Freelance work

Barging past a swarm of small children jostling upwards from the seafront, I arrive at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. It is, with the best will in the world, an ugly building, like a bingo hall had sex with a secondary school. Inside is a different story. Its intestines are a marbled maze of tiles and carpets, dressed with long wooden handrails and dotted with dramatic stained glass lights. 

A gym owner and personal trainer from central Iowa, Joe clocks an average of three y’know’s for every sentence spoken and within minutes of his podcast’s first episode has identified that whilst “one person can have a peanut butter sandwich and be fine”, another person might be left facing an “epipen nightmare”. It’s a metaphor. His point being that “not everybody is the exact same”.

Beside me, a woman in a headscarf shares a packet of Quavers with a newborn; beside her, a man in an Adidas tracksuit holds a plastic pint of Guinness in one hand and a tiny sleeping child in the next. There are four different coaches of three different ethnicities, the youngest separated from the eldest by an absolute minimum of 50 years. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It must take an entire town to raise a footballer.

Somebody has been playing Balkan heavy metal in the café. The culprit’s identity remains a mystery, but let’s just say that our 6ft 2in Bosnian barista seems sheepish.