Strange Days #32
May 2026 | Sidelines
Folkestone is a strange place to be a football fan. My local team, Folkestone Invicta, who I’ve been semi-regularly going to see with my dad and my brother for the best part of twenty years, have just been promoted to the National League South, the highest level of football they’ve reached in their history. I’ve seen more people wearing the black and amber stripes of Invicta around the town lately than I ever have before, so something positive is definitely brewing on Cheriton Road. But this is very much a new thing, and aside from this recent momentum there’s never been much going on around here from a football perspective. So it’s no wonder I’ve had to look elsewhere for a club to support.
When I was very young, my grandparents moved to Norfolk, and my grandad became a die-hard Norwich City fan. He used to spend his Saturday afternoons listening to matches on the radio in his shed, and send me cuttings from the Eastern Daily Press in the post to keep me up to date with all the goings on at the club. He even sent me a signed photo of former goalkeeper Bryan Gunn that he managed to get hold of after somehow speaking to him on the phone (the details of this have never been explained to me). I’ve been a canary ever since. This season hasn’t been a particularly good one for Norwich. They’ve drifted to another unremarkable mid-table finish in the second-tier of English football. But every time they play, I eagerly check in to see how they’re doing, hoping for good news.
The mediocrity of Norwich City has given me one thing, though. It’s nice to be able to enjoy the narratives that emerge at the top of the Premier League without having a dog in the fight. This season, I’ve had a great time watching Arsenal finally win the league for the first time since 2004. I have a soft spot for Arsenal. The first football match I ever remember watching was the 1998 FA Cup final between them and Newcastle, and ever since then I’ve wanted them both to do well. But even so, I’ve been surprised at how invested I’ve been in this title charge.
When it looked like Bournemouth might somehow beat Manchester City and hand Arsenal the title much sooner than anyone thought, I went for a walk around town and listened to the end of the match on the radio. And when Arsenal played PSG in the Champions League final, I watched the match projected onto the wall of an Airbnb in a small village in Derbyshire, of all places, on the last evening of a weekend away in the Peak District. Having to close the shutters on a beautiful early summer evening, so that the room was dark enough to make the image even remotely visible, should speak to how invested I actually was. And even though that match ended in the disappointment of a penalty shoot out defeat, the experience of watching this team, a team I actually like, finally ascend to the summit of English football has been surprisingly entertaining. Perhaps I’m not as much of a neutral as I thought. I can’t even begin to imagine how the die-hards feel about it.
And that brings me to a very different kind of spectator sport. One of my guilty pleasures is keeping an eye on how films are received at film festivals, and there’s no better iteration of this than the baffling spectacle of Cannes. I know this is a losing game. The only way to know whether a film is good or not is, of course, to watch it, and it ultimately doesn’t matter what a few tired people on the French Riviera think of the new Lukas Dhont film. But for two weeks of every year I wait with bated breath to hear precisely what these people actually do think of movies that I largely don’t care about. I spend so much time listening to near-inaudible podcasts recorded on noisy terraces, reading reviews clearly padded with copy-pasted filler from the press kit, and waiting for numbers to appear next to film titles in a critics grid. I’m locked in, trying to infer as much as possible about what I should and shouldn’t seek out when these films belatedly start playing at other festivals in the autumn and beyond.
There are many, many films from this year’s Cannes that I’ll never be able to muster much enthusiasm for, but there are a few that did catch my attention. I’m always going to be interested in new films from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Valeska Grisebach and Radu Jude, and realistically there’s nothing that would stop me from wanting to see them. But the positive buzz around Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva and Sandra Wollner’s Everytime has put them on my radar in a way that wouldn’t have happened had I not been paying attention. And so has the response to Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, which sounds like a genuinely bizarre object that seemed to sit at odds with everything else in the competition. This way of experiencing a festival isn’t really that different to watching a season of football pan out. I’m not at the match, but I’m watching on from the sidelines, waiting for narratives to form and, eventually, seeing what all the fuss is about. Given the choice, though, I’d much rather be watching something for real.
Speak soon,
Matt