SATURDAY night’s all right for fighting, as Elton John once said. Let’s get a little action in.
It’s seven o’clock and I wanna rock, wanna get a belly full of beer.
Or on the hand, maybe talk about crochet and soft furnishings, holiday plans and gardening. Whatever happened to our Saturday nights? They used to be so much fun.
We spent last Saturday evening with some friends whom we love dearly. We have known them for a very long time. Our children have grown up together and moved out to start their own lives.
We have gone on holidays together, run races together, fallen off bicycles together and got a little drunk together now and again.
Now we are gradually growing old together, and our Saturday nights are not what they were.
Once we went out dancing, in among the bright lights of Paignton, rubbing shoulders with the beautiful people, the jet set, the Paignton Playboys and their glamourous companions.
We were in with the in crowd, and we went where the in crowd went. We were as cool as Dobie Gray in velvet pants on Soul Train.
We would walk into our favourite places and we would know nearly everybody in there. There would be nods, waves and glasses raised to and fro.
It was like being Norm in an episode of Cheers, going where everybody knows your name. A little later, the music would be loud and we would dance until we dropped at some seafront bar or other. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end. But then, gradually, we slowed up a bit, and we didn’t go to town every Saturday night. Then we didn’t go many Saturday nights. Then we didn’t go at all.
Last Saturday night we stayed in, ate well and drank sparingly. We talked about forthcoming holidays, and where we might go to spend them. We talked about suites and armchairs, and how we might protect them from clawing cats.
Then the new Unwins seeds catalogue came out, packed with pictures of plants you can buy to grow in your own garden.
“Unwins!” I exclaimed. “Deep joy! Seedy-bold in the cattle-y-bilo!” But it turned out it wasn’t that particular Unwin at all, which was disappointing for me, and baffling for the rest of the people in the room, who had no idea what I was on about.
It was a Saturday evening quite unlike old times, but maybe all the better for that.
The following morning, clear-headed and bright-eyed thanks to a night at home with a small cider and the Unwins catalogue, I pulled on the magical golden jersey of Torquay United to play for the Gulls’ walking football team in a tournament.
We won our first game, vanquishing the league leaders and reigning champions. We only lost our second when the freakishly strong wind blew the ball into our net as it ran loose from an excellent save by our goalkeeper. Maybe a quiet Saturday night in isn’t such a bad idea after all, and Sunday morning football is better with a clear head.
This article first appeared in the Torquay Herald Express on 13.03.2019
BREAKDANCING could become an Olympic sport as early as 2024. I am not making this up. The organisers of the Games in Paris propose to showcase breakdancing, along with surfing, climbing and skateboarding.
This must not happen, and here’s why.
The Olympic motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for Faster, Higher, Stronger. It was proposed by Pierre de Coubertin upon the creation of the International Olympic Committee in 1894, and it is not for us to muck about with it in an effort to be more inclusive of youth and urban pastimes.
No sport which depends on the opinion of a judge should have a place in the Summer Olympics. If you cover 100 metres faster than anyone else, you win. That can be measured with complete accuracy. You are the fastest, and therefore you win. The same can be said for jumping up into the air higher than anyone else can, or lifting more weight.
How much did you lift? OK, that’s more than anybody else lifted, and that makes you the winner.
What if Olympic gold depends on a judge thinking that maybe your shoulders aren’t quite in the correct position during some manoeuvre or other?
Climbing? Yes, because it depends on measuring how quickly you can get from the bottom of a wall to the top. It is pure and simple.
Surfing? No. Skateboarding? No. They all depend on the opinions of a judge.
Nobody is saying that the people who practise these sports are not clever. They are, often wonderfully so.
I can’t surf. I did some body boarding once, and it did not go well.
We bought body boards from the petrol station that used to be at the bottom of the road, and took them with us on a camping trip to Cornwall. The kids took to them like, well, kids to water.
I either fell off, or careered in to the shore at breakneck speed, putting shoreline paddlers in peril. I had neither skill nor balance.
My skateboarding career was equally brief, consisting of an evening some time in the mid 1970s trying to get the hang of a mate’s new-fangled board on wheels. I ended up in the rhododendrons.
Breakdancing, I will confess, is something that I have never tried, although I know a man who has.
The gentleman in question is now a pillar of the community, so I shall not name him. He wouldn’t thank me for recalling the days when he took a little square of lino with him down to Victoria Square on a Saturday morning and spun around on it, roughly in time with the tunes coming out of his Radio Shack cassette player.
He would spin around on his back with his feet in the air, building up to the finale of his routine, which involved going completely upside-down and spinning on his head on the little square of lino, to the gasps of an appreciative Saturday morning Paignton audience.
These days that fine head of hair has gone, and his pate is shiny and bald. I asked him if this was anything to do with spinning around on little squares of lino in Victoria Square on Saturday mornings, and he just gave me a rueful smile and gazed off into the middle distance. Breakdancing is clever, innovative, bold, brave and carefree, but for heaven’s sake, not an Olympic sport. Not in a million years.
Darts, though…
This article first appeared in the Torquay Herald Express on 27.02.2019
This piece is a bit of a departure from my normal blog posts. I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau with the Holocaust Educational Trust and 200 school students from all over the West Country. This is what we saw there:
THERE isn’t much colour in the death camp, particularly on a chill, grey February day with rain in the air that washes all joy out of the palette and reduces everything to greens and greys and boot-sucking mud browns.
But deep inside the Auschwitz museum there is one display cabinet which is full of vibrant colour – reds and yellows and blues. It is a collection of some of the items the millions of Jewish captives brought with them on the trains that would bring them through the notorious gates of the Nazi death camp.
They brought pots and plates and pans of all colours, with floral patterns on them. They brought colourful tins of shoe polish. Some even locked their front doors and brought the keys with them, thinking they might one day go back and unlock those doors again, and resume the lives from which they had been taken.
We are guests of the Holocaust Educational Trust, learning by seeing the places where the millions died, hearing their stories and walking the same paths and courtyards they did.
“Here is the wall where there were shootings,” says our guide, a middle-aged Polish lady whose sweet, soft, sing-song voice lends an air of everyday normality to her escalating tales of unrelenting cruelty and horror.
“You can go up and look closer if you like. Here are the photographs of the children who were subjected to experiments, here are the gallows where the hangings took place, here is a cabinet full of human hair which they cut from the women to sell.”
It is almost too much to bear, and it gets worse as we walk through the shadowy stone-floored rooms and corridors. Home movies showing ordinary Jewish families and couples enjoying life before the Holocaust flicker on the wall of a room in which doctors experimented on them.
There are 200 teenagers on this tour, representing 100 schools from across the Westcountry. The Holocaust Educational Trust takes dozens of these trips every year as part of a drive to educate young people and turn them into ambassadors, making sure the lessons of Auschwitz reach out across Europe and across the generations.
Among them are students from Coombeshead, Clyst Vale, Exeter School, Newton Abbot College, Okehampton College, South Dartmoor, Stover School and The King’s School. Once home, they will write reports and discuss what they have seen.
A recent survey suggests more than a million people in the UK do not believe the Holocaust of the Second World War ever happened. Others maintain that the figure of six million Jews killed is an exaggeration. The students have important work to do.
The HET’s Lessons From Auschwitz project is government-funded and has been running for 20 years. Thousands of students have been on these tours.
Trust chief executive Karen Pollock MBE says: “It’s a vital part of our work, allowing young people to learn about the Holocaust in a way they cannot in the classroom.
“The visit enables young people to see for themselves where racism, prejudice and anti-Semitism can ultimately lead, and its importance is demonstrated by the inspiring work students go on to do in their local communities.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest killing site of the Holocaust. It is one of several locations around the little Polish town of Oswiecim, whose name became Auschwitz when the occupying Nazis arrived. Birkenau is the site you recognise from the grainy newsreels and black and white pictures taken when it was liberated by the Soviets. In the spring of 1944 alone, more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews came to Birkenau, having crossed Europe in crowded cattle trucks. Most of those who survived the journey were murdered on arrival. Many were dead within 25 minutes of the trains pulling in through the gates. Others were put to work as slave labour, and died from disease, starvation, exhaustion or beatings.
Around a million Jews died in Birkenau alone, along with 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Sinti and Roma gypsies and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
But the bare facts and the baffling numbers wash over you. Nobody can conjure a mental picture of that many people.
You have to go and see, and leaf through the enormous manuscript that fills one entire room in the museum, and look through the close-typed names as your thumb guides you through its seemingly endless pages. There are four million names on it, their surnames in capital letters.
You have to walk into the gas chamber and feel the chill of the cold stone as you look up to the holes in the roof through which the little blue Zyklon B pellets were dropped, the pellets that became active on contact with the air and killed everyone below, 1,500 people at a time.
Feeling that chill and seeing that glimmer of light through the holes in the roof tells you much more than a textbook can. You can’t feel the chill when you watch a newsreel or click a web page. We shiver in the cold as we walk around Birkenau, but the guide tells us this isn’t particularly cold for the time of year there. We are well wrapped in coats and scarves, hats and gloves as we move inside to see a display of the flimsy ‘striped pyjamas’ which were the prisoners’ only insulation against the weather.
There is snow on the ground and the ditches on either side of the kilometre-long railway line through the camp are plugged with thick ice. We stop beside a hut, and the Polish guide tells us this is where a doctor decided which of the Jews climbing down from the cattle trucks would be killed, and which would be sent to work.
We are shown a photograph of the selection process taking place and realise we are standing in the exact spot on which the doctor stands in the picture.
The Devon students are quiet and thoughtful. Not one of them checks his or her phone for messages. There isn’t much chatter. They all take pictures to illustrate their reports, but nobody takes selfies.
We move on, because there is still more horror to see.
We visit barracks with long rows of three-deck wooden bunks into which thousands of people would be crammed every night. We visit the place where the confiscated valuables brought on the journey were sorted through and piled high to be sold.
One display in the museum has thousands of pairs of shoes, another has a mountain of hair brushes, another hundreds upon hundreds of prosthetic limbs. A huge pile of spectacles fills another display case.
Outside again, the wind whips through the trees that gave the camp its name. Birke is the German word for birch tree. In the room where the valuables were sorted we sit on the stone floor and listen to prayers and poems as a short commemoration service brings our visit to an end. We have a candle each but we can’t light them indoors and it is too cold outside to do it there.
Rabbi Andrew Shaw, who has travelled out from the UK for the day, tells the story of the Holocaust survivors in his own family, and tells the students how important it is that they go home and tell their families and their peers what they have seen.
“This place,” he tells them, “is vital to the survival of the human race, so we can understand what happened here and ensure that it never happens again. This is what happens when hatred goes unchallenged.”
For the students the experience has been brutal and harrowing. They were apprehensive when they left Exeter on the early morning flight to Krakow, and many are not yet ready to talk about it as they leave Birkenau. Some, however, are already planning what they will do as ambassadors for the Lessons From Auschwitz project.
Ella Laity from Stover School has spent her 17th birthday on the visit. She says: “I thought that anti-Semitism had been and gone, but this is more relevant now than it has been for a long time. As ambassadors we have an important role to play.”
Lizzie Wills, who is 16 and also from Stover, adds: “I had always thought I had a strong understanding of what happened in the Holocaust, but it’s not until you go and see it for yourself that you really do.”
Night has fallen by the time we leave Birkenau, heading back between the frozen ditches where the arrow-straight railway line stretches into the distant darkness.
One of the educators from the Holocaust Educational Trust tells me: “For me, this is the most moving part of the whole visit.
“We walk out. They couldn’t.”
This article first appeared in the Torquay Herald Express on 20.02.2019
THERE’S a picture swirling around in the cluttered cyberspace maelstrom of Facebook at the moment, posted there by a group called Sunday League Football, and it takes me right back.
The way we were
Back to Brixham, and more specifically to Wall Park, sometime in the early to mid-1980s, to a Sunday morning, a nagging muzzy headache and a faint feeling of nausea.
The picture shows a footballer in a yellow shirt, navy shorts and green socks. He wears white boots, like Alan Ball used to wear when the rest of the world was still wearing black ones from Frisby’s.
He is sitting on an upturned Maes Pils beer crate with his feet crossed at the ankle and resting on a white panelled football. He has a bottle of beer in his hand and, for the piece de resistance, he is drawing deeply on a cigarette. The Maes Pils suggests that he is a Belgian fellow, but to be honest the picture could have been taken pretty much anywhere in Europe.
It is a pose with which many of us who played Sunday football back in the day will be familiar.
I would love to say that Brixham United’s Sunday football team of the time was a well-drilled and professional outfit, but in truth we were an unruly and unkempt mob.
Sunday football in the local Combination League being what it was, most of us would have been in the London, the Long Bar and/or the Parkham until the early hours, having played a South Devon League game the previous afternoon. If anyone was in a fit state to drive we might have ventured over as far as Vergines or the Firwood, which were the only places with late licences.
It was not unknown for players to turn out on Sunday mornings not having actually been home since the match the previous day, having just grabbed a few hours of fitful sleep on someone’s sofa before tucking into a hearty and slightly misguided breakfast.
There would be a head-count before the game as the shirts and shorts were pulled out of the bag, and there would always be a few who would have to be listed as Missing In Action, not seen since some stage of the previous night.
There were some very good players in the Combination League, but not all that many of them. The good ones were made to look very good by comparison with the rest of us.
Many of the teams were made up of shambling, hung-over council park heroes who just wanted to get through until the final whistle.
One memorable Sunday morning we conceded more than 20 goals in a game against a pub side from Paignton. It started badly with a goal from the first attack of the game, and then it got worse.
By the time the Paignton pub had stretched its lead to 15 or so, some of our players had given up completely. A couple of them were leaning on the metal rail around the perimeter of the pitch, chatting to spectators and hoping against hope that the ref would signal the end of the game sooner rather than later.
But the goals kept raining in, one of them when I drove a defensive clearance against a team-mate’s legs and the ball ballooned back over my head and past our hapless keeper for an own goal for which I was blamed, rather harshly, I felt.
No mercy was shown by our opponents, and I believe the match ended 23-0. We probably went down to the Maritime afterwards to drown our sorrows.
HERE’S a thing you don’t see at the roadside any more – hitch-hikers. There was a time when you saw people hitching everywhere you went. Now you barely see them at all.
Where have all the hitch-hikers gone?
Maybe we were more trusting back then, 40 years ago. Now we might be less likely to hop into a car with a complete stranger or, from the other perspective, to pick up some unkempt-looking hobbledehoy from the side of the road, not knowing what he might be concealing in the depths of his rucksack.
It was all the rage for a while, though.
My school mate Carl and I went to the 1977 British Grand Prix at Silverstone without spending a single penny on getting there.
We didn’t spend a single penny on getting in, either, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
You didn’t need tickets in those days. you just rocked up and paid a man with a satchel and a roll of tickets a fiver or thereabouts. That was our intention.
From Exeter we got a late-night lift in a lorry as far as Bristol. We got to Aust Services beside the Severn Bridge on the M4, then waited an age in the grinding cold before the dawn to get picked up again.
Somewhere near Aust Services…
From there we got to somewhere near Newbury, and from there we made it to Aylesbury. Then we had our biggest stroke of luck of all, being picked up by somebody who was actually going to the racing circuit for the same purpose we were.
And when we got there, he showed the chap on the gate a pass of some kind and we were in, free and gratis, driving over the bridge that used to stand between Abbey and Woodcote corners into the middle of the track itself, and parking in some kind of compound for the favoured few.
No money had changed hands since we filled our rucksacks with crisps and pop at the Tweenaway Co-op the day before, and now here we were, at the home of British motor racing, just an arm’s reach away from the action.
We didn’t have the blazers and the badges to stay inside the VIP compound, but we were inside the circuit for the weekend, and that’s where we stayed.
James Hunt in action – anoraks will note this picture is from 1978, not 1977
Hitch-hiking away from the track again after the race – won by James Hunt from Niki Lauda and Gunnar Nilsson, seeing as you ask – was somewhat easier. People with spare seats in their cars and vans were picking up loads of hitchers.
We got lucky again, getting picked up by a man in an ice cream van who was going home to Swindon. We had to climb in through his serving window.
He was playing The Who on an eight-track cartridge in the front and said we could help ourselves to anything he had left in the freezer chests, but all he had were some kind of mint chocolate chip lollies which clearly hadn’t caught the imagination of the Silverstone race-goers.
Still, they were free so we got stuck in. I haven’t liked mint chocolate chip ice cream since.
We walked through Swindon late at night and joined a line of people hitching at the slip road on to the M4.
It took us the rest of a long, cold night to get home again but we were fully fortified by sickly ice cream and had spent a grand total of about £1.50 each on the adventure.
The article first appeared in the Herald Express on 06.02.2019
THE Six Nations rugby tournament begins this weekend. Hope springs eternal.
I shall, of course, be cheering for Wales, as always, because my dad was a proud Welshman and I grew up steeped in the folklore and legend of the men who played in red and white.
Dad was from Gorseinon, which is the hometown of the dashing Welsh full back Leigh Halfpenny, who is currently concussed but may yet have a decisive part to play at some later stage in this year’s tournament.
I have friends who are England fans through and through, but the beauty of the Six Nations is that the game is the thing. If your team wins, so much the better. If not, there is still plenty to enjoy, even if some of the games are on ITV.
On Saturday afternoons in the Sixties and Seventies when the then-Five Nations were playing, dad and his pals would gather at our house or one of theirs to watch matches played on lumpy, clinging, muddy pitches in black and white. By half time the mud had done its work and you couldn’t tell one team from the other.
The sons and daughters were all welcome to watch, and I don’t recall any swearing, however badly things were going for the teams the various pals supported. There were two Welshmen, an Englishman and a Scotsman, if I remember rightly. If only there had been an Irishman, we would have a had a ready-made joke to build a punchline onto.
There was no effing and jeffing, but the rooms were smoky and there were cans of Long Life beer, which in the days before ring-pulls had to be opened with sharp, pointed implements. I had learned by a very early age that you had to puncture both sides, so that you could drink from one without excessive foaming spoiling your enjoyment. Long Life was made by Ind Coope and came only in cans. It was probably horrible, but for us an illicit swig from an unattended can was like nectar.
During those long afternoons, the games would ebb and flow noisily in monochrome. The armchair coaches would pick apart the tactics and declaim long and loud on how scrummaging wasn’t what it used to be, and how nobody really knew how to drop-kick any more. As for the standard of line-out play, well….
But all the pals knew their rugby and would occasionally set off for a road trip to the Arms Park or Murrayfield to see a game in the flesh. They all seemed to have battered estate cars that smelled of wet dogs and were held together with string, bungees and goodwill. Small people were not invited on those epic expeditions.
I think dad had high hopes that I would turn out to be the next Barry John, but my school rugby career in the maroon and white of Churston was brief and undistinguished. I played as a prop forward and scored one try – just the one – which I could still describe for you in absolute detail if you really wanted me to.
It is decades since I last touched a rugby ball. Where we play our walking football at Paignton Academy there is often a high-velocity game of touch rugby on the pitch beside us. When our round ball strays on to their pitch, the rugby players confidently kick it back for us. When theirs comes on to ours we tend to gather around it and eye it suspiciously, poking it with our toes and marvelling at its ovoid strangeness. No-one dares to kick or throw it back because you never quite know what might happen. We tend to pick it up and carry it back to them.
This article first appeared in the Herald Express on 30.01.2019
BIG tur, little tur, big tur, little tur – you may have heard me intoning that mantra throughout last week.
There’s plenty of snur on the slurps, with more falling all the time. Hey hur, let’s gur!
Ruka is a scant thirty miles from the Russian border. From the top of the ski slopes you can see it, and you can ride out on a skidoo until you get to the line in the snur where Finland ends and Russia begins.
This was our second visit to the Finnish ski resort, a small and immensely welcoming village just 25 minutes by coach from the tiny aerodrome at Kuusamo, where the handful of charter flights bringing tourists are pretty much the only traffic.
At passport control they chat to you about your holiday plans and smile, instead of glowering out from their secure booths.
Ruka is growing, but while in a year or two it will be bigger and busier, there isn’t much prospect of it losing its charm.
When the weather warms up from the current minus 20, the roofs will go on a new apartment block beside the lake and Ruka will be ready to welcome even more people.
But the welcome hasn’t changed at Roy’s or at Koti Pizza or the Ski Bistro, where skiers in huge plastic boots clump in and out on the stone floors in search of sugary doughnuts and mugs of hot chocolate to accompany their tall tales of derring-do.
“Did you SEE that jump I just did half way down Red 12?”
Ruka is great, and if you have half a mind to try a Finnish skiing holiday, you should definitely give Ruka a go.
This year we decided to have lessons, in an effort to fine-tune the skills we have taught ourselves over the past few years.
Our instructor was a chap called Ashley, who was clearly not a Finn but had an accent we couldn’t place.
He gave us priceless hints about pushing down with the big tur on one foot and the little tur on the other.
This would help the edges of our skis cut into the snur as we made our way gracefully down the slurps.
My feet, it turned out, needed to be clurser together.
The accent beat us all, and Ashley had to divulge in the end that he was a native of Canberra, the proud capital of Australia.
He saves all his holidays for an annual trip to Finland, where he teaches buffoons like me to get down the mountain without hurting themselves.
My big tur routine helped me snowplough a little less, and by the end of the week I was almost proficient at parallel turns.
On the final day we stood at the top of the longest and steepest red slope in the resort – Red Ten, also known as Pessari.
In skiing, you start at green slopes, which are barely inclines at all, then move on to blue, then red and then maybe one day black, which is basically like throwing yourself down that hill at the back of Pimlico, on snow, on skis, with no practical means of stopping.
At the bottom of Red Ten is a bar called Monomesta.
Everyone says you should go there, because it sells delicious golden beer and baskets full of crispy chips drenched in spices and sauces.
All the cool kids go there to see and be seen in their best new kit, but there is no way of getting there without having first hurled yourself fearlessly down Red Ten.
Only Red Ten skiers get to dip their chips at Monomesta.
Thanks to the advice of the patient Australian I made it to the bottom in one piece.
I drank a beer and ate chips, posing in my budget salopettes as if I was the new Franz Klammer.
I’ll be ready for all eventualities if Paignton ends up getting any snur this winter.
HOW do you rebuke a cat? How do you deliver an almighty rollocking when the creature sitting in front of you thoroughly deserves one?
If you rebuke a dog for some misdemeanour, he knows. Your cat, on the other hand, almost certainly understands every word but chooses not to respond.
Your dog picks up on your body language and the tone of your voice. He sees your gestures and your furrowed brow and reacts accordingly, maybe looking a little contrite and heading off to his bed to ride out the storm and emerge a little later when you are a little better disposed towards him, possibly for some treats or a tickle behind the ears to show that you’re friends again.
Your cat, however, will blink his great green-ish yellow eyes, make a kind of ‘Brrrrp’ sound and walk away with his tail in the air like a great question mark, querying your authority and your right to raise your voice at him. Who are you, after all, to question the king of the domestic beasts?
I was livid with Ron the tomcat when I got home from work the other day to find the kitchen floor carpeted in grey feathers.
There were so many feathers there that I thought he must have caught and killed an ostrich. Maybe two ostriches. I almost rang the zoo to see if they were missing any.
Whatever kind of bird it was, there was a kind of sticky black deposit on the floor which had presumably been inside it until it encountered Ron. There was also a pool of blood. And feathers – so many feathers.
I was raging at Ron, who is a well-fed cat with an extensive selection of gourmet snacks to choose from and has no need to go out and kill things to supplement his diet.
“It’s not as if you’re hungry, is it?” I fumed, as he sat on his bed calmly washing himself and looking anything but guilty.
“Why do you have to go out and murder things? You live in a house with vegetarians, you horrible creature. And look at the mess! I suppose you expect me to clear this up for you?”
I remonstrated with him at length, but there was no point in reasoning with him.
I realised then that I was standing in the kitchen with the light on, clearly visible through the window, arms outstretched and leaning towards the blinking, tail-swishing, not-in-the-slightest-bit-remorseful cat, shouting at him. The neighbours must have thought it looked hilarious.
Ron, completely oblivious, simply yawned, showing off his magnificent teeth, then fixed me with what can only be described as a baleful glare. A little later, as I scrubbed at the floor with an antiseptic wipe and wished the sticky black substance was still safely inside the bird instead of being stuck fast to my laminate flooring, I tried to tell him off again.
He finished washing his gentleman’s area, turned tail and left the room.
He is the scourge of feathered and small furry creatures in the banks and hedgerows where we live. He is a showman, racing up trees and vaulting garden walls just because he can, to show anyone passing by what a splendid specimen of domestic feline athleticism he is. But short of imprisoning him in the house, how can I convince him to live and let live when it comes to the little creatures? I can see myself having many more long and loud conversations in the kitchen with him, much to the amusement of the neighbours.
DARTS will never be quite the same again. Remember the last time you played darts? I’ll bet it was nothing like the way they play darts these days in uber-trendy corners of London.
We went to the new Flight Club just around the corner from Victoria Station for an evening of what they now call ‘social darts’.
Bright and exuberant young things from the city gather there to throw their arrows, but not quite the way you remember. These darts players clutch cocktails and pitchers. The young men in check shirts sport bushy beards but wear no socks.
Flight Club is a new thing, and there are Flight Clubs in Shoreditch, Bloomsbury and Victoria, in Manchester and in Chicago.
They are lavishly decorated spaces with different ‘themes’ in different areas. Our oche was in the Toy Room, where chintzy pottery figures lined the walls and stuffed toy animals hung from the ceiling. A thoroughly agreeable soundtrack of funk and soul thumped out from the speakers.
To play at Flight Club, you book a darts board area for a certain number of people at a certain time, just like in a bowling alley, and an army of ever-cheerful young staff wait on you constantly, bringing food and drink to your area whenever you press a little button and command it.
The computer randomly splits you into pairings and you play various darts-related games over your 90 minutes – a conventional shoot-out down from 180 rather than the more time-consuming and troublesome 501, a game of ‘Killer’, ‘Shanghai’, ‘Snakes and Ladders’ or other clever concoctions.
At the end of the 90 minutes a winner emerges, in our case a jubilant Mrs H, who topped the leaderboard, had her picture taken with it and has talked of little else since. I was woefully far down the rankings, and frankly don’t want to talk about that at all.
All around us, hundreds of young players in workplace or family groups played loud and long into the night in the Toy Room, the Big Dipper or the Shooting Gallery, quaffing craft beer and nibbling artisan pizza as the screens alongside their dart boards kept the scores and showed video replays of their finest moments. The videos arrive in your inbox by email the next morning so you can share them on social media.
I sound sniffy, but I don’t mean to. Traditional pubs with dartboards are to be treasured, but you don’t find enough of them. Few landlords can afford the room for darts when they can squeeze in an extra table for carvery, and who can blame them? And who wants an errant arrow penetrating the crust of their Yorkshire Pudding as they sit down to enjoy a pleasant pub lunch?
The sport of darts is thriving at the top level, and there is even talk of having it included in the Olympics. Why not? Is it so different from shooting?
Flight Club keeps the sport of darts alive in surroundings where you just wouldn’t expect to find it, and for that reason it has to be a good thing. Maybe the next Michael Van Gerwen or Robbie Cross will come through from a Flight Club, having been inspired to play the game by an evening of craft beer and artisan pizza in Shoreditch. Wouldn’t that be a wonderment?
Flim-Flam and Ballyhoo 