Ipswich

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Wassat spell???
Wassat spell???


Ipswich!!!


I once spent a year in Ipswich. I'm not bragging, I just did.

Ipswich is out on the east coast, about 70 miles from London, a fair old step, and not near anywhere else much.

Surrounded by Tory country, Ipswich is an industrial town and solidly Labour. It has a football team that used to be in the top division in English football.

And who can forget Keith Dellar, the darts player from Ipswich, who rose to fame briefly in the early Eighties?

The people have a strange accent and pronounce 'have' as 'hiv'.

It is very cold there. One night when I was there the temperature went down to minus sixteen.

There are quite a few West Indian and Pakistani people there.

I have never seen so many West Indians with ginger hair and freckles as in Ipswich.
There were also a lot of American servicemen from the nearby air bases. You could see them a mile off, both black and white. They were all really big, quite a different physique to the local people.

There was a pub, I can't remember the name unfortunately, where all the naughty things in Ipswich went on.

On one side was a separate pool room, full of ganga smoking Ipwich Rastafarians, and in the main bar very camp old gay guys sat around talking to pantomime prossies.

I saw a TV programme about Ipswich in the War and this pub featured in it. It was a flashpoint between black and white US servicemen in World War 2 and there was a stabbing there, which shocked the town.

I also went to the local astronomy group's open night at their HQ in a stately home observatory.

It was a huge telescope with a built-in chair in a purpose-built observatory,constructed for the eccentric lord of the manor in the 19th century. It had a lift operated by water, though that wasn't working during my visit.

It happened to be a really clear evening and we saw the setting crescent moon followed by Venus.

The milord who built the place always wanted Queen Victoria to visit, but she never did.

He had a village relocated because it spoiled his view.

It was him who put up the money for the first railway in Ipswich and that is why, to this day, the trains head north and then skirt round the town, instead of going directly south; it was because old lordy didn't want to see any poor people on his way to London.




And that's what Ipswich means to me!

Ipswich on Wikipedia