Newcastle to Perpignan; my first post.

I have found it harder than expected to start my blogging. I had a clear notion of setting out the principles of my ’40 for 40’ challenge and the supporting philosophy. This hasn’t happened, so I have decided to leap straight in and write some words about how my sporting match challenge has gone so far.

I am still in the first month and with my five fixtures I am well on target to achieve the forty by the end of the year. So far I have been to:

Newcastle Redbulls vs Perpignan
Perpignan vs Johanesburg Lions
Lyon vs Treviso (aka Bennetton)
Olympique Lyonnais vs Brest
Munster vs Dragons

I’ve watched games from the snow-trodden Tyneside to the rain-sodden Mediterranean this month.

I am not a sporty person – or i hadn’t thought I was. This challenge originally was about getting out and living more widely, seeing more places, doing more things. However, I have found a genuine enjoyment in the games and found myself shouting along for the homeside like an avid fan. This has ranged from a brusque ‘Come on lads’ through to a Francophile ‘Allez les gars’

My trip to see the Newcastle Redbulls was a cold one: the streets of Newcastle glistened by saline encrusted ice and towards the stadium the paths had been compacted down into a hardened layer of snow. The stadium was small and easily accessible by Metro albeit a confusing route – though I just followed the crowds. The metro is quite small and not London-regular so it was worth pushing out as soon as the game finished to get on. In the morning, I’d visited the Baltic where nearly twenty years previously I’d declared a lib-gem future as a bright eyed 18 year old student activist on Election Night on live TV.

Perpignan was superb and was totemic of the basis of my challenges. I was using my leave to get out and see France. I had my InterRail pass and was on a night train from Paris Austerlitz – remarkable for being the drabbest departure station in France – and arrived early in Perpignan. Cafe creme down the hatch and on a bus to the coast where I scared local by going for a January swim not in a wetsuit. I’d been to Perpignan before and hadn’t much liked it. I hadn’t much liked it this time. What I did like was the game. They played in a flood-inducing levels of rain sloshing around. This did little to temper the Catalan pressure; I quickly realised that this was not a French team, this was Perpinya and their blood was Catalan.

Sadly at all of the French matches, there was no alcohol-free beer available and the food was heavily meat based. Even the desperate chips I sought turned out to have been cooked in beef fat.

By the time I got back to my hotel room, I was soaked through and my waterproof had given up. I set about trying to dry my clothes overnight before the morning train and hoped for a hot shower to relieve me, sadly this dated hotel room had only cold water.

I left early the next morning to catch my direct train to Lyon, arriving at the station which Dali declared the centre of the world having successfully avoided various rowdy drunks and street dwellers. Lyon is a city I want to go back to: truly beautiful. My striking memory of the match against Trevisio was that the stadium was a modern one encased in an old one built out of brick and plaster. It had a slight Nuremberg vibe. Also, they were selling oysters as stadium food – peak French.

Less endearing was the French’s partisanship during the matches. In England, it is usually to gently applaud good skills from the opposing side and to always wait in silence during a kick. No such courtesy displayed in France.

That evening, I boarded a special tram to the suburbs to see Olympique Lyonnais play against Brest. The stadium was lit up in blue and was celebrating its tenth anniversary, it was shrouded in mist and fireworks from the ultra fans were going off. I despise working football games in my day job because of the blokes rowdiness but found as a spectator I was able to navigate my way away from this. The throb of the mob was actually enjoyable as a spectacle. As much as I enjoyed the football, I was equally captivated by the frozen air sinking through the stadium’s aperture illuminated by the flood lights.

My final sporting match of the trip was in Cork – having got a ferry from Cherbourg to Dublin; an adventure in itself. This again was a windy wet affair and sadly no alcohol-free stouts or porters were available. A small ground with a shiny pitch. A half hour walk with no realistic transport back to the city centre which given the cold, rainy, windy night I would have taken.

My ‘forty for forty’ challenge is about living more widely so that when I go gaga in the nursing home, I have a rich diversity of memory to live in. My experience of the world has increased thanks to this challenge and has provided me with a reassuring framework to go out there and live.

And i’ve just completed my first post.