The Last Tour of Durham

Mar 31, 2018 · 3 minute read

The Goodbye Durham Tour is now in full swing; whilst my house isn’t on the market yet¹, and I’m not scheduled to move until the end of April, I’m going to Seattle and Las Vegas in a week’s time. Then I just have two weeks which will mainly be a flurry of me getting increasingly more exasperated as I try to fit all my things into little boxes that somehow take on the density of a small black hole even after just putting a few books in them².

A post shared by Ian Pointer (@carsondial) on Mar 31, 2018 at 5:51pm PDT

So that means it is time for a final trip to OnlyBurger, in their original location, of course. One of the top priorities I have when I get to Cincinnati is to find a replacement, but it’s going to be hard.

A post shared by Ian Pointer (@carsondial) on Mar 31, 2018 at 5:49pm PDT

Toast! Ten years old, and still going strong. Many an afternoon or evening was spent here, although I haven’t been much since I stopped working in downtown Durham.

A few of us will mourn you, South Bank building!

A post shared by Ian Pointer (@carsondial) on Mar 31, 2018 at 6:06pm PDT

And of course, one final shot of the South Bank Building, which if I do come back to Durham in the future (and I expect I will!), I imagine will be raised to the ground. The centre of Durham has changed a huge amount in the seven years I’ve lived here. Can’t quite get along with all the changes; in particular, this hideous work of glass:

Ugh.

A post shared by Ian Pointer (@carsondial) on Mar 31, 2018 at 6:08pm PDT

It’s a building that’s too tall and is too close to the amazing Hill Building. But, I do hope that they have a plaque inside to commemorate where Colin Firth once stood and attempted…that…accent.

It’s not all bad; I’d argue that despite reservations about Unscripted, they prevented a lovely little modernist building from being demolished and turned into a soulless glass block matching the one across the road. Of all the hotels that have sprung up in Durham in the past few years, it’s the one I’d actually want to stay in.

Anyway, so you may catch me out and about in the last couple of weeks of April frantically trying to check off the last of my old haunts. And not just Durham, of course! It has been so long since I’ve been to Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen. Apparently they now ship biscuits, but I feel that they’d be somewhat cold by the time they reached Ohio…

But I already have a fun story about that, trust me. ↩︎
‘few books’ means 3 cookbooks that weight about 10lbs each, obviously. ↩︎