A sign on some railings just outside the office…

Ipswich Town ground at Portman Road

I’d only been to the football once before, and that was for England v Portugal in Euro 2004. We lost, Lisbon went crazy, and as a result we had one of the best nights out of our lives. The city erupted, there was partying on every street, and we joined the locals singing and cheering until early next morning. Well, some of us did: it was a press trip and the real football fans went to bed early with depression.

Anyhow, yesterday Rich and I headed down to the Ipswich Town ground at Portman Road to see the ‘Tractor Boys’ take on Blackpool, the ‘Seasiders’. With 21,059 bums on seats it wasn’t quite a capacity crowd, but it was more people than I’ve seen gathered together in Ipswich before, and the ratio of home to away supporters, which I would have put at about 50:1, must have been enough to make the orange-clad visitors feel like a tiny minority. We’d almost unwittingly joined them. Neither of us knew what colour Blackpool played in, and Rich had initially put on his bright orange coat, the exact same colour as the Blackpool shirts, but changed at the very last minute.

As with all of these things, the time flew by. Football in person is nothing like football on the box, and the crowds around us were making a half-time dash for the dodgy food stalls before we even knew it (no chips inside the ground, bizarrely, although loads of caravans doing a brisk trade in them outside).

It had been a goal-less first half, but things really picked up after the break (no ice cream lady or organ appearing out of the centre of the pitch, either). Ipswich Town scored twice in the next 20 minutes and the crowd went suitably bonkers. The Blackpool supporters sat quietly in their little sectioned-off terrace surrounded by police.

Five minutes before the end, when it seemed impossible that Blackpool should be able to claw their way back, the more complacent Ipswich supporters started filing out, and two minutes later missed an extraordinary goal from the visiting team. One of them broke free from the pack and ran up the edge of the pitch, kicking the ball before him. Everyone else – in blue and orange alike – hung back as he ploughed on. The home team goalie came out to meet him half way, but seeing that there was no way he could score without being deemed offside, didn’t even try to stop him. Even the player himself seemed to think it was a lost cause, and booted it into the net as a joke, as much as anything else.

The Seasiders went loopy, and the home crowd booed. The referee stopped the game for a minute and went to consult the sideline flag wavers. Nobody could really believe that the goal would be allowed, but a minute later he made some kind of gesture and the scoreboard-cum-advertising hoarding (‘Bang one in with Fireworks Emporium‘, ‘There’s no substitute for Express Signs‘ etc etc) clocked up a point for the away team. Right around the ground, the supporters were caught up in the emotion, most booing, and a smaller northern contingent cheering as though their lives depended on it. Their expensive train tickets had been money well spent.

What a climax. That was the end of the game, and both teams left the field with some goals under their belts. The supporters left, too, after an exciting close to what had earlier looked like it might be a rather ordinary, hum-drum kick around.

We went to the docks for coffee and watched the sun go down between the boats masts, and agreed that it had been – all in all – an excellent afternoon.

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ipswich+town, football, blackpool, seasiders, tractor+boys

The National Theatre did a special Valentines screening of Brief Encounter last night. It was a chilly outdoor showing, projected onto the wall of the Fly Tower, which looks out over the Thames, to an audience sat about in deck chairs, cocooned in blankets and rugs.

I’d never seen it before (although I thought I had), which was probably for the best. Despite our checked tartan blanket the wind was whipping up around our legs, and I think if I’d known the story and not been so keen to sit it out and see how it ended I might have suggested we left shortly after Celia Johnson’s first cigarette.

But despite the cold, it was utterly captivating, and it left me wondering how I’d managed to get this far through life without having seen it before. Like I had with Casablanca. It’s the story of Laura and Alec. He comes into the tea room at the station where she’s waiting for her train. She gets some grit in her eye and he helps to remove it. One chance meeting leads to another and soon they’re having illicit lunches together and trips out to the country, all the while telling their respective partners half-truths about what they did with the day.

But their relationship was doomed from the start. This was 1945, and such behaviour would have been quite shocking. One lie led to another and another until finally something had to be done to draw it to a close. A few weeks of irresponsible happiness had killed all feeling Laura had for her husband, and she was left, by the end of the film, trapped in an unhappy relationship, which had ultimately been torn to pieces by something so incidental as a piece of grit in her eye.

It drew a capacity crowd. The deckchairs were full before we get there, and so we perched on the side of a flower bed, while other lay right in it, using the neat box hedges as pillows. Some others, better-equipped than ourselves, had brought sleeping bags and garden chairs, and they sat there wrapped up tight, snacking on the tea and bath buns being served up to get us in the mood.

The free guide they gave out included a review from The Monthly Film Bulletin of December 1945, which gave it high praise. ‘There have been few better British films than Brief Encounter even at a time when our studios are taking their place in the vanguard of this great contemporary art‘.

Only half of that statement still holds true. British cinema may no longer be in the vanguard of great contemporary art, but that there have been few better films than Brief Encounter is as true today as it was at the end of the War.

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london, cinema, films, movies, brief+encounter, noel+coward, british+cinema, bath+buns

Clearing out the loft on Saturday we came across a whole bunch of knitting stuff. Needles, wool, stitch counters. We even found a half-made jumper, still on the needles that will never be finished now.

Most interesting, though, was a whole folder full of old patterns, carefully annotated over the years. Growing up, almost all of our clothes were home made for a good long time, and I have no doubt that some of the kids’ patterns in that folder were to be found in my and my sister’s wardrobes in the mid- to late-70s and early 80s.

Some were truly tasteless, clearly, and not the kind of things you’d get away in modern-day hoodie society. Some others were quite obviously relics of the twenties and thirties, now falling to bits, and shown off by the long-dead supermodels of the inter-war years.

The ones below are my favourites, chosen largely on the basis of cheese quotient, starting out with a couple of very sports casual dressers. Poor chap in the Wendy pattern is doing his best to strike a pose, but his lady friend has seen it all before.

Now these two ladies know how to have fun. Look, they’ve even knit some bobble hat cosies for their tea pots. I particularly like the hat on the egg. It looks like one of the Flumps.

The two in the left-hand pattern below are sharing some secret joke about the cactus and whoever it is they’re looking at. Where has the blue woman got her arm?

The woman in the Wendy pattern is clearly trying out for Howard’s Way.

It really felt like summer had arrived this weekend. The sun was bright, the skies were clear and it was warm enough to sit outside without a coat.

Yet it was largely spent indoors.

Saturday, we cleared out the loft. It’s ten years since the first items went in, and some of them are fifty or more years old. Some, we reckon, had probably been in the family 80 or 100 years; some had perished; some we wondered why we’d ever kept. Eight hours after we started, the garage was filled with irrelevant junk that was only ever kept on the off-chance it might one day be needed, and we’d gathered together all the heirlooms, the photos of people who had died long before we’d been born, and the more useful trinkets that will be put back to good use.

It was back-breaking stuff, and I lost track of the number of times I walked into a rafter or beam, but it was very much worth the effort. By evening we were aching, and had jelly legs, but we also had a close-to-empty loft, a close-to-bursting garage, and a small pile of things that either couldn’t or shouldn’t have been thrown away. My pile consisted largely of fantastic aged ephemera, some of which I’ll post up here over the next few days.

Sunday, we traipsed into London to see Varekai. I say traipsed because that’s exactly what it was. Every time we venture into the city at the weekend we vow ‘never again’, and then a few months later we forget and find ourselves swearing at delayed tubes and trains, realising our mistake.

This weekend, the main train line was closed, so we drove to Epping to catch the tube from there. Half of that was shut, too, so we ended up having to catch a tube, then a bus, then two further tubes, and then reverse it all on the way home, so all in all it stacked up to seven hours of travelling to go 35 miles and back. a sad indictment of British public transport.

It was worth it, though. The show – the story of what happened to Icarus after he’d fallen back down to Earth – was excellent, and full of back-breaking, dizzy-making stunts with a distinct lack of safety nets, and a serious sparcity of things to hold on to.

Worth seeing? Certainly. Even with seven hours’ travelling. Absolutely.

But if you can drive there instead, do.

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london, cirque+du+soleil, cirque du soleil

A fact and a joke.

The fact:

Erinsborough, the fictional suburb in which Australian soap Neighbours is set, is an anagram of the word Neighbours. Am I the last person to discover this?

The joke (from last night’s London Paper, and which everyone seems to laugh at before saying it’s terrible):

Why should you never marry a Dutch girl with inflatable shoes?
Because you never know when she might pop her clogs.

I thank you.

Poor old Oscar is properly confused by the cat flat. He goes out into the outhouse and then stands at the little door sniffing the air coming through and meowing to be let out.

Sometimes he presses the top – at the hinge – with his feet, but he can’t work out that all he needs to do is press the bottom with his nose and it would flip open. Instead, I have to bend down and hold it open for him so he can shuffle out.

And then, 20 minutes later, he’s sat on the front step, meowing to be let in. Whether that’s because the flap is equally confusing from the outside, or he considers the tradesman’s entrance too degrading, I don’t know.

Either way it leaves me with a question… how do you train your cat to use a cat flap?

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cat

The University of East Anglia’s Norwich campus is a home to a strange and varied mix of buildings. Much of it is brutalist in nature, with unforgiving concrete buildings forming an almost unbroken wall stretching from one end of the campus to the other.

It’s a strange place to spend a Saturday afternoon if you’re not a student, but we were in the city and wanted to check out the famed Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the free gallery and museum set up by beneficiary Sir Robert Sainsbury, one time chairman of the supermarket that took his family name.

It’s worth a trip for the building alone. An early Foster creation, you can see its influence on later projects like Stansted and Chek Lap Kok airports, with a grand, gently-arched roof curving gracefully over a cavernous, yet still strangely intimate interior.

There are no visible supports to break up the gallery, yet somehow the grandeur of the place does nothing to belittle the exhibits within. You could rightly expect that 4000 year old masks, and tiny statuettes no larger than your thumbnail would be lost in such a building, but they’re not. That’s thanks, in part, to clever use of temporary dividers and display boards that break up the space into manageable parts.

Entry to the gallery, which brings the University a return of between £1m and £1.5m each year, is free, and the coffee shop – an essential part of any gallery visit – is both well stocked and surprisingly cheap.

The only disappointment was that the building itself, so impressive in person, is very difficult to photograph from the outside. The stark, unapologetic ends are perhaps the most interesting parts. Exposing the roof and wall supports, they make it look like the building is merely a chopped-out section of a larger whole.

Even that, though, doesn’t hint at how impressive a structure it is, how ahead of its time it must have been, how important it was as a harbinger of future British architecture, and how forward-thinking and brave Sir and Lady Sainsbury were to have commissioned such a radical design when they were already well into old age.

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museum, norfolk, norwich, gallery, sainsburys