Portuguese politicians calling for some of the Euro 2004 stadiums to be demolished as the country’s government plans cost-saving measures!
Many of these stadia were award-winning were they not… Portugal Euro 2004 was a summer of utter love.
I have never seen this before. The ENTIRE UK covered in snow. As seen from NASA‘s Terra spacecraft. http://bit.ly/88WtAR
For the first few days of 2010, seeing that we don’t have ‘Sales’ and everyone else does, we’ll join in the fun by giving you great on the spot deals on any pictures you fancy. You can always ring us.
Happy New Year. Stuart
This is my letter to Mr Peter McCaffery, Principal at University Cumbria presiding over the Ambleside campus and the proposed total closure of it.
Notes informing that letter :
The Principal announced total closure and redundancies to the press before he told the people concerned.
Students have signed up to Ambleside for 3 years – they are now being told they will have to relocate to Carlisle.
Peter McCaffery is from Durham and supports Newcastle United and is a keen cold-water swimmer.
Ambleside United are the repeat champions of The Westmorland League.
Charlotte Mason arrived from Chichester in the 1800’s to give Ambleside/The Lakes a total vision of education.
Dr Peter McCafferey, Vice-Chancellor
University of Cumbria,?Fusehill Street, Carlisle?CA1 2HH
7th December 2009
Dear vice-chancellor, I wanted to contact you directly before announcing anything through the press – my intention to oppose you/your plans to close the Ambleside Campus of the University.
You must have made this decision on the day Newcastle United got relegated from the Premiership, so wounded and barmy is its plan! … to decimate the community surrounding Ambleside United : the champions of all Westmorland!
I understand as man at the top here you are faced with tough decisions to make, I understand too you are a decent man – but this is an indecent solution to problems which are the fledgling University’s problem and should not become Ambleside’s.
Ambleside is a venerable seat of further education and has been for over 100 years. Emotive words are banded about like ‘the Oxford or Cambridge of teacher-training and outdoor pursuits’… blah blah blah. Instinctive opposition to razing this history is as much about the future – the colleges were founded and furthered by visionary people (many of them women) and they remain about vision-in-education. In a rural setting. A community. The unique landscape and culture of central/south Lakes informs the style of education at Ambleside colleges and they reciprocate.
It seems to be your battery-farming vision for education to round up all the education and stick it in one urban block in Carlisle and hope the students are persuaded by bright lights. It’s as if you wish to preserve this the Carlisle body and cut off the extremities when in this deep cold water the fledgling University finds itself.
I am going to put the case for Ambleside particularly before Lammy/Mandelsohn the Education Ministry, this week.
It’s not too late to turn this around and at the moment this decision is yours.
Yours sincerely, Stuart Clarke
Ambleside is snug. Xmas Lights. Real Snow on the mountains. Students in the streets in fancy-dress. Guitar music spilling out of the pubs. 3 cinemas with some lovely films. Eateries. And there’s us.
Surely after my own Xmas designs on the window, we win! Our ship of a gallery-cum-shop was untouched by the floods and it sails on with all the many pictures lining the racks, the figurines, the books, the bigger pictures as well. Yes this is a sales pitch – i’ve built it now I await for you to come.
We never closed, even during the floods. Come see us.
Back of the net: we get the National Football Museum – guest blogger ‘ComStad’ goes on to write…
Preston 0, Manchester 5
This is good news.
The museum of the national game is to come to the UK capital city of popular culture: ‘the least aristocratic city in Britain’ as we’ve been called.
Alongside the permanent memorabilia from Pele, Bobby Moore and the likes, Urbis could cover the serious football themes of the Latin American football wars, hooliganism, match-fixing, the tribalism attached to clubs and march on to fun themes such as football fashions, the crazy hairstyles of players, FA cup songs.
Perfect, this is the right decision.
The current location of the museum, Preston North End’s ground, was a backwater. A football stadium without a game going on, is like a nightclub at 10am, pointless.
Urbis, a museum (yes, at last we can call it a museum rather than a centre for urban culture or some such) is perfect too. It’s in the heart of a city. In an entertainment area too.
And the present leadership at Urbis with Vaughan Allen as Director is a good fit for the relocated National Football Museum. With the present exhibitions – a lovely duet of British hip hop and Manchester produced TV – Urbis has done what it does best in recent years, provide contemporary, interesting and well-produced shows. Given a single theme, football, the world game, that imaginative lot at the Urbis should have a field day. Or even a pitch day.
Alongside the permanent memorabilia from Pele, Bobby Moore and the likes, Urbis could cover the serious football themes of the Latin American football wars, hooliganism, match-fixing, the tribalism attached to clubs and march on to fun themes such as football fashions, the crazy hairstyles of players, FA cup songs.
Here’s the official reaction.
Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council, said: “I’m delighted that the trustees have accepted our offer for the National Football Museum to relocate to Urbis. Manchester is not only a city with football in its blood but also one of the country’s leading visitor destinations, the most visited English city outside London. We strongly believe that this move will significantly strengthen the National Football Museum. Independent expert analysis shows that the National Football Museum at Urbis could attract up to 400,000 visitors a year – making it an internationally important destination.
“The museum’s arrival in Manchester will ensure it has a sustainable future while adding to our existing wide range of tourist attractions, building on the major achievements of Urbis to date. The Urbis team will use their creative expertise to reinterpret the football story as part of popular culture in an imaginative and interactive way.”
Hard cash is behind the victory. The mechanics of the deal are that Manchester’s proposals for subsiding the museum with £2m per year, outbid Lancashire County Council, Preston Borough Council and the University of Central Lancashire’s joint £400,000 offer to keep the museum.
Preston doesn’t lose out completely. There will still be a presence for the National Football Museum in the town and Preston will hold onto the main storage facilities and archive. As long as this doesn’t become a British compromise and fudge solution that’s fine.
It’s clear though that Head Office will be here: that the major exhibitions and the major artefacts will be in Manchester.
This is wholly appropriate.
Whilst Preston was one of the founding clubs of the Football League, the whole apparatus of permanent professional leagues, nationally and internationally, was ratified in Manchester’s Royal Hotel in Piccadilly Gardens in April 1888.
Football’s come home. Or will do when the National Football Museum opens in Manchester in summer 2011.
Cas says..” Yay! I hope the Urbis team take on their new roles with relish and understand how they will benefit long term from being associated with what will be a wonderful tourist attraction. Manchester can’t be the UK’s true capital of arts but we can be the Capital of Sport, which is not a bad thing.”
We ARE open
Please come and see us, buy what we have.
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Now that 5am has become 4am I wake bolt up at 5 to 4, without fail. Some body clock mine. Fires are still burning from peoples excitements the night before. I’m like the milkman – remember him? Its Rememberance Sunday and given the hour I am one of the first to be remembering it. We all of us die but so many died by some useless command – GO OVER THE TOP! A footballer (Da Silva Eduardo) much mailigned for diving in a football match (he was only just back from a broken leg) scoring a goal yesterday pulled up his shirt to reveal another one-white proclaiming ‘its time for peace’ ... (not through this incident but in general :) don’t let anyone ever convince you the game is all about money.
My daughter Ava could have been called “Poppy”. She was borne on the Eleventh of the Eleventh of the Eleventh. She’s just 4 this week. Although I haven’t seen that much of her – her mother has been with her every single day for four years – I get on so well with her. How is this possible with such an age difference? I’m impressed by the clever things she does and says. Her increasing vocabulary – perhaps it was always there just waiting to come out. And by the way she touches. Ok, sometimes she’s too rough. Her sense of humour is developing and she looks like she can dance. I think of all the times I might say to her, both smiling the smile : would you care for this dance? Has she a wisdom predating this life… my sister says she has an old soul. Is the age difference thing really so important? Getting on is the thing. It’s surely what you bring to the table. Or the dancefloor. I recommend ceilidh dances once a week – where everyone of all ages and cool get together and go through all sort of mating and general etiquettes, whilst dancing and hugging.
I think of those young men barely seen anything going to War (particularly that First one), wet, cold, dead, never to return with stories or to the dance. People who sent them or managed them were mostly older and there could be some blame attached. If we are in a war with Afghan right now then surely we should have a War Cabinet really looking at things. We cant just blame the Prime Minister or faceless civil servants. Everyone now is beginning to say they never wanted it. The backstabbing face-slapping double-dealing newspapers such as the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Express would probably criticise the likes of me for being liberal, for being all nicey-nicey about all sorts of people who might not deserve it. As if I have no clear view. I do : I want such newspapers to die a hideous death. And I want beach football to be reinstated once it has died (from December 1st the authorities in Rio are banning all beach football because of the chaos it brings. Denying young men, and women – and not just young men and women – the times of their lives).
I look back to what i was doing before that historic programme. A programme to change everything. To change public life and to change personal opinion.
Having been up at 4 in the morning, I was having an evening sleep on the sofa in front of the fire. Telling myself to awake for 10.30pm. I was awoken in fact at 10.15 by a text (beep) from someone i hadn’t heard from for some while. A person who conjures up immediate warmth by what she says and what she does not say. Text in its brevity can leave a lot to the imagination. I read every one of the few words, many times. Read the sentences quickly, then slowly, possibly rearranging the words.
A person who conjures up immediate warmth when she is looked at. I reached for the photographs that i had of her. And a bigger shiver still ran down my back, and along my limbs, to my ends. And pumped around that inner place we just call the heart. A desperation also took over me. How I wanted her here. In the fire’s warmth glow her hair would be flame-coloured.
I traced her shape on the surface of the photographs: she leaning down, she sideways on, she with her back turned – I tapped her on the shoulder. I tapped her on the shoulder… expecting her to turn around, that I could grasp her hand and feel her close.
People are so very very special. The thought of having to live without loved ones is almost unbearable but bear it we do. This feeling of love (or whatever it is) can go beyond – for complete strangers – even foreigners. Most of the time we keep at least an arms distance from one another. Or we even come to turn away in hate.
Then ‘that’ programme begun.
Occasionally you see something that electrifies you and in this case makes you realise the power of television and in particular terrestial television – the event-like nature of everyone watching something at the same time and then discussing it. X Factor and Come Dancing get people going but BBC QUESTION TIME with its accent on the people-politic was on another plain.
Being the pluralistic BBC, owned by the people, it attempts to let everyone have their say and last night it included Nick Griffin of the BNP, who amassed quite a vote only recently. All the politicians assembled, bar Nick Griffin, who was crushed on this occasion, excelled, and showed why they are politicians. The Deputy chief of the British Museum, an American, showed why she has her position.
Debate must be brought out into the open. Nick Griffin is less of a mystery to me now after Question Time – but it’s still a mystery to me why so many of my brothers voted BNP. Isolated these brothers surely were when they were asked to ut an x in the box back in the Springtime.
This BNP thing needs to be argued down, charged down – if like Nick Griffin it deserves charging down, lest in 5 years we could be faced with the first Civil War of our recent ‘indigenous’ history.
And just like that, you Jane get in touch. Your web-page displays a successful childrens illustrator with more than 30 books to her name. Not the name of your youth. You have married!
I sit here at the very table I showed you and pal Sam on a slide-projector the very photos you refer to (as well as others) (it was a summer’s day – it was 1987); i am in what was and is and will always be the house of my youth. Where my mother is still. Siblings not so far away. Berkhamsted and Tring.
And it’s my Mum’s birthday (today).
I have put away my being-Stuart-Clarke/Lake-District-artist intensity for a weekend, to try and do some simple things well with my Mum, around her birthday. By the way I’ve been to see Mott The Hoople at the Hammersmith Apollo last night with me bruvver – THE band of my youth, reformed in original line-up format on this October night 37 years on from when they last played. 5 lads from a west country border town. There was always a connection with them – I collected Mott The Hoople from aged 11 when glam rock Bolan and Bowie were about…but Mott were mine. I bought the pink and white (like coconut ice) “Mott” album 12 incher from PRP record-shop and marched it home preciously (checking in the bag it was still in there, undamaged, mine) – Mott and me over the blue bridge and under and through the tunnel. And through that invisible LOOKING-glass wall that led you and led me from there.
Mott-in-hand my life changed forever as the needle accustomed to Andy Williams Mooooon River bounced and scratched along on My Mum’s old record-player positioned on the back dining-room floor out of the way, at the feet of where i am sitting now.
I was borne in this house in so many ways.
Today I walk past your old door, in Dudswell.
Ever ready to reconnect, not only with old Berko area but with why I began the football odyssey in the first place, i am revisiting over time the grass roots of the football game that so obsesses me. This can be in Hyde Park (you had a job/flat near there last time i pursued your memory and got the lowdown not from you but your Dad, more a cricket man) and these grass roots can be at Dudswell old rec, Butts Meadow, Velvet Lawn. Jane can you bring these memory places to life in a series of bright naive-art postcards (love that picture of yours “in the town where i was borne”) – i will pay for their production.
I walk on near the Grand Union Canal, past Berko Town’s ground and Graham Aiton is sat out the front and being me I recognise him but he calls me Kev (my bruvvers name). (Always fancied his tall gorgeous Scottish-looking sister Heather but it would not have worked).
I look for football near the Castle grounds, near Sam’s olden house, at Cooper’s grounds which was Kitchener’s Fields where everyone tobogganed. My grandfather whom I never knew was chief accountant for Cooper’s pharmaceuticals and agricultural supplies and built/opened many things in the town such as the town swimming-pool (the Deer-Leap also), the town’s football grounds, the Rex cinema (recently reborne). I search for and find his grave slumped up against a wall that looks as if its about to come down in that cemetery on Three Close Lane, above the Rex, almost in Ashlyns Estate – dangerous territory. (Indeed if I see Ashlyns bully Mick Duggan today, although my not being a man of violence, I shall pin him up against that dangerously leaning wall. He will have doubtless withered. And I have not).
The phone vibrates. It’s a text image of my daughter. Only offspring. And boy does she look sprung – punching the air Travolta-style about to party somewhere up there near Cleethorpes, she is dressed in red shoes, leggings and the black bolero I bought her. Another vibration and with it another image : she dancing and clutching a trumpet with a group of girls (The Band) in what looks like a Cuban balmy evening. My Ava is 4 next month.
Today I am sat on the old Woolworths spot now Waterstones and Costa Coffee, on Berkhamsted High Street, buying arty books for Ava (she is arty) (and sporty) and she phones my Mum and sings her “Happy Birthday” through several verses, quite beautifully.
We surrounded by books… which you yourself might have designed.
THE YOUNGSTERS KICK-OFF (homage to Bobby Robson, there in spirit)
The opening game of the season was a 9-goal thriller, away on the outskirts of the big city to last season’s champions, Throckley. Wark started brightly, passing the ball well, and with goals from midfielders Eddie and Jake we were soon 2–0 up. Throckley stole past the defence to reduce the deficit, but another goal from midfield restored a two goal advantage as our away supporters made their presence felt.
After halftime, it was another story and a more muscular style of outer-city football prevailed, as the Throckley lads scored 3 times to take the lead. Louis came off the bench as a substitute, and in the lone striker role made some intelligent runs into the box as well as displaying a willingness to seek the ball in deeper positions and link up play with the midfield. With 10 minutes to go, Louis was chopped down in the box by some more robust Throckley tackling, and the referee showed no hesitation in blowing his whistle and pointing to the spot. Some members of the crowd thought he should have been allowed to take his penalty, but with Jake on a hat-trick there was never any question that the captain would take the responsibility. At 4 all, with just a few minutes left on the clock, we thought we could come home with a precious away point but such hopes were swiftly dashed. While Wark were bringing on their last substitute, the referee inexplicably allowed play to continue, and some sloppy defending led to a late winner from the champions. Afterwards, our manager (Richard from the Co-op) commented “The referee had a shocker”. More philosophically, he concluded “It’s not all about results though. There are a lot of positives we can take away from this match”.
Man of the Match: Big Jake (for the hat-trick and a general willingness to help out all over the pitch)
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