Live Sport

Now I appreciate that this isn't a very manly thing to say, but live sport?  What's all that about?

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing sport - on the whole I'm rubbish, but I enjoy it.  Watching sport (well some sports) on the television is normally a satisfying way of wasting an hour or so, but sport, live, in a stadium - nope, just don't get it.

In the last couple of weeks I've been to both athletics and rugby and in both instances I've just come out a bit confused. If you're near enough to see anything up close, then you can't see what's happening anywhere else so have no real idea what's going on. If you're far enough away to see the entire event, then you're probably so far away that you may as well be looking at a formicary.

Don't get it.

It's almost like the sport is incidental and really the event is just an excuse to get drunk and holler noise at strangers as part of a mindless herd.  Which is nothing like a live music gig...

A Play of Two Halves

How good is the first half of Timon of Athens?  Answer: Really good. It's not like any other Shakespeare I've seen: often when you see Shakespeare in a contemporary setting it still feels very Elizabethan; this didn't, this felt like a contemporary play that the author had decided to put into blank verse. Great story, great characters, great acting - by the time the interval I couldn't understand why it's not really put on.

How bad is the second half of Timon of Athens? Answer: Pretty bad. Plot is dispensed with in favour of a series of the free-form jazz ramblings of an ADHD child. Nothing seemed in anyway credible - in a contemporary setting or anywhere.  By the time the end (if you can call it that) came round my eyes were sagging and I'd stopped caring.

Cork It

Ever since someone told me that Cork is "sort of like Venice" I've been curious to go there.  I assumed that it would be all canals and boats and hats and stuff.  I hadn't realised that the main similarity would be that there's a couple of shops selling over-priced pizza.

Still the town was nice enough, even if it wasn't all that Venetian.  The Victorian prison was pretty impressive and everybody loves a butter museum, right?

Good Things and Bad Things

Good thing #1.  Julius Caesar at Noel Coward Theatre and set in an unnamed African state was about the most accessible Shakespeare I've seen.

Good thing #2.  I've been to two Kate Tempest things in the last couple of weeks - both her book launch and her solo, erm, hiphopera at the BAC.  She's a talented mammal, that Tempest girl. I'd not been to the BAC before, what a great building.  It made me want to open an art centre in England's Newest City (TM) but I fear that it would be about as unsustainable as anything can get.

Bad thing #1. My bike got stolen.  Rubbish. I hadn't really realised how reliant on it I'd become.  I'd forgotten how annoying short haul driving is, and how long walking anywhere takes.

Bad thing #2.  Linked quite closely to Bad thing #1.  The act of buying a bike from Halfords was probably more frustrating than the act of having my bike stolen. Impressively incompetent. I'd heartily recommend not shopping there ever.

There's been other good things and bad things over the last couple of weeks, but the bad things are pretty boring to start with and the good things have been written about so much that they're teetering on the yawnsome precipice so could do without any nudging from me.

Racist Hogroast

It's all kicking off in Chelmsford City today.  I'd assumed that the high police presence was all about VFest but it turns out there's a riot goin' on. For those of you who aren't down with da goss' of da 'Ford, they're planning to build a shiny new mosque on a rundown industrial estate in the, ahem, city centre (still can't take myself seriously saying that). The EDL have taken issue with this and are organising some kind of angry, semi-evolved, anti-cosmopolitanism march thing (for the record the new mosque is being built as part of a complex with a Waitrose, which will really shake-up Chelmsford's 96% white-British demographic, the EDL must be quaking). United Chelmsford (not a football team) have organised a counter march.  So far, with the backdrop of V weekend, sounds like the most interesting thing to happen in Chelmsford since, erm, 1381?

What got my goat (and I know I shouldn't blog when I'm irked as it comes out as a hotchpotch of poorly expressed and easily misconstrued bobbins), was I got handed a 'free hogroast' flier by someone trying to get me to go to a nearby church. Now, maybe it was a coincidence and maybe I'm reading too much into it but part of me thinks that giving out pig products (on a day when even the farmers' market wasn't selling pork) looks a bit like you're trying to court the far right rather than those people that might be supporting a mosque. WWJD?

Right, rant over, in other news i went to Hot Tub Cinema last night.  Odd that sitting in a hot tub with six strangers on a roof in Hackney gets relegated to the 'in other news' bit.  And i didn't even mention that I saw Richard III the other day - that Rylance fellow, he can act.

...To The Imitation Zone

Standon Calling is probably my favourite festival. Don't get me wrong, V and Reading serve a purpose and I've had a couple of great Glastonburys but I just think I've grown out of big festivals.  Even Bestival, the first time I went it was all fun and excitement; the last time I went it took me over twelve hours to get there which just takes the shine off it a little bit.

Standon Calling though. It's great. Showers. Good toilets. The kind of bands I want to see. Good food. Few queues. Limited idiots. And it's only an hour's drive away. Best Fest.  No messin. 

That said the idiot quotient was obviously higher than I thought as ****** **** were filming there. Now I don't know if you've seen ****** **** but it's about as bad as it's possible to make television (which is why it's not getting a mention). It's a half-hour TOWIE-themed Blackberry commercial and every bit as bad as that sounds. I feel that my whole Standon experience has been tainted. I'd heard through the Essex grapevine that we were on it, so I turned my brain off and steeled my eyes for punishment. 

The juxtaposition was almost worth the tedium. One of my mates was shown wearing a full home-made duck costume, quickly followed by someone in a shop-bought Indian headdress saying 'do you think we're we're the only ones that have made an effort with fancy dress'. The correct answer was 'No, fake girl, other people have made more effort than we have.  We're just wearing what the ****** **** stylist put us in.'

Incidentally someone there asked if I'd made my costume. I was wearing a limp cardboard horse.  I thought it was fairly obvious that I had, but it did make me wonder whether there is a market for slightly rubbish but high effort fancy dress. #possiblecareeropportunity

London 2012

London, I don't know how to say it, but I think we need some time apart.  I've tried to get excited about this sport's day thing you've been banging on about but i just don't really get it.  It's not you, it's me, I appreciate that, but you only seem to be interested in one thing; what with your hoops draped all over everywhere and your streets brimming with high-stoppability idiots.

I think it could still work.  I just think we'll get on a lot better if we have a break for a couple of weeks.  Are you cool with that?  Grand. See you in September.

__________

In other news I went to the ballet again.  Play Without Words.  That's supposed to be good, right.  Everyone raves about it.  Didn't get it.  Not at all. Found it boring and I didn't really understand what was going on.  A series of technically adept set pieces, I can see that.  But not sure i'd call it a 'play' more like a particularly tepid episode of EastEnders where everyone does everything really slowly. Guess I'm not as culture as I think I am.

I went to the Tanks, too.  That's the new bit of Tate Modern.  Dead good bit of artspace.  Liked it a lot.  Not certain about the art that's in it at the moment - but we've established that I know nothing about culture so it's probably great.