time on the internet has. But so what? I’m still here, still posting. I’m sure Duck rather liked the buzz and the milkshake certainly brought more boys to his yard.

This is the first post in a revived personal blog where I look at some of the issues and lifestyle around living in the north as a portfolio freelancer. It’s not pretty. We’re barely surviving here. Next post will be a recipe for cheesecake. Not just any cheesecake, but the most amazing cheesecake you’ve ever tasted. There’ll be the socio-economic reality of the everyday here in this former colliery village, and there’ll most definitely be some controversy. This is one of the poorest parts of the country, and you can imagine it’s being seriously hammered by the current government, but then t’was ever thus.

I’m never quite sure where to draw the controversy line, and the line itself is never straight, it shifts like the tideline along the sands. But I’m certain it’d be irresponsible to blogging and to ‘journalism’ if we didn’t seek to name and shame wherever and whenever we can. And if we’re wrong, we can always say so, and continue to discuss and grow vegetables, and bake cakes, and feed crows. Lifting directly from Duckrabbit:

“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death – Jean-Jacques Rousseau”

More soon….

Having finally regained possession after an on-off battle lasting about 6 years and costing every last bit hard won savings and the forced sale of most of the tools of my trade and so on, and so on, this is what the place looks like as of this morning. That stepladder had been propped over the lobby door, St Trinian style, presumably in the hope it would crash down onto my head, and the chair seats have been taken out. But as you can see, that’s not the worst of it.

There was an inkling the house would be like this, the neighbours, the nice local bobbies and the engineer who was finally and at long last admitted to do the gas inspection had given fair warning. But still, it’s quite a shock.

Lots of work to do now, then.

Click through for a slideshow or follow this link. It’s Flash so you won’t see it on your phone or iPad, sorry.

I need a job to help pay for all this. Any and all suggestions gratefully received.

My first Solo Show in some time is opening this afternoon at the Decisive Moment Gallery at the Arts Centre in Darlington.

This is an exerpt from my blurb:

The last Seaham coal mine was forcibly closed twenty years ago.

Brenda Burrell inhabits and documents the uneasy survival of this coastal pit village from the inside: its uniquely English architecture and vibrant, indefatigable people.

After a spirited struggle, the mine, one of the most productive in Europe, was finally closed in 1991, putting a whole community out of work, its buildings, and all surrounding supply industries shattered and then bulldozed.

The twenty intervening years has seen photographers Simon Norfolk, John Davies, Sirkka Liisa Konttinen and the Billy Elliot filmmaker Lee Hall walk the empty brown wastes of the former mine land, comb the now beautiful deserted beaches, making art where the pit waste once was dumped. 

This latest and ongoing series of works shows the younger inhabitants of the village twenty years after the pit closed, those whose fathers were barely toddlers themselves during the days of coal, the neatly dressed windows and weather-washed streets embarking on a new century.

There’s going to be a buffet, wine and cake, and some of my family are coming, so I’m not as nervous as I thought I might be. But it’s a tough crowd, and I’ll be grateful and willing to hear all and any comments and criticisms, as ever.

Hopefully, I’ll see you later. If you can come another time, it’s on until the 17th December – please do let me know and we’ll meet for a cuppa.