Another Opportunity to Demonstrate my Northern Credentials

You couldn't have timed it better: just when I'd gone misty eyed writing about the corner shop and collecting me mam's Hovis, Lisa pointed out the appropriateness of the music from the old Hovis adds. The one where a young flat cap wearing bread boy pushes his sit-up-and-beg bike up the steeply cobbled street to the tune of the Largo from Dvorak's New World Symphony. It couldn't be less Northern though if it tried - Dvorak's symphony was about the New World of the USA, rather than the North of England; and the steeply cobbled street they used in the advert was in Devon.

Anyway, with the warm strains of brass band music drifting across my imagination, we popped across to Blackpool to hear our Tom play in the North Western heats of the National Brass Band Championships. I have written about this event and its idiosyncrasies before so was a bit stuck for what to say, until this happened.

We have a new camera at work and it is necessary for me - no I consider my solemn duty - to borrow, I mean practice with it whenever the opportunity presents itself. So Sunday found me inside the Winter Gardens with our new Canon DS400. I had already spotted that flash photography was prohibited; nor, for similar reasons, was I intent on taking photographs when it would distract the players. I took a few pictures of the bizarre interior of the Spanish Ballroom - replete with its model hillside village to give the impression, I presume, of being in some sort of Spanish valley.

Poised to photograph Greenfield band as they came into the auditorium I shot a couple of tests to check the light but was approached by a timid mousey woman who, judging by her rosette, was an organiser. She pointed out that photography was prohibited; I pointed out that flash photography was prohibited which meant that I was OK. She withdrew.

Moments later I was tapped on the shoulder by a similarly rosetted man with a very stern beard. Now I, as you know, like a beard, but this one bristled with barely restrained indignation. We had a brisk exchange of views about what the programme stated about the restrictions on photography; but he had the rosette of authority and the humour of a traffic cop who, despite your pleas of mitigation reaches unfeelingly for his ticket book: he went immediately for the ultimate sanction.

"If you do not refrain from your photography I will have to ask you to leave the auditorium."

He drew out the word 'leave' with a dramatic flourish, until it was as long as his 'auditorium'. The devil on my shoulder confirmed with me that I really ought to call his bluff and refuse to budge. But just as I was on the verge of saying "well you had better get some help then..." I felt words like rivets drill into the back of my head from a seat half way down the hall:

"DON'T - YOU - DARE" they said, so I skulked muttering back to my seat, but not without my parting shot:

"Your type are the reason that brass bands are a minority interest" I said; and I meant it to sting.

But I had the last laugh in any case just look at the photos of the Winter Gardens I took without him knowing. Ha! (oh, and a few I took at stormy lunchtime too)



It is no wonder that many bands struggle to keep players interested when the people who maintain the brass bureaucracy are as stuffy as that silly sod. Thank goodness that one of the less healthy sides of brass banding persists in many bands to tempt the young to stay for the social life.


Thank goodness for beer - the saviour of banding!

A Game for the Masses

I have mentioned before that I don't like football (soccer); but it is in my genes non the less. I am from a family of football season ticket holders; a family of amateur players - from three generations - and part time pundits; in short I am the black sheep. So I was surprised when, armed with work's new Canon EOS D400 taking a lunchtime stroll around Manchester United's home at Old Trafford, I understood what was going on.

For what was going on was in many ways a pilgrimage. The forecourt of the towering stadium was far fuller than usual (and it is usually full of tourists) but there was a notable difference. Jokes about Manchester United fans aside, there were far more Manchester people there. As we drew closer we could see there were knots of people gathered round what have become commonplace ways of marking mass sorrow: shrines of flowers. These shrines though were accompanied by football scarves tied to barriers, more usually used to control crowds on match day, scarves more often seen denoting tribal difference but now tied side by side to mark a loss fifty years ago. People were remembering the Munich air disaster that ripped the heart out of the young team known as the Busby Babes.

At one end stood an older man who looked like he had just stepped off those Busby era terraces fifty years ago: flat cap, tab dangling smoking from his lips, gaberdine rain coat. As he silently stood and mourned I resisted the cynical voice that cried out "For goodness sake it's only a game" and I wondered, as I reflected on Premiership's attempts to take football even further from people like him, by holding UK matches overseas, I wondered whether he was mourning the loss of football too.

I once met a man who played for Manchester United in the 1920s. His professional football career brought little in the way of financial reward - his cottage opposite Dobcross Band Club was earned by his factory work after leaving the game. Yet his view was that the honest slog of a lump of leather up a muddy pitch meant far more to fans then than the sanitised game that is presented now. If he were here this week I think he too would shed a tear for it seems that, if Premiership get their way what was once our national game, a game that drew all people together across the country (except me of course) will be little more than a Cirque De Soleil with balls: the sort of place you go once or twice in a lifetime to watch the expert skills of professional acrobats, rather than the sort of thing that inspires the sort of deep loyalty that brought that older man to reflect on the events of fifty years ago.

If I stroll down there in a week or so the flowers will be gone and the place will be back to normal: populated by hoards of tourists with little affiliation to the city, nor to the events that rocked my father's generation of football fans. Does it explain then, why I am more willing to stand and watch a group of local men scrabble over a ball on a Saturday afternoon at Springhead FC than I am willing to give the time of day to the football talked about at work on a Monday?

P.S. The photographs above weren't mine. The statue is Sir Matt Busby stood proudly surveying the forecourt of Old Trafford. Regular readers will guess who took them!