A view from the bridge

One of my old school friends has just posted some images online from an exhibition he's involved with in Wigan, including the photo below taken outside Central Park rugby league ground in the early eighties.

My grandmother grew up with her uncle and auntie in a pub in Wigan, and after he died worked with her in a sweet shop near Central Park which later became a souvenir shop for the rugby league club. As kids in the seventies, we visited the sweet shop and then walked into the ground through an open exit gate and stood on the empty terraces.

So many questions spring to mind when looking at the photo of the people enjoying a free, if obstructed, view of the pitch: can they no longer afford to pay for admission to the ground at the turnstiles? (unemployment was rising sharply then, especially in the North West); have they stopped to watch the whole match, or just briefly on the way to or from somewhere else, like the guy on the bike?; has the yellow plastic traffic cone just fallen over in the road, or been kicked over for some reason?; what do the spectators on the adjacent terracing think of those watching the action for nothing?

Strangeways Here We Come

Channel 5 showed a documentary last night about the 1990 Strangeways prison riot.

The month long sit-in on the roof of the massively overcrowded Victorian gaol just north of Manchester city centre, during which much of the fabric of the building was destroyed, became something of an attraction, both locally and for the national media, sparking a debate about prison conditions, and leading to some improvements at the rebuilt and renamed HMP Manchester when it reopened in 1994 (notably toliets in the cells), although those who organised the protest ended up spending many more years behind bars as a result of it. One of them, already serving a life sentence, described the experience of emerging on the roof above the rotunda, overlooking the tower which was popularly, but wrongly, thought to have housed the gallows before hanging was abolished (it's actually a ventilation shaft), seeing the outside world for the first time in almost a decade and feeling human again (the other iconic landmark on the Strangeways skyline, the chimney of Boddingtons Brewery, finally came down in 2010, three years after the rest of the building was demolished).

Among the other changes at the new HMP Manchester was a ban on prison officers belonging to far right groups, before which National Front badges had been worn openly on the wings, and the closure of the social club where some of them drank heavily at dinnertime.

The prison population has increased dramatically since the 1990s and now stands above eighty thousand, so that, despite the privately-run HMP Forest Bank opening in Salford in 2000, on the site of the former Agecroft power station, as another local prison and remand facility, Strangeways has again become dangerously overcrowded and is still a place where prisoners are merely contained rather than rehabilitated.

Czeching out some Bohemian beers

With normal exporters Beer Dome not delivering to the UK at the moment because of Brexit-related customs problems, I had a look elsewhere for Czech beer online and found Halusky, an importer/retailer based in southwest London. Their mixed box of bottled beers includes a couple I've drunk before, Budvar and Pilsner Urquell, which I've also had on draught, and a couple I hadn't, from the Velkopopovicky Kozel brewery just south of Prague (if you didn't know already, the bearded billies quaffing beer on the labels is a fairly big clue that Kozel is the Czech word for goat).

Velkopopovicky Kozel 10° Svetlé Vycepni

Very pale/gold with a sweet, honeyish malt taste, but quite bitter, well carbonated, and a rather thin mouthfeel – a pretty basic lager to be honest.

Velkopopovicky Kozel Cerny

Again quite a thin mouthfeel, and a small white head, but an instant coffee hit very much like a stout and black in colour too – my kind of beer.

When the Covid pandemic is finally over, I really need to go to the Czech Republic and drink unpasteurised draught beer in a tankovna pub there.