Kingston Park has a climate that would normally strike fear in the heart of a brass monkey, but the tidy little ground was basking in warm sunshine last Wednesday as the Newcastle Falcons players gathered on the pitch for their pre-season photographs.

Just as it has for the past month or so, lending a literal dimension to the suggestion that Mike Blair is enjoying the Indian summer of his career.

Blair admits he had reservations about forsaking the charms of the south of France for the grittier pleasures of the north-east, but the uncommonly balmy weather of the past few weeks has made the transition less of a wrench.

"If I had come here when it was windy and wet and horrible then I might have been pining for France," he said. "But the fact it has been so nice has made things a lot easier."

In a few months' time, when the wind is blowing straight in off the North Sea on a wet Friday night and his new team are locked in a grim, attritional struggle, then Blair might have reason to reconsider the charms of the place, but for the moment he seems energised, rejuvenated even, by the change he has just made.

It is an improbable development, for barely eight months have passed since the announcement of his retirement from international rugby seemed to confirm that Blair, 32, was on the gentle downslope of a career that had brought him 85 Scotland caps, a mark surpassed only by Chris Paterson and Scott Murray. As his move to Brive at the start of last season had also been motivated by lifestyle considerations, it seemed clear that he was all for a gentler life than the one he had been leading for the previous decade.

Yet as time went by it began to dawn on the scrum-half that he was not quite ready for the rugby equivalent of pottering about in the garden shed after all.

"Going to Brive seemed to tick every box at the time," he said. "It was a fantastic spot and we really loved it there. But it also made me realise that I wasn't quite ready to take things easy."

Hence the move to Newcastle, and what could be a perfect fit between a newly-promoted club who are seeking to consolidate their league position and a player who has one of the best rugby brains in the business. Blair is a craftsman half-back, but it is his reading of a game and his decision-making skills that are likely to be his greatest strengths in what is likely to be a testing season for his new side.

Edinburgh certainly noticed the absence of those qualities last season. In Blair's last season at Murrayfield they had reached the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup; in their first season without him they plumbed depths of wretchedness that even their most pessimistic supporters could scarcely have foreseen.

All of which adds a certain poignancy to the meeting of Newcastle and Edinburgh at Hawick's Mansfield Park on Friday. Blair is not yet sure whether he will be involved in what will be the final pre-season warm-up for both sides, but it is certainly not one he wants to avoid.

"I expect it will be a fairly full-on game," he smiled. "I think it will be great, and I'm actually looking forward to playing against guys I've known so well for so long. I don't think it will be strange for me. You just get on with things, and I think I'm quite good at moving on anyway."

Watching from a distance, Blair still felt Edinburgh's pain last season. "I saw a few of their games, maybe five or six, and it was hard to watch," he said. "I really felt for the guys. There were a lot of little things that we had got away with the previous season that they were just not getting away with any more.

"In a way, it just seemed that they hadn't moved on. They had kind of stood still a bit. And when that happens you fall behind.

"They've got some very influential guys who are going to have to really step up this year because it can be hard to get back from the position they're in. But with Alan Solomons coming in as coach, he's going to make a big difference. Guys are going to have to prove themselves to a new coach again and often that alone gives a bit of a lift."

Ironically, Blair may find that there are more Scottish accents in his new side than his old one when they clash in Hawick on Friday. Falcons director of rugby Dean Richards was a modern-day hammer of the Scots when he used to pitch up at Murrayfield on England duty, but he has been happy to look north for talent and now has around a dozen Scottish players on his books.

"There's a lot of piss-taking about it in the dressing room," said Blair. "But as we're probably the biggest group at the club we do a lot of piss-taking ourselves."

So does being a Jock among the Geordies make him pine for the homeland? More pertinently, does it make him question his own decision to stand down from the Test scene?

"No," came the blunt response. "The decision wasn't a snap one; it was something I had been thinking about for a good six months prior to that. The fact I'm now in England doesn't alter my thinking at all. The reasons I had for making the decision in January are reasons I still stand by now."