Wait until next year

August 18, 2025

VCD Athletic vs Sittingbourne (FA Cup Preliminary Round)

Sandwich board advertising VCD vs Sittingbourne

I like to try to make at least one FA Cup game each season. I find it amazing that we still have a tournament where the smallest clubs in the country are in the same competition as some of the biggest clubs in the world.

Early qualifying rounds are a chance to feel part of something bigger – genuinely you are on the Road to Wembley. You are witnessing a small part of a much larger story, one that will play out over a whole season. Some people choose to follow the competition round-by-round picking a team at the start to watch and then following the winner of each fixture they see, right up to the final.

Hill leading down to a football pitch, with picnic benches on the way

For all that, it does feel a little peculiar that the non-league season starts with a glut of cup fixtures, at least for those lucky enough to progress, a fun run of games to have for sure, but a mixed blessing for any team looking to make a good start in the league.

And this game was not just about the magic of the FA Cup but was also a chance to see two teams in the same division face off and to see they might progress, or otherwise, this season.

Window of a clubhouse with a TV above it

VCD have a great ground, as you enter you pass a bowls green and a tennis club, a reminder that this was once a much larger sports ground for local munitions workers. The footballers still change in something that looks suspiciously like a cricket pavilion. The clubhouse feels like a proper clubhouse, a pubby feel, not too bright, with trophies, old team photos and a league ladder adorning the walls, along with the obligatory dartboard, pool table and Sky Sports screens. Some clubhouses can feel a little cold, with bright white walls and too bright lighting, more like a leisure centre lobby than a place to anticipate a win or commiserate a loss. Yet VCD’s clubhouse gets it right, it is homely, lived in.

Hatch of tea bar with a table in front with condiments

Once you pass through the turnstiles, if you can resist the tea bar, you are led down a slope to pitchside, and there’s something really pleasing about how the pitch opens up to you like that at the bottom of the hill. There’s a stand on one side, and then roofed standing all alongside the other side – a great place to watch football as you are sheltered from the elements and the low roof magnifies the sound too. All of these features help hem in the ground on what is a pretty large piece of land, enclosing it in a way that helps give the place some focus and identity.

Group of people leaning against hoarding watching football, a football stand in the distance

On to the game itself, and Sittingbourne would have considered themselves very unlucky not to win, but VCD certainly battled well to stay in the game the way they did. A penalty after 15 seconds was a hell of a start for Sittingbourne, as most of the crowd were still filing into the ground and milling around the tea bar. However, Frankie Leonard made a tremendous save to keep it out, followed up by an equally good reaction save from the rebound. Sittingbourne would go on to hit the woodwork three times and miss another penalty before Ellis Brown finally put them in front late in the game.

Cricket pavilion beyond a large patch of grass

Sittingbourne look like they could be a force to contend with in the league this year, strong, focused and able to attack on the break at pace. There were moments where it felt like they and their supporters were getting frustrated at not being ahead. And I felt that in some ways gave VCD some hope that they could get something out of a game they were still in with a shout of winning. There’s that certain kind of promise from hearing an opponent getting increasingly exasperated despite being on top, that maybe they are focused too much on perceived injustices rather than the game at hand and might soon have something to be genuinely fed up about.

Top of the hill, clubhouse and tea bar at the peak, people watching football going on down below

That VCD were able to stay in the game and frustrate Sittingbourne for so long is an encouraging sign for them. They play good football, are coached well and seem to have got a good balance between maintaining some continuity by retaining their core squad and recruiting the kind of quality players who will offer something new. If they can build on the determination and skill they showed in patches in this game they could surprise a few people this season. They just need a little more consistency and concentration over the 90 minutes.

So, the game ended 1-0, a fair result, but I can also imagine both dressing rooms might have spent some time contemplating if they should have got more from the game – that Sittingbourne should have put away their chances, and VCD should have maybe tightened things up more at the back and could have nicked something at the end. But it was a good day’s football, and a proper FA Cup tie. Now, to concentrate on the league…

August 8, 2025

Ace Records pop-up

A red Ace Record t-shirt hangs from the ceiling, boxes of records are behind it with more records on the wall

I miss record shops. I remember many happy Saturday afternoons working my way through all the local places, trawling their bargain bins and hoping something wonderful would appear. Now and then I’d make my way up town and work my way along Berwick Street’s record shops before taking on the giant Tower Records and HMV.

Obviously record shops still exist, it’s just there are far fewer of them. So when I have the opportunity to root through some records and CDs, I take it. Ace Records’ pop-up shop at Chalk Farm offered one of those opportunities. As part of their 50th birthday celebrations they have taken over an empty shop for a few days and filled it with much of their extensive back catalogue, predominantly of reissues of rare and previously unheralded tracks, along with some real rarities from their collection, including test pressings, along with some fun merchandise. There was loads of great stuff, and all reasonably priced too.

As much as it would be great to have a permanent physical home for Ace Records, a pop-up is a pretty good second best. I think it is something plenty of other labels could try. Last year Numero Group had a similar pop-up shop in London that was brilliant. There’s something quite special about being able to immerse yourself in a label’s back catalogue for a while.

Ace Records poster on a wall, and beyond it boxes of CDs on a table, with records and a tote bag hung on the wall behind that table

I particularly enjoyed overhearing the conversations between staff and customers. I think I know a fair bit about music, but I was in the presence of people who have forgotten more than I have ever known, who were clearly enjoying finding a venue where they could actually use their esoteric knowledge in a social setting. Funny how in just a few minutes you can hear about obscure old producers, the best record cutting services, upcoming gigs and major beefs amongst record collectors (something I didn’t even realise was a thing!). Record shop spaces can feel intimidating sometimes, but they can also be fascinating and very funny, intentionally or not.

On my way back I thought about what I see as The Collector Impulse – an impression that some people gain more fun in collecting (and hoarding) than in the actual thing itself. The thrill is in the chase beyond anything else. I see it sometimes in those people snapping up rare beer releases, or seeing how many football grounds they can visit, or…collecting rare records.

And then I thought how Ace Records, as a reissue label, is the antithesis of that impulse – they haven’t just collected, they have shared – and there is so much more wonderful music out there and easy to access because of their work. These songs aren’t lost, or lingering in a handful of private collections, but are back out there in the world enjoying a second life. It is a democratisation of music, bringing it to everyone, not just those with the time and budget to uncover lost classics. And that’s a very, very good thing.

The pop-up shop is open until Sunday, at 1 Adelaide Road, NW3 3QE, across the road from Chalk Farm tube station.

Exterior of shop with Ace Records banner hung from top, with Ace 50th Anniversary sign in the window.

August 4, 2025

A few short notes on Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Cover of Thomas Bernhard's book, Correction. There is the outlines of trees on the cover.

“Wherever we look, we see nothing but abandoned intentions”

Thomas Bernhard’s Correction (translated by Sophie Wilkins) is a book of two halves. In the first half the narrator is summoned to his friend Hoeller’s house following the death of their friend Roithamer, and is tasked with making sense of the papers that Roithamer left in Hoeller’s garret. The second half sees the narrator relay Roithamer’s final work, which outlines Roithamer’s thinking behind building a gigantic cone in the forest, but that ultimately details both his philosophy of the world and his descent into some kind of madness.

“I’ve lived half my life not in nature but in my books as a nature-substitute, and the one half was made possible only by the other half”

The two halves of the book mirror the doubling/halving seen throughout, the contrasts between books and nature, city and countryside, work and home. There need to be two sides to provide the right balance in life, a contrast that provides a creative tension that can help drive us, but also tear us apart. It is life as an act of perpetual correcting/correction, Bernhard in this book and others illustrating the urge to go from one direction to the exact opposite only to circle back again – whether in action or in word.

“What we publish is destroyed in the instant of publication. When we say what we are doing, it’s destroyed”

Bernhard’s trick in the second half of the book is to have the narrator indirectly relate Roithamer’s words, distancing us from them by placing the narrator between the reader and Roithamer. We are reading the narrator, who is reading Roithamer. It is a technique you can see Sebald picked up on with his works.

This doubling of narrators both mirrors the themes of doubling in the book and is a device that shows the thoughts and madness of Roithamer (or anyone) will always be just out of reach. We are all ultimately unknowable as we are in a permanent state of correction, forever changing, and there is no way for anyone to articulate that inner life on the page and even if we could, the reader would interject or project themselves onto the text, and then wish to look away – “We read a book, we’re reading ourselves, so we loathe reading”.

“Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life…the lack of ideas is death”

This is a book on the importance of ideas, and the impossibility of those ideas, that to truly fulfill an idea requires the kind of purity and perfection of both thought and action to render it unachievable for most of us, and destructive for the few who can actually realize their vision. The idea might bring about life, but its completion will kill us. I can see why the narrators in many of Bernhard’s later books procrastinate and fail to do anything. Roithamer is an example of what happens when you throw yourself entirely into an idea at the expense of everything else.

“In this way people tend to waver at a certain point in their lives, and always at the particular crucial point in their lives when they must decide whether to tackle the monstrousness of their life or let themselves be destroyed by it before they have tackled it”

I suppose in some ways a creative act is also an act of correction. In creating something new it is, by definition, in opposition to what went before it. There may be a set of influences or processes or standards, but the creation corrects all of those, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in monumental ones. And this how we fight that monstrousness of life, and maybe that is a quietly and perversely hopeful thing. We may ultimately be destroyed by our ideas, but it is our ideas that give us life.

August 2, 2025

Royal Oak, Northumberland Heath

The Royal Oak is massive. It’s local, and that’s important, but the first thing to mention is it’s massive. There are three bars in an age where even two bars is a rarity – The Poolroom Bar, The Bar That Always Has The Racing On, and The Main Bar That’s Out The Back. Well, that’s what I call them, anyway. It’s massive, it’s local, and it’s old. The current building dates to 1930-odd, but there’s been a pub on the site for a lot longer, nobody really knows how long. Pubs are often considered part of the fabric of the community, but this pub really is – it was here when this part of outer London suburbia was literally all fields. You can’t really talk about the history of this part of the world, Northumberland Heath in the Borough of Bexley, without at least giving a nod to the Royal Oak.

So, it’s local. I think you have to situate every pub in its environment. It sits in what many would consider a nondescript part of London, right on the outskirts, certainly far from gentrification, a place sort of in a bind over whether it is actually even in London or really in the neighbouring county of Kent – a recurring subject for some of the most fervent and misguided discussion you’ll ever see on a Local Facebook page (the real answer is “Once was Kent, until London swallowed it up in the mid-1960s”). It is an area that wasn’t particularly well-populated until a century ago, when the builders swooped in and built lots and lots of suburban streets. My view (one I may, or may not, expand on one day) is the whole area is an area of immigrants, and a whole lot better for it. It is just that some people don’t see things how I do, that you can immigrate from Bermondsey just as much as you can from Nigeria or Poland. There aren’t many people who can go back several generations and find their ancestors lived around here. We’re all from somewhere else.

It is also an area where people love a good pub, and that for many years didn’t have many to actually love. A whole lot of old boozers for Locals and Locals Only, a fair few others with shoddy beer, even more shoddily kept, and then a few chain places that were…fine. There was the odd glimpse of What Pubs Can Be – the Robin Hood and Little John in Bexleyheath was, and is, a great pub – a little country pub dropped on a suburban street, a place that had to be excluded from the local CAMRA’s Pub of the Year voting as it kept winning, if I remember rightly.

So, a lot of people who loved pubs, but not many places that deserved that love, until the micropub revolution hit the area. In many ways Bexley was the perfect place for micropubs. The clientele were there, waiting, thirstily. There were plenty of empty shops ideal for conversion. And a wonderful local brewery emerging, Bexley Brewery, to provide the beer for those who wanted to serve something local. Down the road from the Royal Oak is the Bird and Barrel (Bexley’s Brewery’s taproom, essentially, although they serve far more than just their own beers), a genuinely special place and a real community hub. It’s not too far to venture to the Long Haul, the Kentish Belle, the Hackney Carriage, the Door Hinge and more. Bexley suddenly had a whole wealth of good places to drink, places with good beer, good company and welcoming staff. But there was still room for the old pubs to step up.

Old pubs like the Royal Oak. A place that was local, A Local.

I remember stepping in there for the first time way back in the last century, as somewhere identified as a good candidate for an underage pint. I got a Guinness with another lad. Then the rest of the bunch we were with filed in, knowing we’d been served…and just sat down without ordering anything. Rightly, understandably, the barman came over and asked us to leave. I asked him if I could finish my Guinness first and he said Yes. A true gentleman.

Until this year I think I’d only stepped back in there a handful of times. It was massive (had I mentioned that?) and a bit overwhelming. What bar were you meant to go in? Did that heavy door even work? It wasn’t especially welcoming, there wasn’t anything decent to drink and it generally felt like a pub that perhaps wasn’t for me, which was a shame, but fine. There’s always somewhere else to go.

Bar with wooden frontage, wood beams on ceiling and pub furniture dotted about

That all changed early this year when reading Boak and Bailey’s weekly roundup of interesting beer writing I saw that not only was the Royal Oak under new management, but the manager was also writing about their experiences. Suddenly a pub I had basically written off became far more interesting and more promising. The grand old place was changing, and hopefully for the better.

Hazel, the manager, has written brilliantly about the realities of taking a pub on (as an actual proper journalist, that is no surprise, but it feels like a real luxury having someone so eloquent covering this kind of subject matter – a proper peek behind the curtain of what it really means to run a pub). And popping in from time to time over the last few months it has been clear that the pub is really changing for the better – a more welcoming place, with much better beer (cask back on, and good cask, well kept!), yet still true to its roots as a massive, local (capital L-Local?) pub.

It’s easy to pop into a tired pub and say it has potential, but Hazel has actually done something about it, spearheading a refurbishment inside and out – from sorting out a run-down outer building and car park to giving a very sensitive makeover inside. It is a refurbishment that feels very much in step with what I think is maybe Hazel’s philosophy to running a pub – it is sympathetic to the history of the building, a restoration rather than a refurbishment really, keeping the spirit of the place, or maybe even re-igniting it, but also making it feel like somewhere that is opening its arms to the community, the whole community. Somewhere we can all feel welcome, feel like we belong. But still fundamentally, to its very core, a Proper Boozer. And a pub that’s aware that for Proper Boozers to survive they need to be both sensitive to their past, conscious of the present and optimistic about the future.

The old wood panelling inside had been revarnished, the old tat on the walls removed, the ancient carpet replaced (but with a proper pub carpet!), the paintwork doesn’t feel too modern, but in keeping with the building. A modern pub doesn’t need to have a load of exposed brick, or grey walls, or a tiled bank of craft keg taps. It just needs to look like it cares. The pub is now not just for the Regulars, but is very deliberately a place for whoever wants to cross the threshold, wherever they are from, whoever they are. And there is more on the way – a new garden, food, a community focus. It has gone from a tired relic to a real, living community space, a Public House in a very modern yet very real sense.

We need Public Houses more than ever, in our increasingly atomised and oppositional society. We need places where we can all feel like we belong, where we can escape, where we take a moment to ourselves or have a chat with others. Places to see for ourselves that we’re not all that different after all, despite what the media and politicians would like us to believe. Bexley has been fortunate to gain these kinds of places with its micropubs, and now it has a Proper Boozer taking up that mantle too.

It is a pub that finally looks like it is proud of itself, and is worth taking pride in. And for pubs to survive they need to evolve in this way, to broaden their welcome while still being true to what makes pubs amazing. And that takes some real bravery – to make people welcome but to also stop the regulars making people feel unwelcome, or to take on a refurbishment of a building that won’t yield easily to such treatment. Communities need pubs, but pubs need communities too.

Seeing the Royal Oak refurbished, restored, I felt a little choked up. I felt a real connection to the past. I looked at the old signage and wondered how many people had looked at them in the years gone by. All those people who had sat here and had a pint, over the last century or so. Here was a place countless people have loved, laughed, cried, taken refuge. And here was a place that will do all that and more for future generations. Hazel and her team are doing something very important here. They are preserving the legacy of the pub, and creating their own too.

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December 14, 2022

13th December

The snow is still here from yesterday.

It is enough snow to close some schools, but not others. The kind of snow a seasoned winter-ist would scoff at – just a dusting!

The kind of snow that gives a phone-in radio host the excuse to exclaim “Why can’t we cope with a bit of snow, the rest of the world can?” The kind of peculiar, contradictory exceptionalism where he sees his country as simultaneously both The Greatest Country In The World and The Worst Country In The World.

The pavements aren’t too slippery, but the snow still slows everything down. Careful, careful. It slows everything down at a time when we’re all trying to get stuff done, before the holidays, before the real slow time.

There is a wonderful uncanny light, as the whiteness of the snow bounces back into the sky. Everything looks a little off, in an intriguing, enticing way. Blues, greys, whites, play off one another. There is a stillness, quietness too.

Woodland on snowy day, blue-grey sky above

Some trees hold the snow, others sag from it. They are all immeasurably beautiful.

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