Going to the pictures in a town without a cinema

We don't seem to get to the cinema very often these days. About 15 miles away, there's a multiplex and a much nicer smaller cinema (recently taken over by Picture House and refurbished) and we make occasional visits further afield to an IMAX for spectaculars like Avatar in 3D or Star Trek, but we often lament the fact that there's nothing closer to hand.

Or at least there wasn't. But we're now able to have a change from films on TV and see them just a couple of miles away - albeit only once a month - and it's all thanks to an excellent scheme called Suffolk Digital Cinema, which loans out the equipment to local communities and points them in the direction of where to hire the films.

We'd been aware of it for a while and had originally looked into signing up our little village, but concluded that the audience here wouldn't be big enough. So we were delighted to find that the nearby leisure centre now puts on the films. We missed the first two or three for various reasons but showed up on Friday and paid our £3 each to see Hairspray, which we knew little about - it turned out to be very good fun.

The screening was very relaxed and friendly. There were probably about 30 people there, half adults and half girls of about 10 or 11 - who gave up on the chairs and mostly went to lie on the floor at the front, which isn't something you can do at a normal cinema!