Free Places To Drink Cans In London Without Feeling Like A Tramp #3: Lewisham People's Day

This is a love letter, of sorts.

crowd shot.

Not too long ago in real terms but what now seems like the distant past my friends and I would have sworn that we would live in our home town of Leeds forever. Things haven't turned out that way. Some of my closest friends have spread out around the country and around the world as jobs, family, girlfriends or boredom have taken us away from what we once thought we would always call home. After everyone finished their university years and returned to Leeds it seemed like an old gang had got back together and that it would never split again. Proximity and history had brought us back together but then life happened again. People grew up, got married, found proper jobs, had kids and people started moving away from Leeds once more. The sight and the memories of my home town will always bring me comfort, make me feel strangely safe and fill me with happiness but it is the people I shared those memories that matter most. It's my friends who made the memories, my friends that made Leeds such a brilliant city to grow up in and live in thereafter and it's those friends from which new memories are being forged with still, just not as regularly as before.

a bloody big periscope.

As friends have spread throughout the world it's become much harder to see each other. I can't just get on a flight to Australia or Ecuador, I can't get on a train up to Leeds every weekend (even if I wanted to), I can't organise myself well enough to sort out a weekend anywhere else. It's said it's easier to stay in touch with people nowadays with the advent of social media and mobile technology but I never receive a ten page letter from a friend or relative like my mum used to or on take part in a two hour conversation on the phone like she still does so, yeah, it's easier to stay in touch but it's harder to actually find anything real out. So the time I do get to spend with friends nowadays is paramount and cherished.

main stage.

And so I met the news that Michael confirmed he'd be getting the train down to London from Rotherham for the weekend of Lewisham People's Day with great excitement. Michael is a friend of mine and Robins (a fellow Leeds expat living in London) from our school days. Michael and I used to eat kebabs and drink cans in his car in a dogging car park whilst discussing (and crying over) various unsuccessful love affairs and listening to emo music. We called this our weekly Dashboard Confessional. We were fucking funny. You can't do stuff like that with just anyone (and look back and laugh at yourselves years later) Michael was always going to be a friend for life, no matter how far away we lived from one another or lazy/unorganised I became/continued to be.

variety show.

Anyway, he came down to Lewisham People's Day two years ago and he's now decided to make it an annual outing. Lewisham People's Day is paid for by Lewisham council so it has bigger clout and backing than most of the free festivals you find round London. It's great that the council are still managing to do this with all the cut backs being forced upon them and you can tell it makes a difference to the community of Lewisham of which between 20 to 30 thousand turned up on the day. It brings the various disparate arts, school and music groups as well as the various communities, religions, etc. from around Lewisham together so you get a great mix of people as well as a great mix of things going on over the five stages and many stalls and tents.

another crowd shot.

The festival is cut up into four main areas and includes an indie tent (bands include the confused but fun The Floodliners, a band with a 70 year old guitarist and another band with a 17 year old boy dressed as Slash), a main stage (rap groups, dance troupes, soul groups), a Lewisham hub stage (where you get local school groups and orchestras from the area) an acoustic bandstand stage (stuff like a capella choirs, acoustic troubadours and reggae artists) and the big top tent (acts include a variety show, some bingo and some band that had a worldwide number one many years ago).

The Floodliners

There were a couple of big food areas this year; one was the new breed on trendy home made street food selling things like home made sausage rolls, chorizo, loads of vegetarian bumf, cakes, bread and what not and then more 'traditional' Lewisham food; jerk chicken. You'll have to queue a while for the jerk chicken. However many pieces of chuck they chuck on the barbecue they always struggle to keep up with the demand. There's aloso a plant and herb stall which I always get far too excited about. There's loads of things for kids to do from face painting, to the craft market to creating a skateboard design to entering the 'minilympics.'

jerk; the food of Lewisham.

And if you want to eat a load of food, drink a load of beer (warning there are no real ale or real cider tents here; the beer vans only sell nondescript cooking lager and pish cider. Bring your own until they learn) and then make yourself sick there's a multitude of scary looking fairground rides to turn your stomach over. There are also a lot of fairground games that are nearly impossible to win and almost nearly as impossible to not have a go (when you've been drinking pints of gin).

losing.

Before we went this year I wasn't sure if you were allowed to take cans in which led to us decanting a litre of gin into plastic tonic bottles so we could consume this in a field on one of the hottest days of the year. Great idea. For the record you can take cans in; the only rule regarding booze is no glass bottles. That and not being a twat. And maybe having a good time. You do have to go through an airport security type entrance where you you will get a metal detector scanned around your body when you arrive so don't go strapping a hip flask to your body; you can take it in anyway.

a rare sight; a bandstand being used for what it was built for.

Anyway after a pint of cooking lager and a pint of gin we sat down in the Big Top tent to watch Ida Barr bingo. Ida Barr is a man dressed as a granny who sings hip hop songs and plays bingo with the audience. It may not sound funny but it bloody well is after a pint of gin and when your friend fucks up, thinks he's won the bingo, but is then lambasted by a hip hop granny on stage in front of a packed tent who accuses him of cheating. I think Michael was drinking faster than I was and didn't realise that Ms Barr had purposefully neglected to tell the crowd the full extent of the rules; I’m sure it's a normal part of the routine and (un)fortunately Michael was suckered in with the hope of winning a tea pot shaped like a British phone box.

Michael getting bummed on stage by a hip hop granny. Not literally.

We walked around the festival site for the next few hours alternating our pints of gin with pints of crap lager watching various acts, eating different food stuff and catching up with each others lives in the sun. It was almost perfect. And then it was perfect; Musical Youth came on in the Big Top. Musical Youth!! Those who wrote and performed the reggae classic Pass the Dutchie. These were heady times. It turns out they didn't really write anything else, not anything anyone would have heard of anyway so they (or the two remaining members of the original group and a load of session musicians/ mates) played a set of (other peoples) reggae hits. They then did a ten minute rendition of Pass The Dutchie. I never thought I had wanted to hear a ten minute rendition of Pass The Dutchie, or indeed see Musical Youth live, I'd go as far as saying the thought had never crossed my mind, but in that moment, in that tent, with two of my favourite friends everything made sense. And then Michael dropped his pint on the floor covering my legs in cheap lager and everything was normal again. We were sixteen again in a park in Leeds. Nothings changed except almost everything. And if that doesn't make sense to you I pity you a tad.

Passing The Dutchie to the left hand side about 100 times.

So yeah as Joey Cape of LagWagon once sang: To all my friends; I remember every drunken night at the old dive. And something that he didn't; so do I, but let's keep on creating new memories. You still mean the same to me wherever we all live at the moment and wherever we all may end up in the future.

'erbs.

www.lewisham.gov/peoplesday

Free Places To Drink Cans In London Without Feeling Like A Tramp #1: Lords

 This is the first in an occasional series where I attempt to find places in London where you can drink cans of beer for free and not feel like an outcast from society or a bench hugging homeless person. Everyone knows London is an expensive place to live and drink and I believe if I find nice ways round this (so not sitting at home, alone, watching films and drinking cans of cooking lager like a one Man Behaving Badly) it is my duty to share my findings with the two readers of this blog. I'll receive your thanks in the guise of a four pack of London's Pride, it's really not a problem though, someone's got to do it. It may as well be me.

Yorkshire taking on the dodo

It's a little known fact (as no-one cares) that during County Championship cricket matches (that's the four day stuff which if you believed the papers are only attended by three OAP's and a dog. Which is patently untrue, especially when Yorkshire come to town; there are three OAP's, a dog and me.*) after the tea break they open up the gates for any riff raff to come in and watch the last session for free. That's basically £5.33 of cricket that you get for free at Lords. (A days ticket is £16 for the mathematically challenged.)

Cherie Blairs Mouth

It is Middlesex County Cricket Club who play their home games at The Home Of Cricket (that's what Lords calls itself, the pompous twat) but it isn't actually a county, it isn't actually anything so I feel they're cheating a bit. Middlesex the county was abolished on April 1st 1965 so not only do they not exist any more, they seem to have been a victim of an Aprils fools joke that went horribly wrong as people actually believed it resulting in bureaucrats actually wiping the county off the register. How unfortunate. They really must have a major complex about this and constantly question who they are all the time (easy answer: they are no-one) and to combat this identity crisis they seem to have developed a player called Adam London to give them some sense of belonging somewhere. If the grounds in London and they have a player called London surely that's where they belong right? Me thinks they're trying a tad too hard. They should just give up and realise they don't exist, it's obvious, it says so on Wikipedia. Bearing this in mind my home county of Yorkshire, (who were playing Middlesex at Lords hence my attendance and this blog) the biggest and best county in the whole land, couldn't possibly lose to somewhere which basically isn't real. The match wasn't really Davis versus Goliath, it was Goliath versus the dodo. Those dodo's do look like menacing fuckers though, I've seen one in the Horniman museum. A lot was at stake.**

The Champagne Bar didn't open when Yorkshire came to town. Wonder why.

Anyway as I say they open up the gates usually a bit after tea which usually ends at about 4pm and you can get in most areas of the ground (if you've got a tie, jacket and a members card for any county you can get into all areas except the corporate boxes) and the stewards don't treat you like a piece of white dog shit that you don't see any more because our great nations street cleaners are so efficient, so you can actually talk to them like human beings and if in the unlikely event they do question you just say you want a look around. They even called me 'Sir' on all four days I was there. The main up shot of the stewards being okay and treating their patrons as normal people is they don't check your bags so even though the County Championship rules say you can only bring in four cans of beer per person you can actually bring in as many as your bag can carry. I recommend going down to Millets and buying an 80 litre hiking rucksack.

A Bowler

If you do decide to go to Lords for a final session to have some cans you must adhere to certain cricket etiquette; don't stand up or walk around in the middle of an over, turn your mobile phone to silent, don't smoke in the stands, clap when you can (I'm not getting into the intricacies of clapping etiquette here, it'll take my whole life) and be kind to all follow watchers of the real beautiful game. But one of the main things is to keep your ears ready to overhear old people imparting wisdom to each other, they're very wise, have lived at least two thirds of their lives and know their shit, they will teach you a thing or two. On this occasion I've heard a woman wax lyrical about how obituaries are the only bit of the paper she reads and a man in his sixties banging on about banging whores in Thailand. We live in a truly wondrous world.

The Full Toss Bar. Add your own amusing caption.

The other main thing, the most important aspect about going to the cricket that you must understand is the lunch box. Believe me, the non assuming packed lunch hasn't been this important since you went to Lightwater Valley or Alton Towers on a school trip. The cricket lunch box can be a wonderful thing and if you take it seriously there are a few rules you should follow. First of all being out in the open air all day means you'll feel constantly hungry and in need of snacks throughout the day so pack enough. I usually take two full lunches, a breakfast and then various pork based nibbles for a full day but if you're only going for the two hours after tea one lunch and some nibbles should be sufficient enough for you.

You should have staples of your lunch box; some fruit, a sandwich, crisps, a Gold Bar, (your chocolate based confectionery should always be a Gold Bar, cricket has delusions of grandeur; so should you) and the aforementioned pork based snacks. Once you have your staples it's time to have your fun and turn a run of the mill packed lunch into a cricket themed packed lunch. Here's what you need to do; first, think about your teams opposition, this will determine the rest of your lunch box or indeed what flavour/ fillings your staples will be. You must base your food from the county your team is playing, for example if you're playing Leicestershire you'll need a Melton Mowbray pork pie, if it's Gloucestershire you are up against your sarnie should contain Gloucester cheese, if your county is playing Somerset you should have a cider (or ten) in your box (or your new 80 litre bag from Millets). Once you've got that out of the way check the team sheet of the opposition; if they have an Indian international playing include a Bhaji, if they have a West Indian include rice and peas and so on. The possibilities are almost endless.

Lords Toilets; luxury

For me this match threw up Middlesex, a place which I hope I firmly established earlier doesn't exist and as the dodo in the Horniman museum is obviously only a model reproduction of what one may have looked like I couldn't steal it and use it's centuries old meat for a sandwich so I focused on Yorkshire. I made a few Wensleydale cheese sandwiches, packed some ham from a Yorkshire pig, sweated some Harrogate sausages with red onion and wrapped them in Yorkshire puddings and brought some Gold Bars. Always the Gold Bars. I also bought a bottle of Magnum*** as Middlesex had West Indian Corey Collymore playing for them. Please, please, please take the cricket lunch box seriously.

Even if you can't be bothered packing your own lunch box I recommend going to Lords for some cans at the end of the day.**** It'll be the nicest, most majestic, elegant place you can drink cans for free without feeling like a tramp. The toilets are worth it on their own, trust me.

Note for Yorkshire fans: Yorkshire won by 10 wickets, this is the best and most confident Yorkshire team I've seen in the eight or so years I've been watching Championship cricket regularly and weather permitting, I think we'll win the title this year.

*Not actually true, County Championship matches are quite well attended and you get less twonks who only go to matches where they can decipher the opposition (so they can shout abuse at them) by the colour of the shirt they're wearing.

**Actually hardly anything was; it was a cricket match.

***Not really, cricket is no place for insanity in a bottle.

****I actually recommend going for the full day, or more specifically for all four days of a County Championship game so that you can appreciate the ebb and flow of a proper cricket match. £16 (or £5 for the final day) for seven hours entertainment isn't much at all and it is worth it.