Last post of the year

I'd intended the round-up of books I've read in the last twelve months to be my final post for 2017, but reviews of the year in beer by fellow bloggers at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, Pub Curmudgeon, and even my local CAMRA chairman JC, firing up his blog again for a welcome return after a long absence, have tempted me to come up with my own personal top ten.

Best Cask Beer

I was quite surprised looking at my scores on Beerscoring to see that of the four beers I've awarded a 4 to this year (I don't think I've ever awarded the top mark of 5, no doubt reserving it for a future perfect pint) three were golden ales, two were brewed in Yorkshire and the same number were drunk in a Wetherspoons pub (Leeds Yorkshire Gold in their branch at that city's railway station after watching Salford rugby league club get thrashed by the hometown 13 at Headingley, Roosters Highway Fifty-One at the Gateway, East Didsbury, and Salopian Oracle at the Salopian Bar in Shrewsbury), the only traditional, copper-coloured bitter being Fool Hardy's Rash Dash at the Hope Inn, Stockport.

Best Keg Beer

Sam Smith's Extra Stout at the Boars Head, Stockport, is the only keg beer I've drunk in a pub which also serves cask, apart from a Guinness in the chain dining pub where I watched the Manchester derby in April, and where the handpump for Sharp's Doom Bar at the end of the bar looked a bit lonely and forgotten.

Best Bottled/Canned Beer

Fuller's 1845 is still my go-to bottled beer for home drinking and I've got a few conditioning for Christmas now. I also tried, and enjoyed, the canned range from Macclesfield's RedWillow brewery, especially Smokeless, which I blogged about here.

Overall Best Beer

1845

Best Pub

The Magnet, Stockport, for beer range and quality, closely followed (as in my case it often is, being just up Wellington Road North) by the Hope Inn, Stockport's premier brewpub. For their pub atmosphere and character(s), the Boars Head in Stockport and the Unicorn in Manchester city centre also deserve a mention (the latter being a rare outpost hereabouts for Draught Bass).

Best Beer Festival

CAMRA's January festival at the former Manchester Central Station stands out for beer range and quality. I also enjoyed my trip to the SPBW's Woodfest at the Junction Inn, Castleford, in July.

Best Beer Book

Has to be Boak and Bailey's 20th Century Pub, as comprehensive an account  of the institution's history in the last hundred years as anyone could ask for, and one that will surely become a standard reference work of the future, much like the early 70's writings of Christopher Hutt, Richard Boston and Frank Baillie on the subject are now.

Best Beer Blog

I still check out Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, Paul Bailey, Red Nev and Pub Curmudgeon most days, but the blog I've started following and occasionally commenting on in 2017 is Retired Martin, in which the blogger of that name details his GBG-ticking odyssey around the country.

Best Beer Twitter

Cooking Lager for his tongue in cheek(?) quips and irreverent bursting of the "craft beer" bubble.

Best Beer Trip

Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's day out in Ludlow. Some of the party even saw Nigella filming in a butcher's shop there!

Books of the Year

As 2017 nears its end, here are the books I've read in the last twelve months.


The Trumpet-Major/The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

I continued my attempt to read everything written by Thomas Hardy into the New Year with these two shortish novels, one set around a mill during the Napoleonic Wars and the other a tale of unrequited and doomed love amongst agricultural labourers and cider makers in his almost imaginary county of Wessex.

The Evenings by Gerard Reve

A claustrophobic and almost plotless novel set amongst the foggy canals and tram lines of postwar Amsterdam on the last ten evenings of 1946 which I read after seeing this review of it, after it had just been published in English, and especially the classic line of its main character, the young office clerk Frits, when a friend asks him what he does at work all day: "I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again."

This Sporting Life by David Storey

Although I'd watched the film based on this novel, I didn't get round to reading it until the death in March of the author who, like the central character Frank Machin, was a one-time rugby league player from a West Yorkshire mining background.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

I blogged about reading this socialist classic, set amongst the housepainters and builders of early twentieth century Hastings, here.

High Rise by J.G. Ballard

I read this novel, set in a dystopian high-rise block of flats of the future, after seeing it mentioned in an article about the tragedy at Grenfell Tower.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Another dystopian novel which takes place in the near future, this time in a totalitarian and almost sterile former United States now called Gilead, which I read after watching a Channel 4 adaptation with Elisabeth Moss playing the title character Offred.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

The novel of the "Beat Generation", with Kerouac's alter ego Sal Paradise criss-crossing late forties America on roadtrips which take in visits to literary figures and to jazz clubs on the West Coast and in New York and New Orleans, which I finally got round to reading this year.

A Burnt-Out Case/The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Another author whose novels I'm working my way through, these two are both set in West Africa where he spent the war engaged in military intelligence, the first, which could be described as post-Catholic (although Greene later returned to the faith he had converted to as a young man), set in a leper colony in the Congo run by European missionary priests, and the other a more religiously orthdox account of the moral and physical decline, and eventual suicide, of an adulterous British colonial policeman overseeing a wartime Atlantic port in Sierra Leone.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The first novel I've read by any of the Brontë sisters, set upon the wild moors around their childhood vicarage home in West Yorkshire, this tale of the love between Cathy and the mysterious Heathcliff has rightly been described as almost vampiric.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

I read this novel about a Newark-based glove manufacturer after seeing the film version starring Ewan McGregor and watching the BBC Four series The Vietnam War, the movement against which within the United States is key to the plot.

Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Kerome

A sequel to his more famous Three Men On A Boat, and featuring the same trio of lower middle-class characters, this is another light comic novel, this time about a cycling tour through Germany before the First World War.

Coronation Street capers

I've been watching re-runs of Coronation Street from 1986 on ITV3 for the last week or so, episodes which I probably watched when they were originally broadcast.

The first thing to say about them is that the show was far funnier then, with many more comic characters and storylines than there seems to be now (I gave up watching it regularly a few years back, partly for that reason) rather than the Eastenders-style grimness which seems to have crept in since, with lots of sparkling repartee between brassy Rovers Return landlady Bet Lynch and the conniving showbusiness agent (and her future husband) Alec Gilroy, the newsagent's shop-running duo of Rita and Mavis (and her hapless fiance Derek) and the malapropisms and wall-adorning "muriel" of pub cleaner Hilda Ogden. The main difference there is the number of boxed keg beer taps on the bar - something you don't see much now outside of Sam Smith's pubs - rather than the more traditional handpumps which have since replaced them.

The main reason for the drop in quality is no doubt the increase of episodes from two to six a week, requiring the scriptwriters to stretch out storylines and make them more melodramatic.

That problem funnily enough is one which the only soap I now watch regularly, the Australian Neighbours, seems to have overcome, despite being broadcast daily, mostly maintaining quality and the fine balance between comedy and drama.

Suds flow in Ludlow

The poet laureate John Betjeman once described Ludlow as "probably the loveliest town in England". I'm not sure if he got to any of its pubs though, some of which are also right up there in the picturesqueness stakes.

I've been to Shropshire a few times before, but until yesterday hadn't been south of Shrewsbury, a similary timber-buildinged and narrow-streeted market town and the principal one in what must be amongst the emptiest counties in England.

The purpose of the trip was for my local CAMRA branch to present the silver award from Stockport Beer Festival to Ludlow Brewery for their Black Knight stout. En route there on the train, we passed both the trackside Salopian Brewery, probably the county's best-known brewer, and New Meadow, the rather identikit new home of Shrewsbury Town Football Club.

Ludlow Brewery operates out of a modernised ex-goods shed right next to the railway station, a handy location which meant that when we arrived at not long after noon the split-level structure was already filling up with several large parties. Certificate presented and a few pints of their beers and very toothsome pork pies and Scotch eggs dispensed with, we set out to explore some more of the town's other pubs .

I was quite surprised at how steep the hill we climbed up to the town centre was, although it was  worth the effort as we passed numeous mediaeval buildings, and in terms of size Ludlow is very walkable. The pubs there were also hearteningly full for a Saturday afternoon, partly because of the coach parties which had travelled to the town for a Christmas market at the castle.

Apart from the Ludlow brewery tap, the town has just one other Good Beer Guide entry, The Queens, which we visited as well as the courtyarded Feathers and Rose and Crown, the bottle shop-cum-bar Artisan Ales, the more modern but still atmospheric Church Inn, and finally the front parlour-style and single beer-dispensing Dog Hangs Well for a last pint before boarding the train for the return journey north, one enlivened at Shrewsbury by some raucous but chatty Bradford City fans celebrating their 1-0 win over the town's table-topping League One side.

Labour in vain

BBC Two last night showed a documentary filmed throughout the campaign for June's General Election, Labour: The Summer That Changed Everything, which followed four anti-Corbyn Labour MP's who hoped that a Tory landslide and a heavy defeat for their own party might just finish off a Leader whom they themselves had spectacularly failed to oust with an, at times farcical, parliamentary coup the summer before, ultimately fronted by the comically inept and now almost forgotten figure of Owen Smith.

The highlight of the programme for me was the moment when the exit poll was announced as voting ended at ten o'clock on polling day, showing that Labour had actually gained thirty seats, the Tories had lost their slim House of Commons majority and their hopes of Corbyn resigning had just evaporated, with Stephen Kinnock, next to his father, the failed ex-Labour Leader and now Baron of Bedwelty, Neil in a social club in South Wales and Lucy Powell amongst besuited young activists in the City Arms, long a meeting place for Manchester councillors, being just round the corner from the Town Hall, both attempting to suppress their obvious disappointment as their hopes for a swift return to what they still no doubt see as normal politics were finally dashed by the electorate.

The programme then skipped forward to the Labour Party conference in Brighton a few months later, with the four looking rather forlorn and friendless amidst the, admittedly a bit gushingly admiring, youthful Corbyn fan club. Having twice failed to persuade the membership to elect one of their own as Leader in successive years, you felt that deep down their thoughts were pretty much identical to those which Bertolt Brecht famously assigned to the Stalinist dictators of East Germany in 1953 after the Berlin building workers' strike sparked an uprising against their rule: "Would it not be easier.../To dissolve the people/And elect another?"

The most bizarre Labour Party-related TV moment of the night had already occurred earlier in the evening, when one-time Cabinet minister and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls brought the ex-Communications Workers Union General Secretary Billy Hayes onto BBC One's Would I Lie To You?, not a programme I normally watch, but which I happened to catch five minutes of while flicking through the channels, and introduced him as his former partner in a Lionel Richie/Diana Ross karaoke tribute act.

How the mighty are fallen

On Saturday afternoon, an unfortunate incident involving Salford City's goalkeeper briefly focussed the otherwise Premier League-engaged attention of TV studio pundits and Twitter upon a hitherto unregarded Horsfall Stadium, home to National League North side Bradford Park Avenue.

Bradford Park Avenue are one of the ghosts of non-League football, former League clubs who have slowly drifted downwards to that level and, as with the also resurrected Accrington Stanley, their glory days, such as they were, are a long way back, in the early twentieth century.

Their descent isn't quite so dramatic though as that of the European Cup, League title and FA Cup winners who have subsequently found themselves playing in the lower divisions (Nottingham Forest, Manchester City, Blackburn Rovers, Coventry City, Wigan Athletic, Portsmouth, Leeds United, and a few more I've probably missed too). So who, I thought, has fallen furthest down football's League pyramid?

The answer it seems, at least according to this article last year, is my own hometown team Stockport County who top the table - not a phrase you associate with the Edgeley Park outfit - with an impressive drop of 99 places, although they've no doubt fallen even further since...

A voice in the wilderness

As other bloggers set out across the country to tick off new entries in the 2018 Good Beer Guide, a look at the map indicates, yet again, a complete lack of entries for my area on the Stockport/South Manchester border, and rightly so given the absence of any decent pubs serving good beer here.

A look at earlier editions of the GBG, specifically the ones from 1983 and 1990, reveals that the same wilderness has existed for at least thirty-five years, and although some "beer deserts" are easily explicable - the one on the other side of town, in the part of North Manchester beyond the extension of the Northern Quarter into now trendy Ancoats and across into East Manchester, is the result of deindustrialisation in the 70's and 80's and the subsequent demolition, conversion to other uses or switch to keg-only dipense of wet-led boozers there and the closure of some of the breweries which once supplied them (notably Wilsons, which shut in the mid-80's, and Boddingtons whose iconic Strangeways Brewery tower came down a decade ago) - the one here is less so as similar outer suburbs around it are not equally bereft of decent pubs to drink in, whether newish micropubs or ones tied to local family brewers.

The nearest GBG pubs to me are all two to three miles away, which realistically means a shortish bus or train journey, and a specific reason to go there, maybe once a week, rather than casually dropping into them more regularly for a pint or two as I would if they were within half a mile or so.

The extremes on the spectrum of a drought to a surefeit of GBG entries are, I would guess, the central belt of Scotland, where lager-drinking largely took over from the 60's onwards (the whole country only takes up a slimmish section at the back of the GBG), and the Black Country, where you can easily visit half a dozen in an afternoon or evening, reflecting the tradition of brewpubs which never quite ended there as it did in other parts of England.

My immediate drinking options are an estate pub and members' only social club, both keg-only, and dining pubs with zero atmosphere and variable, to say the least, beer quality, so my best bet for anywhere half-decent to drink locally in the near future is probably if someone converts one of the several empty shop units hereabouts into a micropub.

Salford not for sale

I wasn't particularly surprised the other day when Marwan Koukash, owner of Salford rugby league club, announced that he was relinquishing control and handing it over to a supporters' trust. I'd been expecting something along those lines at the end of a season in which, despite the money he's put into the team and the highish league position that they achieved, attendances at matches have continued to fall.

When Salford moved to their new ground in Barton-on-Irwell from their longtime home at the Willows in Weaste in 2012, attendances were about 5,000. The stated aim of the move was to at least double that; instead, they are now around half, often bolstered by away rather than home fans supporting their team, and even some season ticket holders no longer attend as many matches as before.

Salford had apparently been told by the Rugby Football League that the Willows was no longer a fit ground for the twenty-first century, hence the move to Barton and a new 12,000-capacity stadium there, jointly owned by Salford City Council and Peel Holdings, owners of the nearby Trafford Centre shopping mall.

A modern ground, even one that incorporated standing areas and offered cheap tickets, was never going to have either the atmosphere or historical associations of the Willows, where Salford had played since 1901, but there have been many other problems with the site too.

I remember at the last match at the Willows, while in the queue for the turnstiles, some fans complaining that in moving to Barton the club was leaving the traditional (i.e. pre-1974) boundaries of Salford, and although that might be a minority opinion there's definitely a feeling that a lot of fans who walked to the ground from the club's Weaste and Pendleton heartlands in the past now no longer bother.

Public transport isn't great to the new ground - the nearest train stations and tram stops are at least a mile away - the proposed tram line to Port Salford, the freight terminal on the Ship Canal also owned by Peel Holdings, which will include a stop nearby, isn't scheduled to open for another four years, and the long access road to the ground means that, despite there being a large, free car park outside, the time it takes to leave it at the end of matches has led many fans to give up using it and parking in the Peel Green housing estate opposite instead.

There has been some talk of Salford not taking enough advantage of their potential fanbase in the neighbouring city of Manchester, and while the idea of that city's name being incorporated into the club's has rightly been rejected, there is some truth to it, especially with their location miles out from the centre in Barton not helping with that.

If the funds could be found, the ideal solution would be to build a ground in the part of Salford that adjoins Manchester city centre, with its numerous transport hubs, but I suspect that they can't, what with the financial support Koukash has given about to be withdrawn and the money from the naming rights to the ground going to Sale Sharks rugby union club, Salford's co-tenants at Barton.

Rugby league has always been dependent on local businessmen becoming owners and directors of its clubs, whether for the prestige or connections that gave them, much like football clubs up until the last quarter of a century in which they have either become PLC's or been transferred to offshore trusts in exotic tax havens controlled by American or Middle and Far Eastern billionaires.

It's hard to see then how, without an alternate source of outside income, a supporters trust will work at Salford, the first board of which is apparently going to be appointed by the outgoing owner. It seems that rather than generously gifting the club to its fans, he is instead walking away from it, perhaps understandably given the circumstances, and taking with him the money which he is no longer willing to put into its continued maintenance.

Wythenshawe between the wars

I've been reading 20th Century Pub this past week, a new book from beer bloggers Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey which charts the ups and downs of that quintessentially British institution across the last hundred years or so, and also, by way of acknowledgement, namechecks fellow bloggers and local CAMRA faces Pub Curmudgeon and Tandleman.

There are quite a few references to Manchester pubs. I was particularly interested in the section about how none of the six pubs built between the wars in Wythenshawe, the so-called garden suburb constructed by the city at its southern edge from the late twenties to early fifties and once apparently the biggest public housing estate in Europe, still exist as pubs, and indeed, according to the website they cite, five of them no longer exist even as buildings.

My grandparents moved to Wythenshawe from Old Trafford in the late thirties (he worked as a toolmaker at the Metrovicks engineering factory in Trafford Park and she as a barmaid at the Gorse Hill Hotel, a pub in Stretford to which she'd transferred from another Threlfalls house in her native Wigan) and I remember most of those pubs from the seventies and eighties, in particular the Benchill Hotel, the closest to where they lived and from where he was fetched when the telegram arrived informing him that his brother had been killed fighting with the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium in 1940, and whose weekend discos my older cousins later frequented. The nightclub attached to the Royal Thorn in Sharston was also where student parties were held by my secondary school in the late eighties.

One of the other pub types they look at is the post-war estate pub, those unloved flat-roofed buildings which were once common in inner-city Manchester, outer suburbs such as Wythenshawe and the towns surrounding them, but which are now as much in danger from conversion to other uses or the swing of the developer's wrecking ball as the pre-war drinking establishments which preceded them.

I also went to the Gateway in East Didsbury yesterday, one of the Manchester pubs Boak and Bailey visited while researching their book, and perhaps uniquely, as an inter-war roadhouse which is now a Wetherspoons pub, one which spans two of the categories to which they devote chapters in it.

Back to Leeds

I went to Leeds on Friday night for Salford rugby league club's match at Headingley, the result of which we shall quickly skip over.

Up until a decade ago, when I left its employ, I used to go to Leeds fairly regularly as the bit of the DSS/DWP I worked for had its headquarters there, in Quarry House (nicknamed the Kremlin by the locals), as did the trade union group of which I was a branch rep.

Leeds station must be high up a list of railway termini with decent pubs in and around them: the Scarborough opposite the station was the the pub we usually ended up in after meetings at the adjacent Queens Hotel, but there's also now a Head of Steam just around the corner, and on the concourse itself a newish bar from the nearby Ossett Brewery as well as the Wetherspoons which back in 2005 was one of the first pubs to apply for a twenty-four hour licence and where on Friday I enjoyed a fresh, cellar-cool pint of Leeds Yorkshire Gold with lots of zingy, fruity hops bursting out of it (easily a 4 on CAMRA's beer-scoring scale).

Since Carlsberg closed Tetley's, the major brewer in the city, in 2011, the micro Leeds Brewery has become its flagship beer producer. As well as a range of bitters (Yorkshire Gold, Leeds Best and Leeds Pale), it also brews Midnight Bell, a dark mild, and thus, having a professional rugby league team, now only needs a tram system to join Salford as a city which fulfils all three aspects of Ron Pattinson's definition of civilisation.

Relaxin' with Lee

I've been listening to trumpeter Lee Morgan quite a bit this past week after attending an evening at Manchester Jazz Society dedicated to his life and music.

 As well as the joyful excitement of his playing and technical mastery of his instrument, Morgan was a key figure in hard bop, the movement which from the mid-fifties brought a harder, more blues and gospel-based, sound to jazz, first as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then as a solo artist. The 1959 Jazz Messengers album Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World, recorded live at Birdland in New York, on which he plays as part of Blakey's quintet, is also one of the first jazz albums I bought.

Morgan played on three seminal hard bop tracks, all of them title tracks to albums on the Blue Note label, as a sideman on John Coltrane's 1957 Blue Train and Art Blakey's 1958 Moanin' and under his own name on The Sidewinder, a 1963 soul-jazz recording which, when edited down from the ten minute-plus album version, unexpectedly became a hit single for him.

A couple of years ago, the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke (with whom I share a love of real ale, football, cricket and jazz, if not the same political beliefs) presented a Radio 4 programme about Morgan in which he told the story of his death at the age of 33, after being shot on a snowy night in 1972 at a club in Manhattan's East Village by his girlfriend and manager Helen Moore, bleeding to death before an ambulance could reach it due to the weather, but until last week I didn't know that he had given her the gun with which she killed him after she was mugged of the takings from a gig. The Swedish film director Kasper Collin also released a documentary about him last year, I Called Him Morgan, which is being screened in Manchester this week.

Not doing things by halves

A Twitter exhange with fellow bloggers Boak and Bailey has revealed the existence of something I've never heard of before, pubs that don't serve beer in half-pint measures.

Not only have I never been in a pub which didn't serve halves as well as pints, at least in thic country, I can only think of one place I've been that serves the new two-thirds of a pint schooner, Alberts Schloss in Manchester which dispenses their Pilsner Urquell "tankovna" in them (they sell other beer in half-pints).

I know what the legal measures for draught beer and cider are, but didn't know until someone just kindly pointed it out to me that since 2014 it's been a mandatory licensing condition for pubs to sell beer and cider in half-pints. It's probably because you just sort of assume that they will that it never crossed my mind that there might be some kind of regulation that actually requires them to.

Night and Day

The first Test match to be played in this country on a day/night basis, from two until nine o'clock rather than the traditional eleven o'clock until six, began between England and the West Indies at Edgbaston, Birmingham, yesterday, with a pink rather than a red cricket ball being used, apparently so as to be more visible to the batsmen under the floodlights.

In the United States, baseball games have been played at night under floodlights since the 1930's, but given the number of games in the regular season there are still plenty of day games for fans to watch on TV or go to.

Day/night games are also routinely played in Twenty20 cricket. Although I'm not a fan of that form of the game, with its emphasis on slogging and slightly predictable run chases in the final overs, I think Test cricket played in the later hours of the day is a good idea, allowing people to travel to the ground straight from work and still see most of the first innings and that, especially in hotter countries like those of the Indian sub-continent, the cooler temperatures then will make it more comfortable for both players and spectators, but I predict, and hope, that most Test matches will still be played in the hours of daylight.

Picc to Vic

Amid the news about rail fares going up yet again yesterday, there was one bright point: the Ordsall Chord connecting Manchester's two rail terminuses, Piccadilly on the south side of the city centre and Victoria on the north side, is a step closer to opening as engineers have completed the 1,600 tonne bridge which will carry it across the River Irwell and it is now expected to become operational by December.

I remember as a child in the 70's talk of a Picc-Vic line, a tunnel beneath the city centre connecting the two stations, but the idea was ultimately dropped and we had to wait until the Metrolink tram system opened in the early 90's for a slower light rail connection between them.

The running of through trains between Manchester Piccadilly and Victoria will be handy for those travelling from Lancashire and Yorkshire to Manchester Airport, and also for those of us on the south side of the city travelling northwards. I'm looking forward to using the new line en route to watching Salford play rugby league at Barton-upon-Irwell and when travelling up the Rail Ale Trail to West Yorkshire.

Holy Orders

The media have been having a bit of fun with the story about the seven seminarians who walked into a pub in Cardiff last weekend in clerical garb and were initially refused service by a barman who thought they were a stag party in fancy dress, before the assistant manager stepped in and rectified the misunderstanding by offering them a free round of drinks.

The bit that caught my eye though was the statement by the Archbishop of Cardiff in which he said, "It's wonderful to hear that the seminarians were celebrating their own path to priesthood by having a good time in Cardiff, which of course they are allowed to have."

It seems to me that the Archbishop is responding there to the unspoken idea that there is something wrong with priests, or those training to become priests, enjoying a few pints in a pub. I blame Henry VIII.

As well as triggering a schism from Rome with his adulterous marriage to Anne Boleyn, Henry in unleashing the English Reformation shut down the monasteries which until then had brewed huge volumes of beer, as well as being the economic hub of an agrarian society, buying goods from the small farmers and tradespeople around them.

Thankfully, the connection between the Church and brewing continued elsewhere in Europe, with merry monks and plastered priests still adorning beer bottles from the Trappist breweries of Belgium and the monasteries of Bavaria.

Rooms at the inn

I went along to the Church Inn in Cheadle Hulme on Thursday evening as my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, was presenting a Pub of the Month award there.

The Church Inn, apparently the second pub to be acquired by Stockport brewery Robinsons, is an early nineteenth century building which was originally two separate cottages. There's a wood-panelled bar with a real fire as you enter, a dining area extending to the rear of the building and a snug behind and served by the same bar, accessible by a corridor alongside it, which seems mainly to be used for TV sports viewing. Thus, although a smallish, food-led pub, it manages to accomodate the needs of drinkers, diners and those there to watch football on TV. There are also a few tables outside at the front, a covered smoking area with another large TV at the rear and a small beer garden beyond that. You can dine in the bar, and outside in the summer months too I suppose, and they also sometimes have live, mostly acoustic, music in there at the weekend.

That a multi-room pub format works so well shouldn't really surprise us: George Orwell in his famous essay The Moon Under Water describes such a place, and you can still see that differentation between rooms in pubs and beerhalls across much of Germany, especially in the Rhineland and Bavaria.

The contrast here, of course, is with large, open plan pubs which scatter a sea of reserved signs on their tables, at which the drinker is barely tolerated and only admitted on condition that they stand at a small bar in a corner, but even some large, food-led pubs manage to welcome the casual caller dropping in for a pint, Wetherspoons being a good example of a place where drinkers and diners mix happily and where, unless it's for a large party of a special event, table reservations are neither generally accepted nor thought necessary to make by customers.

Anyone who had a Hart

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola is attempting to sign goalkeeper Pepe Reina from Napoli.

On becoming City manager last year, Guardiola effectively dispensed with the club's first-choice keeper for most of the last decade, Joe Hart - sending him out on loan to Torino last season and to West Ham ahead of this - and signed Claudio Bravo from Barcelona.

Bravo ultimately came up short in the shot-stopping department and now looks likely to be sold, but when he was bought Guardiola saw him as a "sweeper-keeper" who could tackle opposing teams' forwards - effectively an extra centre-back - and intitiate attacks with long passes to his own.

The "sweeper-keeper" role was invented in contintental Europe in the 1950's before becoming popular in South America, but has often been seen as a somewhat risky tactic here. Jonathan Wilson in his book The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper says of the 1953 match at Wembley in which Hungary beat England 6-3, "[Hungarian goalkeeper] Grosics charged out to the edge of the box and, with impeccable timing, volleyed the ball clear. 'Unorthordox but effective,' said an uncertain Kenneth Wolstenhome in commentary, seemingly not quite sure whether he should approve of this sort of thing."

I guess Guardiola sees Reina both as an experienced back-up keeper for the young Brazilian no. 1 Ederson and as someone who can play as a "sweeper-keeper" and stop a shot.

Up The Junction

En route to a rugby league match in Wakefield last night, I popped into Woodfest, a beer festival organised by the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood at the Junction Inn, Castleford, which champions beer from wooden rather than metal casks to the extent that they supply them to breweries to put their products into as well as serving Old Brewery Bitter from the best-known suppliers of cask beer in wood, Yorkshire's most traditionalist family brewers Samuel Smith.

Formed in 1963, the SPBW pre-dates Britain's leading beer drinkers' organisation CAMRA by almost a decade and has always been more of a social rather than a campaigning group, although CAMRA itself is I suppose moving in that direction too now. The event was held in a marquee behind the pub and the premises of a refurbished, but from I could see still closed, and certainly unsigned, pub next door to it, the Horse and Jockey. CAMRA stalwart, and former Trotskyist, Roger Protz was also there, making notes for the speech he was to give later, although I had to leave before he spoke.

I hadn't drunk any of the beers I had last night before so it's hard to say what they're like in metal rather than wooden casks, but the latter did seem to have added a bit of Victorian-style funkiness to them, especially Beer Nouveau's Barclay Perkins X Ale, a recreation of a 1852 8.9% mild served from a small barrel on the bar, and Castleford Special, a similarly historic London porter supplied by Buckinghamshire's Baby Animal brewery.

Here is London, giddy London

I've just spent a few days in London for a mate's fiftieth birthday.

I've got one word of advice for fellow Northern beer-hounds heading for the capital: Wetherspoon's.

The pub chain is your best bet for well-kept and conditioned cask beer at the reasonable prices those of us from north of the Trent are used to paying, especially if, like me, you had CAMRA vouchers to use up by the end of the month. Indeed, in the suburb of west London where I was stopping, it was the only pub selling cask beer.

I'm not sure I've drunk beer from Sambrook's Brewery in Battersea before, but the couple of pints of their Powerhouse Porter and (after that ran out) their Junction bitter were easily the best, and certainly cheapest, I found in the metropolis.

I also got to drink in the pub in Clerkenwell where Lenin drank when editing the Russian socialist newpaper Iskra nearby in 1903, and where he later allegedly first met Stalin. Although the building looks pretty much the same as it might have done then, the clientele has changed somewhat.

Music in Monk Time

It's not often that you get to buy a new album by Thelonious Monk, the jazz pioneer who pretty much invented bebop piano at Minton's Playhouse in uptown Manhattan in the early 40's, but this week I did with a double CD of the recordings he made for the soundtrack of a 1960 French film, Les Liasions Dangereuses.

Although based on the 1782 novel of the same name, the film is set amongst a bourgeois family in contemporary France. Some of the music from it, including material by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, was released as an album at the time, but Monk's contributions lay in the record company vaults until they were rediscovered in 2014.

The sound on the album is as sharp and as fresh as the day it was put onto tape in a studio on the West Side of Manahattan in the summer of 1959. Although Monk is playing music he'd played many times before, rather than newly-composed material, there's less of the angularity and atonality which you normally associate with his playing, and which first drew me to it twenty or so years ago, more swing and lyricism, a romantic feeling even, no doubt appropriate to the theme of the film (some of the  alternate and unedited takes which make up the second disc of the album are in a noticeably faster tempo than the ones which ended up being used in the film). Monk also shares frontline duties almost equally with the rest of his quintet, especially the tenor saxophonists Charlie Rouse and Barney Wilen.

The album includes a booklet with black and white and colour photos from the session featuring Monk himself in a fetching hat, his wife Nellie and patron Pannonica Rothschild, as well as extensive liner notes. My favourite are from the English, indeed Mancunian, jazz pianist and critic Brian Priestley who recalls seeing the film while living in Paris as a student in the early 60's, and even hearing a couple of Monk's musical contributions to it which were released as singles in France on jukeboxes in bars and cafes there.

Belgian Blonde

I went to a CAMRA meeting in Stockport last week at which a marketing and pubs manager from Robinsons, the Victorian brewery whose redbrick tower still rises above the town centre, gave us a presentation about recent additions to their draught range, and, very kindly, some free bottles of Blonde Tom, their new Belgian-style strong ale, to sample.

Blonde Tom belongs to the same family of beers as Old Tom, the 8.5% dark strong ale first brewed in 1899 which is one the company's best-known products, although at 6% it's not quite as potent as its older brother and, as the name suggests, has a golden colour. It combines English hops with a Belgian yeast strain rather than the one they normally pitch into their open fermenters to give it a different taste to that of their other beers. The beer one of them mentioned as the kind of strongish golden ale they were aiming for was Duvel.

Blonde Tom is a thinnish beer with a quickly dissipating head, quite sweet, but with a refreshing sharpness too. I'm not sure I picked up any specifically Belgian notes, but it defintely doesn't have the normal Robinsons taste. It'd be interesting to try a cask version to compare it to the bottled one.

Post-election number-crunching

Although less so than others in the past, last week's General Election result threw up some clear differences between the votes won by each political party and the number of parliamentary seats which that gave them.

First Past the Post as a voting system obviously favours parties who are able to build up large votes in individual constituencies, even if some of those are then wasted because they end up surplus to returning their candidate there, and punishes those whose support is spread more thinly across the country. So what would the House of Commons look like if a proportional representation voting system had been used for last week's poll?

There are different forms of PR, from single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies to national lists with thresholds for representation, or a mixture of the two, but assuming a strict correlation between votes cast and seats won it would have given the Conservatives (42.4%) 275 seats rather than 317, Labour (40%) 260 rather than 262, the Liberal Democrats (7.4%) 48 rather than 12, UKIP (1.8%) 11 and the Greens (1.6%) 10 rather than none and one, the Scottish National Party (3%) 19 rather than 35, and the Democratic Unionists (0.9%) who with their 10 Northern Irish seats now hold the balance of power half that with only 5 MP's returned to Westminster.

The outcome might still have been a Conservative minority government, albeit one short of the necessary votes to get its legislation through Parliament without appealing to parties apart from the DUP, but Labour too would have had a possible route to power with the support of other centrist and centre-left parties such as the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP.

Way out west

I went to Warrington yesterday afternoon for Salford's rugby league match there.

Warrington has a bit of a mixed character: halfway between Manchester and Liverpool (I think it's the furthest east I've ever heard opposing fans called Scousers), with most of its big industries, such as wire-making which gave the rugby league team its nickname, long gone, although there are still a few cement plants and factories around the town centre, north of the River Mersey, the historic boundary between Lancashire and Cheshire, but inexplicably transferred by local government reforms to the latter county, at least administratively, in 1974.

There are some quite imposing redbrick Edwardian building as you come out of the station, including a couple of pubs still in the liveries of the town's two defunct breweries, Greenall Whitley, whose former offices now house parts of the civil service department for whom I pushed a pen for a decade or so, and Tetley Walker, demolished to make way for the Halliwell Jones Stadium where yesterday's match was played.

I hadn't been to Warrington's new ground since it opened in 2004, the club moving there from its former home at Wilderspool, a name I always associate with the office of the North West regional Labour Party in the district of the same name, and was unexpectedly impressed by it. Some of the new rugby league grounds have a bit of a characterless, "identikit" feel to them, but Warrington's has a pretty decent atmosphere: the stands are much closer to the pitch than they appear on TV, the home fans stand on a large terrace along the touch-line opposite the seated main stand, as they once did in The Shed at Salford's old ground, The Willows, the roofs are low enough to trap sound and the filled in far corners help with that too. And unlike Salford's new ground at Barton-upon-Irwell, it's easy to get to, being right in the town centre, only a five minute walk from Warrington Central station.

Smoking and drinking

I'm pretty familiar with the history of laws regarding young people and alcohol, but the introduction this weekend of new rules supposedly stopping them from starting smoking, by making twenty the mininum number of cigarettes you can now buy, legislating for plain packets and further restricting the sale of rolling tobacco, amongst other illiberal and no doubt ineffective measures, got me wondering what the equivalent history of the laws around children and tobacco is.

It turns out that the Children's Act 1908 which introduced a minimum age of 5 for drinking at home and banned those under 14 from drinking in pubs (raised to 16 in 1910 and, unless it's beer, cider of wine, not spirits, consumed with a meal and purchased by an adult, 18 in 1923), also made it an offence to sell tobacco to those under 16 (raised to 18 in 2007). Not that I remember the law being enforced when I was a teenager in the 1980's and purchased cigarettes for neighbours from local shops; some of my classmates at secondary school also popped out most morning break times to buy them for their own consumption.

It seems that my generation will be the last to have experienced the once ubiquitous sight of someone enjoying a fag with their pint. Although as a non-smoker I personally endured rather than enjoyed smoky pubs before 2007, it's hard to argue that the ban hasn't had an impact on already struggling businesses and that it was entirely a question of political ideology that a compromise, such as separate smoking rooms and exemptions for private members' clubs, wasn't found.

Pub pages

I'm halfway through reading, admittedly rather belatedly, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the socialist classic by Robert Tressell (actually Noonan, the pen name being a pun from the building trade) about a gang of housepainters in "Mugbsborough", a fictionalised Hastings, the Sussex town where he wrote the book between 1906 and 1910.

As you might expect from a novel about a group of working men, there's a pub in it, The Cricketers. While Hardy and Dickens describe the city and country pubs of the Victorian era, and Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton and George Orwell interwar and wartime London ones, I can't think of a literary pub from the Edwardian age, expect maybe the one the title character escapes to in The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells, although that's really a riverside inn, and so even though I've drunk in a few well-preserved examples, especially Joseph Holt's dwindling estate of them in Eccles, it's good to have such a detailed depiction of one as this:

"Viewed from outside, The Cricketers' Arms was a pretentious-looking building with plate glass windows and a profusion of gilding. The pilasters were painted in imitation of different marbles and the doors grained to represent costly woods. There were panels containing painted advertisements of wines and spirits and beer, written in gold, and ornamented with gaudy colours. On the lintel over the principal entrance was inscribed in small white letters: "A. Harpy. Licensed to sell wines, spirits and malt liquors by retail to be consumed either on or off the premises".

The bar was arranged in the usual way, being divided into several compartments. First there was the Saloon Bar, on the glass door of which was fixed a printed bill: "No four ale served in this bar". Next was the jug and bottle department, much appreciated by ladies who wished to indulge in a drop of gin on the quiet. There were also two small private bars, only capable of holding two or three persons, where nothing less than four pennyworth of spirits or glasses of ale at threepence were served. Finally, there was the public bar, the largest compartment of all.

Wooden forms provided seating accommodation for the customers, and a large automatic musical instrument—a "penny in the slot" polyphone, resembling a grandfather's clock in shape—stood close to the counter, so that those behind the bar could reach to wind it up. Hanging on the partition near the polyphone was a board about fifteen inches square, over the surface of which were distributed a number of small hooks, numbered. At the bottom of the board was a net made of fine twine, in which several india rubber rings about three inches in diameter were lying. There was no table in the place but jutting out from the partition which divided the public bar from the others was a hinged flap about three feet long by twenty inches wide, which could be folded down when not in use. This was the shove-ha'penny board. The coins—old French pennies—used in playing this game were kept behind the bar and might be borrowed on application. On the partition, just above the shove-ha'penny board was a neatly printed notice, framed and glazed:—

NOTICE

Gentlemen using this house are requested
to refrain from using obscene language.

Alongside this notice were a number of gaudily coloured bills advertising the local theatre and the music hall, and another of a travelling circus and menagerie then visiting the town and encamped on a piece of waste ground about half way on the road to Windley.

The fittings behind the bar, and the counter, were of polished mahogany, with silvered plate glass at the back of the shelves. On these shelves were rows of bottles and cut glass decanters, gin, whiskey, brandy, and wines and liqueurs of different kinds."

All What Jazz

Ahead of a meeting of Manchester Jazz Society in a fortnight on Larkin About Jazz:The Poet As Critic, I've just picked up a secondhand copy of Philip Larkin's All What Jazz, a collection of the record reviews he wrote for the Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971.

As well as being regarded as a major post-war English poet, Philip Larkin's posthumous reputation is at best that of a professional grump and commitment-phobic womaniser, and at worst that of an espouser of far-right views and composer of racist and other dubious ditties in his private letters to school and university friends such as his fellow writer and jazz fan Kingsley Amis.

Like Amis, Larkin's jazz tastes were for the New Orleans and swing bands of his youth, Armstrong, Bechet, Ellington and Basie, and he expresses his aversion to modern jazz, especially its leading proponents Charlie Parker ("compulsively fast and showy...His tone, though much better than that of his successors, was thin and sometimes shrill"),  Thelonious Monk ("his faux-naif elephant-dance piano style, with its gawky intervals and absence of swing, was made doubly tedious by his limited repertoire"), Miles Davis ("Davis had several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all") and John Coltrane ("metallic and passionless...exercises in gigantic absurdity...long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity"), in the introduction to this collection, although he does moderate his opinions of them to some extent in later reviews, even going so far as to half-heartedly praise the free jazz musician Ornette Coleman ("a slow ballad that sounds as if it is trying to be beautiful").

Larkin's love of the blues is unsurprising, but what did come as a bit of a shock is that as well as interwar figures like Bessie Smith, Big Maceo and Big Bill Broonzy his tastes also extended to the postwar Chicago electric blues bands of Muddy Waters, Little Walter, James Cotton, Howlin' Wolf and Big Walter Horton with their amplified guitars and harmonicas, the rediscovered Mississippi bluesman Fred McDowell and his protege R.L. Burnside, Texas acoustic guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins, swamp blues duo Lightnin' Slim and Lazy Lester, the late sixties soul-blues of Nina Simone and even black Cajun R&B/zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier.

Roll on the polls

With a General Election now set for 8th June, the bookies are offering longish odds on anything other than a landslide victory for the Conservatives.

I think the Tories will probably gain about fifty seats, and Labour lose about the same. I can't see the Lib Dems winning more than twenty seats, which would nevertheless be a big step forward for them after their electoral wipeout two years ago, or, unfortunately, the SNP losing any of theirs. This election could also, hopefully, be UKIP's last hurrah.

I also think that after such a result Jeremy Corbyn might, to the consternation of most of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, stop on as Leader.

I'm not sure why I continue to make these predictions, having called a Remain vote in the EU referendum and thought that Labour would become the biggest party at the 2015 General Election. On the other hand, I did think, in the face of those who told me that I was dead wrong and that there was absolutely no way that it couldn't happen, that Trump might just win last year's US presidential election.

Macbeth in Manchester

I went to a talk by beer historian and blogger Ron Pattinson yesterday afternoon, part of the so-called Macbeth Tour he's doing to promote his new book about Scottish beer.

The event took place at the Beer Nouveau Brewery Tap, a microbrewery housed within a railway arch in Ardwick half a mile south of Piccadilly station, and featured tastings of historic Scottish beers recreated by them as well as some produced by Manchester homebrewers.

The beers, which spanned the years 1879 to 1894, were shilling ales, designated according to the wholesale price of a hogshead which, at least in the nineteenth century, gave the drinker some idea of their strength: the ones we tried began with a 1879 Youngers 50/- Sparkling Ale at 3.7% abv and ended with a 160/- from the same brewery and year at 7.8%.

The Scotch ales brewed and sold in Belgium and the United States tend to be dark, strong and malty but shilling ales like the ones we drank yesterday are nothing like that, being pale and well-hopped. Many also had an appealingly sharp sourness and some woodiness picked up from the oak casks they'd been racked into. My favourites were probably the Youngers 1879 160/- and Ushers 1885 100/- which reminded me of pale barley wines.

Thanks again to Ron for the talk, which as always was packed with masses of interesting and informative stuff interspersed with lots of humour and myth-busting, and to Steve at Beer Nouveau for kindly hosting us.

This Sporting Life

The playwright, screenwriter and novelist David Storey, who has died aged 83, epitomised the early 1960's realist "New Wave" in British film: Northern, working-class and newly self-confident.

The son of a miner from Wakefield, Storey belonged to the same generation of actors and writers as Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, John Braine, Tom Courtenay and Alan Sillitoe, and like them often experienced something of a disconnect between the artistic world he found fame in and his roots, playing rugby league for the Leeds "A" team at weekends before returning to the Slade School of Art in London, a feeling memorably expressed by Courtenay in the entry from the diary he kept as a student at RADA for the day in 1959 when his hometown side Hull lost to Wigan in the Challlenge Cup Final: "Met Dad, went to Wembley. Played Chekhov in evening."

Young Bones Groan

A 14 year-old boy from Sheffield has died in hospital in Leeds after he collapsed at the end of an unlicensed kickboxing bout in the city on Saturday night (unlicensed because the "sport"'s governing body bars those under 16 from the fights it promotes) and the private medical team hired by the event's organisers were unable to save him.

I'm not a fan of boxing, as I wrote here, but there's a world of difference between the law allowing adult men to engage in violence which if it took place anywhere else would see them prosecuted and young people with still developing brains and muscles, no doubt heavily influenced by older family members, being exposed to the dangers of the ring, especially one in which they can legally be kicked as well as punched to the head and upper body.

I've seen comments along the lines of "he died doing what he loved" and " all sports have risks", and West Yorkshire Police have said that they are not treating his death as suspicious, but surely his parents should face some sort of criminal liability.

I'm not saying that they should go to prison - punishment beyond the ridiculously premature and entirely avoidable loss of their son is hardly appropriate here - but a conviction for manslaughter on the grounds that they recklessly put his life in danger, or under one of the child protection laws requiring adults to ensure the safety and welfare of young people in their care, and a suspended sentence would at least send a message to others about society's attitude to such behaviour.

Yes we can

Although it's been available for more than eighty years, having first been sold in the mid-thirties in the post-Prohibition United States, canned beer has always had a bit of a cheapo image compared to draught, or even bottled, beer, and long been associated with globally-brewed, mass-market lagers.

The last canned beer I drank was probably a widgeted can of nitroflow Guinness at a sports event or in a hotel bar. Although I knew that some microbreweries had begun producing so-called "craft cans", the only pubs I'd seen them on sale in were Wetherspoons, where the draught choice is usually good enough not to bother with anything else, and at home I normally drink bottled beer, but an email from online retailer EeBria tempted me to pick up some from Macclesfield brewery RedWillow.

I've drunk cask versions of a fair few RedWillow beers (all of which have a -less suffix: Feckless, Wreckless etc.) on draught in the pub, and a couple of their bottled equivalents here and there too, so I was interested to see how they'd survive the transition to can. The first one I cracked open, Smokeless, is a beer right up my street: a 5.7% abv smoked porter, albeit one infused with chipotle.

I was expecting lots of fizz and a thin head, but as you can see from the photo there was a decent amount of foam and the beer beneath was softly carbonated: if I'd been asked to, I think I'd have had a hard time distinguishing it from the cask version, although the chipotle flavour was a little bit more pronounced I thought. I'm looking forward to seeing how their hop-forward and fruity pale ales stand up in cans.

There are apparently some can-conditioned beers, including a few German wheat beers, which still have live yeast in the container and would therefore be acceptable to CAMRA in the same way that bottle-conditioned ones are.

Miss Simone

For the last few days I've been listening to BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, an abridgement of Alan Light's biography of singer and pianist Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone?

Nina Simone is notable not just for spanning multiple genres in her musical output - blues, jazz, gospel, soul, R&B and pop as well as the classical music she had been trained to perform as a child in North Carolina - but also for being a political figures whose songs Mississippi Goddam and The Backlash Blues (the latter penned by her friend the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes) exemplified the harder-edged, more militant tone the black civil rights movement took on in the sixties in the face of racist intransigence from the Southern states and the Federal government's sluggishness in enforcing freedoms legally won by African-American activists.

Simone acquired a reputation for being "difficult", a trait often ascribed to her having some sort of personality disorder, but given the racism she experienced throughout her life (she refused to play at her first public piano recital until her parents were moved forwards from the back of the concert hall where they had been placed and put onto the front row and later had a place at a music college denied to her on the grounds of her colour before becoming a cabaret act at the bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she adopted her stage name) it was surely either a case of her standing up for herself, or, if it did indeed stem from mental illness, was a reaction to those injustices.

Up in the air

The Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific has introduced a beer designed to be drunk at altitude.

Betsy is a 5.1% abv unfiltered, bottled beer brewed by the Hong Kong Beer Co. which uses a lager yeast, English Fuggles as well as local New Terrritories hops and 60% wheat malt in the mash. It's named after the first DC-3 aircraft the company flew in its early days in the mid-40's. and supposedly has a flavour profile which works particularly well at thirty-five thousand feet. It all sounds a bit gimmicky to me.

Having a beer on the plane is a ritual which is part of most people's holidays, although you're most likely to get served the product of a global brewer like Amstel or Stella. The one beer I look forward to drinking when flying is Lufthansa's in-flight beer Warsteiner which always seems to have a bit more hoppiness than the average mass-market German Pils.

Another ground, another planet

I went to Edgeley Park in Stockport on Saturday afternoon to watch FC United, the club which split from Manchester United following its takeover by the Glazers, play Stockport County in National League North, the sixth tier of English football.

The last time I went to a match at Edgeley Park, back in 2008, Stockport were in fourth-tier League Two, (heady days!) and I sat towards the back of the Main Stand, amongst the grumbling, seen it all before old codgers you expect to find in that section of the ground, as they beat visitors Accrington Stanley 2-0; this time, I stood with the away fans on the open Railway End as the home side recorded a 2-1 win.

There were four things which separated the match from the modern experience of watching top-flight football:

1. Paying in cash on the turnstile at prices even lower than the already pretty reasonable ones of nine years ago.

2. Standing throughout the match in unreserved seats bolted onto the terracing, allowing groups of teenage lads, older mates, and most importantly the loudest singers to congregate together, so that sound builds behind the goal before spreading across the end.

3. Watching the whole match in the resulting kind of noise which, as it should, leaves you slightly hoarse/deaf when you come out of the ground.

4. The teams playing in unnamed strips numbered 1-11: might seem a minor point, but it just looks right to me.

I don't remotely think that the Premier League is going to allow any of the above any time soon, although there are admirable efforts underway to re-introduce safe standing at top-flight grounds, as already happens in Germany, and from this season at Celtic Park in Glasgow too.

Just not cricket

The International Cricket Council is once again discussing how the game can be reformed and expanded , beyond the ten Test-playing nations which are its heartlands, especially those on the Indian sub-continent where it's a mass sport.

It's interesting to see that rugby union is being held up as an example of a sport that has expanded beyond the former British Empire, but there are important differences between them which mean that its successes are unlikely to be repeated by cricket.

Except in South Wales, and to a lesser extent the neighbouring areas of South-west England, rugby union is a sport of the upper and middle classes. That means that in both former colonies of the British Empire (Australia, Ireland) and those countries that are not (Argentina, Italy) the game has a social prestige and is thus the chosen sport of private schools and universities rather than the football codes which are the mass, working-class sports in those places.

Although privately-educated players have featured quite heavily in the England cricket team, usually as batsmen, unlike in rugby union they're balanced out by a group of more working-class players from the North and Midlands who often make up the bowling attack (that mix was also present in nineteenth century England rugby teams, before the split between rugby union and rugby league, with Oxbridge backs and forwards from the pit villages and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire). And when it comes to race and national identity, pretty much any match England plays is against a team descended from colonial subjects, convicts or slaves.

Attempts by rugby league to expand beyond its heartlands (Northern England and the urban east coast of Australia) are also instructive: whereas they have failed repeatedly in London and Wales, where the game has no real roots, and more importantly no social significance beyond the pitch, they have flourished in the politcally and religiously dissident working-class and small-peasant areas of South-west France where, to quote the author  Tony Collins, "rugby league symbolised much more than an alternative set of rules for rugby",