To The Nottage! …on a damp Estuary Wilds Friday evening. Thirty five odd years ago and we would be starting the weekly WEEKENDER ritual of getting tarted up and buzzing off our tits just up the road at the University.
Middle-age means a more sedate Friday evening sitting in a historic nautical room with a bunch of stiffs, watching a series of old films depicting Weird Wiv on camera from days gone by.
LIVE the dream, Jase. At least we managed to reduce the average age of the coffin dodgers by a couple of decades.
We took up our position on the back row of The Nottage. It wasn’t exactly DATE NIGHT. Plus I had forgotten my specs, and so had to quint to see anything.
Lined up for the evening’s entertainment was a rag tag collection of old films featuring Wivenhoe. there was no soundtrack, just home movie footage. This led to a constant stream of commentary from the audience.
“Oh look, there’s old Jim!”
I challenged A to shout out:
“There’s Dave!”
There was no Dave.
That would have livened the stiffs up.
The first film was a rather lengthy home movie affair, featuring the voyage of Cap Pilar. This is a ship that is still spoken of around these parts with reverence.
The back story is a young fella back in the 1930’s SPUNKING his wealth on Cap Pilar, and then inviting a crew of around sixty or so local types to explore the world with him. The outbreak of War cut the journey short after a couple of years.
Footage from the voyage was incredibly homoerotic. I don’t think that was the intentions, any maybe it was just me that saw this. The crew were pretty much all stripped off, muscle bound and scrubbing the decks, as well as each other.
Blimey. And that was all without my specs on.
It dragged a little, tbh. Some fast forwarding of the hour long footage followed. It was hardly a Friday night spent doom scrolling on Tik Tok.
A short break followed, and then we had a mid 80’s promo film trying to sell the idea of the Tidal Barrier to the locals. There was some fantastic accidental Partridge quotes in there.
The commentary covered the original idea of the Barrier being closed up to four times a year. Fifty or so closures is now not uncommon. Time and tide, and global warming, innit.
The final film was a comedy home video gone wrong. I don’t think we were suppose to be laughing, but the back row action had us pissing our pants, trying to cover up all the jocularity.
The subject matter involved one of the final launches of a grand old industrial ship just before the shipyard closed. You can imaging the scene: the whole town had turned out for the smashing of the Champagne bottle. School kids had the afternoon off.
High tide arrived, the dignitaries rocked up. Our DIY cameraman was on the opposite side of the Muddy Banks to capture the action.
THREE! TWO! ONE!
The ship slid down the slipway, and then promptly pointed in the wrong direction.
OH SHIT.
Some mad scrambling followed to get the bulk of a vessel back on the slipway with the water fast draining back out downstream.
It was classic Weird Wiv. We found it funny as fuck. No one else did.
There was talk of heading back up to campus for an all nighter with a little more light refreshment. Instead we were back in bed by 10am.
