Just like Tuesday night – here we were, driving round a one-way system in a Suffolk town and looking for somewhere to park. Unlike Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich has a fast and lively road network and a town centre that dies at six in the evening.
We’d arrived early for an evening with Professor Brian Cox and his New Horizons tour (along with 1,200 other people; we’re not personal friends of the famous physicist…) and were hoping for a couple of hours exploring the town. We’d been here in 2016 for the Gin Festival and found Ipswich to be a mixture of expensive hotels and rough sleepers – this year, the rich had almost disappeared and the streets were blank and uninviting.
The weather didn’t help – cold, windy, snow in the forecast – but a warm cafe makes that kind of weather a treat. Finding refuge in a Costa Coffee that seems to be the only place open at 5pm isn’t the same, and when they closed at 6pm we were adrift. We went back to the statue set up to honour the cartoonist Giles in Queen Street (Grandma is looking straight at the window of the office where Giles worked for decades) and found absolutely nowhere open along the way to sit with a drink and a snack.
We spent our spare time in Ipswich queuing up outside the Regent Theatre for Brian Cox’s show and wondering whether it was worth coming here at all. But – it was. The show is described as a warm-up for his upcoming tour, but after these two dates in Ipswich Mr Cox will be off to America and Canada. He did do a previous warm up tour in 2021 for his New Zealand and Australia dates (cancelled), but hey, we’re glad he landed here before he takes off for foreign parts.
And yes, Robin Ince was there. Luckily, because he started the evening by reassuring everyone that we would understand absolutely everything Brian said… until we stood up, then the ideas would disappear like we’d shaken them loose, but neither did distinguished cosmologists understand it all. And we were off.
We weren’t allowed to record or photograph the show, but I hope we can see those great backdrops again. They were the cities of the future with space elevators, astronaut/tourists and communities living at the safest limit of black holes (and deriving their energy resources by chucking their rubbish into the black hole, if you believe Professor Cox). Great to hear that the Infinite Monkey Cage is recording its thirteenth series at the moment; it’s the science equivalent of Morecambe and Wise, with famous people keen to appear on it and the joker of the pair ready to biff the serious one into submission if he dives too deep into cutting edge physics.
Highlights of the evening? Learning that the peculiar black hole featured in the film ‘Interstellar’ was a realistic representation of the latest scientific research, courtesy of physicist Kip Thorne. Hearing the sainted Professor Cox say that he’d been invited to give his opinion to the world’s leaders gathered at COP26, and that he’d told them; ‘Don’t fuck it up’. Himself leaning over and whispering that he’d read this bit last week, and realising that bloody hell, he could have stood up on stage beside Professor Cox and given a fair stab at explaining the theory behind the preservation of information.
The final joy was to leave Ipswich behind and know that we never had to go back.
Julia Chalkley 