Three sided football this weekend.

I've managed to draft in a good friend who has volunteered to help and most importantly, drive! We'll head out in the morning for Plumstead Common with all the gear and film the guys setting up the hexagonal pitch. If you're reading this and thinking "what the fudge is three sided football" then check out this earlier post. We'll also film some talking heads and hopefully have enough material to put something half decent together!

I grew up around Plumstead Common although I have not been there in many years. I'm curious to see what has changed and what has stayed the same! I remember the view from Winns Common, which is just next to Plumstead Common and is at the peak of the uphill road I grew up on. I used to go up there every weekend in the late 80's and  early 90's to climb on the tumulus - a well preserved bronze age burial mount, and to the Northern tip of the common where I would gaze out over the flat expanses of North East London all the way to Essex. You can clearly see the grounds of Belmarsh prison and I would always count the number of gas holders and towering chimneys on the horizon, sometimes with a pair of heavy, grown-up shiny new binoculars my grandfather gave me for my birthday. Within a year the binoculars were destroyed by water damage and condensation when I foolishly tried to use them to see underwater in a playground paddling pool on Winns Common, a source of stomach churning guilt for many years. I never threw them out, even though they were essentially useless and I never told my grandfather.

The view from Winn's Common

But back to modernity. Once we're filming on the common we have a rather sizeable problem in that we will be in an open space for many hours with no access to power points. I'm going to fully charge my batteries before we head out, and then I guess I'll need to need to take a break halfway through to take a short drive back to Owen's house to wait for the batteries to charge, which could take an hour or two. Not exactly ideal, but short of hiring out some sort of generator, we're stuck with it. We'll miss a chunk of the day but we should still end up with enough footage to make a nice little video. We're not there to document the whole match, just to assemble a short video about three sided football and about the Plumstead Make Merry, the people hosting the match.

Right now, the ever unreliable weather forecast for Sunday is bucketing rain all day long. As I look out my window, it's much the same right now. Fingers crossed for good weather on the day. We'll have no cover.