Hey Nik. How you doing? Not seen much of you since the '80s? Yes, it's only Nik Kershaw and yes, we know he was born in Bristol, but here he is kicking around the town he grew up in.
The hair is shorter, but he himself isn't, and the mini-multi-instrumentalist is revisiting the haunts and hang-outs of his youth that fuelled the journey to the, very nearly, top of the Top of the Pops.
Well done Nik, by the way, on penning Chesney Hawkes' 1991 chartbuster The One and Only, not that a lot of people know that.
It's a shame Chezzer isn't with you. I hear you're good pals, and he seems like a nice young man. At least he did on Celebrity Escape to the Country, even though, much to the viewers' disappointment, he didn't buy a new house in the Cotswolds.
SlyBob are in Ipswich to do their own reminiscing, in this case about Sir Bobby Robson, RIP, the former Ipswich Town F.C., England, Barcelona and latterly Newcastle United F.C. kickball manager.
He's held in high esteem in these parts, propelling the local team to the, very nearly, top of the league, not to mention a famous F.A. Cup win and a successful excursion into Europe, helped by, what was then, the progressive employment of non-UK players.
This was a few years before Kershaw's dizzy heights, but wouldn't it be good to greet Suffolk's bronze tribute to Sir Bob - thanks Keith .
That, however, will have to wait despite Portman Road being not so far away. The sun is soon to go down, you see, and nobody can do nothing about it, not even Nik and his wishful warbling, eh?
Fore Street is understood to be a South-West thing, and is, as should be known by now, Old Cornish for 'Street Street'. There's no redundancy here in the East of England, it's just a main thoroughfare, and a fairly thorough walking up of it is required.
You might be tempted to stop at everybody's favourite, the good old-fashioned hardware shop that's family run, probably.
Bob loves these places, it's thought to be the smell, which is that of grandad's shed, and could easily spend an hour inside although there's often an obligation to buy a small bag of screws or some shoelaces.
Alas, there's no such fun to be had today in Martin & Newby after the lights went out in 2004 having opened in 1873 - DAMN YOU B&Q! Three years before closure, however, one literally did, a 70-year-old+ lightbulb believed to be the oldest of its type still working in the world!
SlyBob likes to shine a light on this kind of thing, and makes a lot of our nonsense worthwhile, nearly, right readers?
The Ancient House on Buttermarket likely wasn't called that when they built it back in the 15th century.
Now nearly next to a Sports Direct™, it sports nice pieces of pargeting, which is typical of the region, and of the kind last seen down in Essex.
The council managed to save the structure from sinking in the '80s, the exact opposite of Ipswich Town's league position following the departure of Sir Bobby for the England job.
Some of the architectural eye-catchers around Cornhill may have been repurposed as fleshpots, but the Fat Cats at Ipswich City Hall still call it home.
Hmmm, this could make for a pleasant wander in a large market town, one of England's oldest, no less, although not all of it is quite so eyeball-pleasing.
The Fat Cats at Ipswich City Hall's planning department had little choice post-war, however, and Orwell Place is a clue.
When he wasn't busy being shot in the throat in other people's civil wars, Eric Arthur Blair nicked the name of Ipswich's river, and George Orwell's dystopian discourse 1984 remains a staple on school syllabuses.
Time spent in Suffolk at the family home in Southwold influenced his nom-de-plume, probably, it's better than P.S. Burton, and while it's not quite the Trent, the River Orwell is still a significant waterway.
Significant enough to attract the attention of German bombers during you-know-when where the docks were the intended target. Wayward payloads, however, also did damage to the town, accounting for, sorry Ipswich, some of the eyesores that came with the rebuild.
They reckon the last wartime bomb dropped on England was on Ipswich, just a five-minute walk away from the docks.
They were on quite an industrial scale, you see, but their eventual redevelopment, following an inevitable decline, is still a work in progress, and this doesn't look to have changed much since 1945?
Rewind exactly a century, and the new, which is now the old, custom house would have been the busy centre of 'the biggest and most important enclosed dock in the kingdom'.
Nearby Felixstowe currently makes that claim, and while some commercial activity continues opposite, Ipswich Waterfront boasts the town's largest footfall away from the football.
Pleasant enough stuff, for sure, along the quay, and the Fat Cats at Ipswich City Hall, there they are again, can take some credit for transforming a previously derelict district without totally demolishing it.
Several vessels remain, we think from this summer's Maritime Festival, as well as HMS Valiant.
Except HMS Valiant is RMC Valiant, part of UK Border Control's fleet, advertising their activity on the East Coast. If that's a sign of the times then so too is an observation on the available outlets... do people really need this much coffee?
If parts of town could be considered quaint, some of what they've done to the quay certainly ain't.
This on-brand building belongs to the University of Suffolk, whose campus is centred around the area bringing a youthful bustle, but yes, it's a polytechnic, really.
That isn't the half of it, however, 'The Mill' is Suffolk's tallest structure, and at 23 storeys you can nearly see Norwich from the top.
Not that anyone here would want to.
No, because Ipswich and Norwich have a rivalry, despite being 40 miles apart, and it's not all about the football. Grudges go way back via county lines to Boudica, or Bo-da-see-ya if you're of a certain age.
Newcastle and Sunderland share a similar beef, understandable, almost, given they're no more than nine miles apart, but theirs is based on shipbuilding and different sides in the Jacobite rebellions.
Sir Bobby, however, rises above this, and even folk in Wearside, and no doubt Norwich, have a soft spot for him.
Some of the pubs are advertising 8 AM openings for next week's Old Farm Derby kickabout, ha! The result will earn the victorious supporters supposed 'bragging rights', a term often trotted out.
What that euphamistically means, really, is workplace banter descending into downright hostility before HR get called in...
(NUFC) Reet man! Aal see ye ootside noo in the car park!
(SAFC) Ha'way then, which one? Y'knar weez are both traffic wardens?