Blog Norwich

Hurrah. This weekend sees the return of the 18-wheeler ploughfest that is Sparks in the Park in Earlham Park in Norwich. I won’t be there. The older I get, the more I value my sanity. That’s not to say I haven’t been there before. The last time I went was about 4 years ago when, as usual, it was a little big too cold, wet and miserable to be spectacularly enjoyable anyway, but even then, it was like something out of a waking nightmare. The peculiar sensation of being herded into an enormous pen, in the dark, with about 20,000 loon-faced ankle-tagged troglodites gurning into cans of special brew, the bonkers lighting of the travelling fairground shining off their large shiny foreheads, is one I choose not to experience twice. I caught sight of a friend who had moved down to London and had just come up to visit with his wife, just as he slowly sank out of view between the teeming mass of Fiveways escapees, mouthing the words  ‘help me’, with a cold stare of inevitability writ large on his face. I never saw him again.

Its not so much the experience on the night which turns me off the whole event, its the aftermath, relayed nightly, in aghast detail, in the Evening News. It looks like it will be a perfect November evening on Saturday, with just the right combination of damp and soggy ground, so that when it comes to packing all the travelling toys back in their boxes and trundling on to the cheese fair in Chelmsford, or whereever these thing go, the conditions will be ideal for ploughing. That is, ploughing up Earlham Park with articulated montrosities, attempting hill starts up a greased-up grassy 1 in 5 in the rain, like something out of Its a Knockout. I can almost hear Stuart Hall cackling away as great tracts of once-usable green space are flung around by the spinning wheels of a 1983 Volvo truck, hitting passing dog-walkers and families on a Sunday stroll. The state of that park after the tractor-pulling event is over is more like a great war re-enactment than a place where I can use jumpers for goalposts and have a nice cup of tea in a shed, looking out over the B1108 for stolen Vauxhall Novas.

I’ll be nibbling home-made carrot cakes and locally sourced sausages in buns, as I warm my hands around a crackling little community fire, oohing and aahing at the delicate little explosions put on for the benefit of the select few friends of the Plantation Garden, counting the Mini Boden wellies, and sharing stories of planning applications. You’d expect nothing less.