Rolling back the years at Ightham Mote

It's distressing that after just two days of work it's already sunk in that this is reality and my trip to England is becoming fuzzy around the edges. I haven't even resorted to my old trick of driving on the left hand side yet and yelling and gesticulating at drivers who are heading straight toward me; you see I would have said towards just a couple of weeks ago.

So it's probably important to write some of this down before it become a dust covered dream.

On my second day in England I headed to Ightham Mote with los parentes. This is a large 14th century National Trust property in Kent set in pleasant grounds as National Trust properties tend to be.

It wasn't far from los parentes' home. My dad has an aversion to driving far these days. When I mentioned a desire to visit Dover, which is about an hour away, he came over all alarmed as if I'd  suggested the third moon of Jupiter - go to the kebab shop and turn left mate by the big orbiting
meteor.

On the way to Ightham Mote my mother was up to her old tricks of convicing my dad he had gone past the entrance even though it was obvious to me she was referring to someone's driveway and I had spied a brown sign pointing down the main road anyway.

I kept quiet and viewed the psychological battle unfold as her persistence started to sew deep doubts into his mind. Fortunately the real entrance suddenly appeared in the hedgerow before we did an embarrassing u-turn and headed for the driveway of 202 Long Lane.

Ightham Mote is a beautiful property. The only thing that's older around these parts are the volunteer National Trust guides who stare icily at visitors to these places. Inevitably dressed in tweeds they are usually former Army colonels or other well to do types from the shires who view the great unwashed with disdain.

It makes one tempted to American it up. "Gee dude this place is old. Is it more than 100 years?"

But while my friends in England told me I had gained some American inflections (they mistakenly believed I was hamming it up), I still can't do American very convincingly.

The guides and volunteers are usually so old they appear to personally know most of the family members with their stiff powdered wigs in the dark 17th century portraits that adorn the walls.

Ightham Mote boasts an interesting history including a tower bedroom where Henry James stayed.

After one of the guides had fixed his falcon eye on us and berated us for visiting the last room first, all the while tottering on his cane, we headed into the gardens to check out azaleas and the like. I don't really do flowers but they can make for good pictures.

It was enjoyable enough but I can't be bothered to recount all of the details so here's the National Trust blurb and some of the photos I took.

Lose yourself in this romantic moated manor house, described by David Starkey as 'one of the most beautiful and interesting of English country houses'. Built nearly 700 years ago, this house has seen many changes and been owned by medieval knights, courtiers to Henry VIII and high-society Victorians. Highlights include the picturesque courtyard, Great Hall, crypt, Tudor painted ceiling, Grade I listed dog kennel and the private apartments of Charles Henry Robinson, who gave Ightham Mote to the National Trust in 1985. The building is surrounded by peaceful gardens with an orchard, water features, lakes and woodland walks. Note: very steep slope from reception (lower drop-off point available).

The slope really wasn't the north face of the Eiger but it's probably tough for some of those 420-year-old guides.

My dad has lost the remote control

My dad has been fretting about the loss of the remote control. Jackson hadn't been here for two hours before both remotes vanished. One was found in the play slot of the video recorder a few days later but the other is still missing in inaction.

This means my dad can only watch one channel - BBC 1. And while he's interested in the news, there are some very substandard dramas on the Beeb these days.

Meanwhile America is facing a catastrophic hurricane that could claim hundreds of lives.

I feel somewhat detached here. Our flight back was cancelled and we have another weekend in Britain. I felt some jubilation about the fact I won't be working 24 hour shifts, wading through flood waters but there's a small nugget of guilt in there somewhere. And I feel bad about my recent MIL jibe now they are about to welcome a monster storm which will come ashore in about a couple of hours.

It's a sunny day here and we'll be taking a walk over the white cliffs of Dover. But I feel more acutely than ever today the transience and fleetingness of life. Yesterday I was in London and I was amazed at how quickly my memory had undone the streets; how I took wrong turnings and forgot which Tube stations to use for which attractions. London had rushed on, leaving me in its slipstream so many years ago.

Yet suddenly I would chance on a bar or a restaurant that held so many dissipated memories that would suddenly come rushing back to me.

I don't think I'm returning to Dover because the white cliffs endure, because they'll always be there as a bright beacon in times of uncertainty rather than somewhere over the rainbow. But here they still are, permanent and reassuring under drifting white clouds as bodies decompose in a Libyan hospital ward and a monster hurricane heads to the United States.

I hope my dad finds the remote control soon.

Ten things I miss about Virginia

I so can't wait to fly back to Virginia on Saturday. This evening I tried to make a mental list of what I've missed and came up with......

1 - Bland imitation fish and chips.
2 - Curries without any bite.
3 - concrete strip malls that stretch to the horizon and some.
4 - mowing the lawn in a soggy sweat fest
5 - those constructive visits by the MIL when I am helpfully made aware of my numerous flaws.
6 - hurricanes that threaten to turn the city into a bad day in Tripoli
7 - inexplicable sports played by men wearing motorcycle helmets
8 - some more MIL crap that I am too flawed to articulate right now
9 - stretch pants and their wearers in Wal-Mart
10 - One day of vacation to use any time I want to between now and 2045.

But at least it's cheaper to park and the parking spaces are a lot bigger.

At some point I'll post some photographs of England and reply to comments I've been too ignorant and distracted to over the last week. But I'm far too depressed to right now.

On the North Downs Way

Limited time and internet access has restricted my blogging activities of late. It can be hard to summon up the enthusiasm to blog when the prospect of a day in Oxford beckons or we end up looking after my sister's kids as well as the two we struggle to look after on a daily basis, a recipe for double trouble.

It's a far cry from the day I first arrived in England almost two weeks ago. It was good to see my parents but after the initial quickfire 40 minute update on all the people I don't know who have died, contracted serious illnesses or lost a leg or two, I found the conversation drying up. This was all rather disconcerting as I hadn't seen my parents for more than a year, although regular conversations on Skype made it possible to get these death and doom bulletins on a more regular basis.

Fortunately I was saved by the bell, or more specifically my brother, who came round to visit within an hour of my arrival.

His partner was due to give birth in days so he was grateful for any pretext to escape from the raging hormones that had been dogging his every movement for the last few months. My arrival was apparently a better excuse than the call he has taken from the local council to inspect all of the manhole covers within a 10-mile radius.

Desperate times require desperate measures and outwardly these were desperate times. Rioting had broken out in London for the second night and the headlines made it seem as if the nation was on fire. Some people from overseas were reacting as if this was Libya or Syria and armed insurrection was underway.

The reality was rather different. London has seen graver threats such as the bombs of the IRA and the nights of 1941 when the skies were full of German bombers. Just 60 years after the death of Christ Boudicca's savages burned and sacked Roman London leaving bodies strewn across the flatlands by the Thames.

In 1351 Wat Tyler led a band of angry peasants from the plague ravaged countryside of Kent and Essex to the heart of London, almost overthrowing the unpopular King Richard II in the process.

London has seen much worse than the bands of rioters who went out in search of some free flatscreen TVs.

On the Sunday of my arrival I left jetlag behind to walk up on the ridge of the North Downs, along an ancient path that pilgrims once used to reach Canterbury cathedral in the days that Chaucer wrote of such journeys.

These are gentle hills where horses roam in paddocks, a world away from the simmering suburbs of London. Little has changed in this landscape of quiet villages for years, although a few pubs have closed. Contented folks who made money in London now meander around in their BMWs. The hills remain almost empty and they look away from the M25 to the garden of England with its oast houses and vineyards, the same place that simmered with abject poverty, disease and resentment back in 1351.

Having a revolting time in London

Just my luck. I haven't been to London since 2007 and my first visit coincides with what's likely to be Day 4 of the riots.

Admittedly these riots appear to be in the areas that no self respecting visitor would visit. The sort of places I was forced to inhabit when I lived here.

So maybe a repeat of the long night of pub crawls when I got on a tube train, fell asleep and ended up in the backside of Dagenham, which in itself is a large backside, shouldn't be repeated.

The last train had vanished and every time I picked up the receiver to call a taxi, I found myself to be incapable of speech.

What followed was a long and half remembered trek winding between the tower blocks of Barking and Dagenham, that it seemed I survived against all odds.

So it's time to do quaint and touristy London; in fact the very aspect of London that Americans tick off their checklists, although I will draw the line at taking photos of a ceremony in which one man with an over sized woolly hat replaces another man with an over sized woolly hat that's known as the changing of the guards.

As for the riots, maybe the Olympic people have a lot to answer for when they chose The Clash's London Calling as a theme tune. Did anybody actually bother to read the lyrics?

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared-and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing

Back to Britain - Part 8: Barnstaple

Of all the bars in every part of the world that one that holds the most strange as well as the best memories for me is the Corner House in Barnstaple, Devon.


This is probably because the Corner House isn’t the sort of place you would go into because it looks quaint. It’s the sort of place you go to if you are a local and your liver has been picked accordingly.

You wouldn’t visit the corner house by choice; nor would you live in North Devon by choice. It happened one day when my editor called me in after I had been working at head office for about two months.

“We want to send you to a district office.”

“Oh Good – as long as it’s not North Devon,” I joked referring to the Siberia posting.

“It’s North Devon.”

“Oh.”

So I drove north for hours on muddy roads, past cows and rural nothingness; past strange smells and winding roads and decaying barns and trees bent out of shape. But mainly rolling emptiness. Obscure rolling emptiness.

As a destination Barnstaple tends to make you wonder why people live here. It’s surrounded by beautiful rolling hills but it’s dowdy and contains some pockets of urban deprivation. You work in the timber yard or the timber yard and you drink to dull your surroundings.

My colleague Mike – not his real name – was known as the Rock of North Devon because he’d been here for so long, a droopy jawed thick set individual with a beard and an oversized coat Mike was definitely old before his age. And disaffected as well as good company on a good day. He lived in a small village that was as poisonous as it was pretty. His plans to open his home to people with mental disabilities caused much trouble in paradise.

Some days Mike would come into the office with his head in his hands. “Ugh Cedric got out last night and walked round the village.”

“Well that’s not so bad.”

“He was walking round the church yard with no pants or underpants.

“uh oh.”

The solution was the Corner House, although I never spent as long as Mike down there at lunchtimes due to the fact I would end up too squiffy to work.

At first I was impervious to its charms. To say the formidable lanlady Roxine had not exactly caught on to the customer service malarkey, is something of an understatement.

“Go on – order one of her eye lid and ringpiece sandwiches,” Mike would goad me and then chuckle to himself as I made the mistake or ordering what was nominally a ham sandwich past 2 pm.

“Don’t you realize it’s one minute past two,” Roxine would scream, fixing her big old bad eye on me.

Even when the order was timely the service was nothing short of frightening.”

“This yours,” she’d scream, as the plate containing this inedible piece of meat raced down the bar past my head. People wonder why I persevered. Perhaps because the alternative was rubbery cheese or the pickled eggs in a bag of crisps that Mike swore by.

I don’t think Roxine ever accepted me as a local, with my metrosexual reporter’s mac. Or maybe she had already seen a long line of reporters come and go.

The locals were people like Buddy who sat hunched over his pint, flicking dandruff off his coke bottle specs and on the bar, rarely imparting his wisdom. But when he did it was well worth it.

“Your buddy’s your buddy’s your buddy,” he’d declare, before lapsing again into silence for about six days.

There was another taciturn character called Gordon who only became animated when talking about the virtues of “maggot galloping.” An explanation really was not called for.

We didn't interact much with these characters but we spoke at length with Tony, an accountant in his 70s who was such an avid Bristol Rovers fan, he'd told his wife to hop on a bus when she was about to give birth to their first born because Bristol Rovers were playing in an important cup game.

Buck, an elderly and somewhat repulsive gentleman who was a local councillor, was positively verbose. He’d talk about the good old days before political parties and his bizarre life ambition to hang strings of condoms from a local viaduct.


When Buck went quiet I’d start to get nervous. When a smile split his features it was time to head for the hills. Buck was renowned for his nose curling flatulence. As people moved away in droves he’d slam the bar triumphantly and count.

“That were a five along,” he’s declare if his fart displaced five people from their seats at the bar.

By 2.30 pm Mike would look positively crestfallen when we’d have to walk back to the office. But sometimes he’d import a few cans of wine and sit at his desk until at 4.30 p.m. – right on cue- there’d be a heavy sigh like a locomotive sloughing out of the sidings and he’d declare: “I can’t go on.”

He introduced plenty more junior reporters to the Corner House but I was glad to hear recently he had won the lottery and doesn’t need to go on being the rock.

Buck is sadly no longer after letting off a 17 along one night in his sleep and setting off an explosion; I imagine Tony's long gone too and his ashes have been spread on the pitch at Bristol Rivers.  Who knows about Buddy. He’s probably still there at the Corner House bar 15 years on, chewing on eyelid sandwiches and declaring: “Your buddy’s, your buddy, your buddy.”

Back To Britain - Part 7; St. Ives

As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives,

Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits: kits, cats, sacks and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

The answer to this 18th century riddle is apparently 2,801 wives, sacks, cats and kits. The alternative answer is the guy went crazy en route to St Ives and jumped off a cliff.

St Ives, to the uninitiated is about as far south west as you can go without flying to the Isles of Scilly. It's on the far side of Cornwall which has always been a place apart.

To me there are two St. Ives. There is the place my parents took me on holiday as a kid with its teeming streets and brick-a-brack shops. They found a white villa nearby for a good rate which beat the usual remove caravans with backed up toilets that they usually stumbled on, so as we could spend the week on a distant farm, gagging on the smell of cow manure.

The villa was a step up but it's hard not to look back on those days without a sense of shame. Granted this was the 1970s but was there really a humane case for skimping on the hair cuts and for dressing me in bright orange sweaters from the jumble sale and chequered brown flaired trousers. It's fine to look like there's a giant fuzzy microphone on your head if you are in the Jackson 5 but I wasn't even black, although I was probably blacker than Michael Jackson in his later days.

I don't remember so much about St Ives as we spent most of the time on the same beach. We ate Cornish pasties that had the texture of grit and contained nefarious translucent gray material. They were a locally distinctive food, developed for tin miners back in the day.

It wasn't until I was half way grown up, until I'd ditched the orange sweaters and got a haircut that I realized there was another side to St Ives, away from the tourists, who are known contemptuously by the locals who take their money as 'grockles'.

Far from the madding crowds, there are lonely whitewashed homes that look out on empty harbors and backwaters of briney sand. There are streets where artists quietly work their magic under skies that had a mere wisp of the Mediterranean on summer days. There's the Tate Gallery, austere with its white art deco lines over an empty beach ringed with palmed trees. St Ives had beautiful vistas away from those tourists and wives and cats.

It all started with Alfred Wallis, a fisherman who painted boats in a naive but organically inspired way sans perspective. In 1928, a few years after he had started painting, Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood came to St. Ives and established an artist colony. They discovered Wallis and celebrated his direct approach to image-making, which is somewhat Van Goch-like in its directness.

Wallace was feted by the postmodernist. I have an image in my mind's eye of this rustic fisherman being taken to receptions in London and feeling out of his depth.

But Wallace was true to his roots and died in abject poverty. And that sums up St Ives, a mixture of the traditional and the artistic, a strange and beautiful hybrid on the lonely and high cliffs of Cornwall.

Back to Britain Part 6: The Pembrokeshire Coast

The sixth form trip to the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales promised to be a bit different. To be fair when the teacher taking the trip was Mr. L, known to everybody else as Moss Chops, due to his unkempt beard, it was bound to be a bit different.


To understand Moss Chops’ appearance, think Gimli in the Lord of the Rings; his personality was a different matter altogether. Also Moss Chops rather neatly escapsulated all of those teacher stereotypes from hell; corduroy jackets with arm patches, chunky cable knit sweaters and an after shave that was a pungent mix of body odor and stale coffee.

And this wasn’t a one day trip; here’s a castle; look at the arrow holes; let’s fill in a worksheet; sorted.

Nope this was a week of hard walking with backpacks, tents and a minimum of preparation.

So we jumped on a mini bus and before we knew it we were setting up tents under the dreaming spires of Milford Haven oil terminal. Moss Chops wanted to go to the pub and while we were all under age, he decided to handpick a few of us who looked like we were capable of growing facial hair to head to the local boozer. Moss Chops looked somewhat disenchanted when I ordered wine, so hastily I changed my order to beer.

The first day of walking, at least 10 miles over the cliffs, proved to be a shock to the system. Moss Chops had ordered some bulk surplus rucksacks that lacked waist belts and chafed at our shoulders. As the temperatures soared and the backpacks became heavier, we started to wonder if we would survive the experience at all, let along complete 110 miles.

We camped on some remote cliffs near St Anne’s head where there were no washrooms. We had an earth fight in which Moss Chops succeeded in hitting me on the head with a large stone.

As the days went by, I became more and more conscious that Moss Chops appeared to hate me. I can’t say I blamed him. At that stage I did a lot of wisecracking and acted in a precocious manner. I would have probably hurled a rock at my 16-year-old self.

But admiration for a Tornado bomber as it soared low over the cliffs, failed to endear me to him.

“Evil killing machine,” he muttered as he trudged down the path.

I earned his permanent enmity by suggesting his unwavering loyalty for the regimes of Eastern Europe might be misplaced and nobody wanted to live under Communism in gray tower blocks, driving around in rickety Trabants and waiting for four hours for a sausage on the days they weren’t arrested for thought crimes.

Moss Chops bad mouthed me to my pal Kevin, who he made clear he preferred, but at least he kept me on the drinking list, even after I described his friend’s pub as a “hovel.”

Of course there were other distractions; Eales, for example, was the captain of the school football team and an erstwhile all round athlete now fighting a losing battle against weight. Two days on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path and he was whining about blisters and calling his mother. Eales went home.

But we trudged on, up cliffs and down into valleys. When we had the energy we lost ourselves in the seascape and the beauty of the place. But most days we struggled to survive.

I’ve never felt such a feeling of accomplishment as the day we walked down the main street of a small town somewhere near Cardigan. We had blisters but we were transformed. And there was something sad about the fact our fellowship seemed to be at an end.

That fellowship never extended to Moss Chops. When we got back to school, he called me into his office one day and gave me a lecture about being cynical.

Superficially, it appeared to be about his friend’s “hovel” in Newport. But I know he was really taking me to task for undermining his Stalinist dream and for showing enthusiasm for the supersonic jets of the Royal Air Force.

Back to Britain - part 4: Swindon

I don't intend to visit Swindon when I return to the UK, but I think most Americans should be forced to drive round Swindon - for the hell of it and to boost the entertainment industry.

That's because Swindon in Wiltshire is home to the so-called "Magic Roundabout," which is actually a series of five mini roundabouts. The first time I encountered it I had only recently learned to drive and almost had a fit.

Americans tend to get freaked out by one roundabout as they are not very common round these parts. Add to the equation the fact you are driving on the left side of the road and going clockwise round the traffic island and this could be a recipe for panic. Whoever designed the Magic Roundabout probably didn't like Americans much.

According to Wikipedia, In February 2009 artist/filmmaker Tom White completed the short experimental film, Swindon Roundabouts. The film "consists of long hypnotic shots of the roundabout and its surrounding area collaged with interviews of local residents and an unsettling soundtrack. The film is intended as a homage to the late Frank Blackmore, inventor of the mini-roundabout," and general American hater.

I'd like to believe Tom White has since got a life but what are the chances really?

I always tried to avoid Swindon even though it was close to my home because it was so ugly and annoying.

But when I landed a summer job in the college recess as a mobile hot dog seller, I had little choice but to go there.

The hot dog company was a winning enterprize run by a man called Sleazy Keith - I have no idea what his real name was - who had made himself a millionaire on the backs of gullible students.

In a rickety Mastro van I would head over the hills and down into Swindon. On one particular night the van got stuck in second gear. As I inched through the bad part of Swindon (that would be all of it) with a high pitched whine coming from the engine, I became conscious this was the red light district and I risked being accused of curb crawling in a hot dog van because I couldn't get the accursed thing to speed up.

My rather classy training manager had told me during the induction it was his habit to give free hot dogs to the hookers, if they did something or other for his hot dog. I didn't ask for details.

But I got to a concrete parking lot without event (unlike the reversing problem I had in Worcester that caused bumper-maggeddon). I'd then light up the greasy old fat and get some burgers and hot dogs ready for the influx from the nightclubs when everyone became intoxicated enough to think my food was edible.

Trouble came in the form of Rude Girl in her pretty yellow party dress.

"Just get me a hot dog you horrible little man."

"Yes maam. I must say your dress is rather radiant tonight."

"Oh fack off and give me more mustard."

"Um this tube is rather a struggle I must say maam."

There was a sudden release as the mustard shot all over her new frock.

"Agggghhhhh.... look what you've done."

"At least it's yellow maam. Nobody will notice unless, well..."

Such was a day in the life of the bustling metropolis that is Swindon. Later that night Furtive Man came along and whispered: "Do you know where the whores are?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't catch that."

"The wh, wh  whores,"

"Again, sir."

"The whores."

"Oh," I exclaimed in the earshot of the line that had formed. "You'd like to know where you can find the whores. No idea, sir. Although there's this girl in a mustard yellow dress.."

I'd head home in the early hours, my van rattling and shaking over the hills; at least that wason  the nightswhen  I didn't kill the battery and have to get my dad to fetch me, rather unwillingly.

Then at the end of the week, when I had raccoon rings under my eyes from all the late nights, Dodgy Keith would hand me a check for about $150.

"Is that is. For five nights a week?'

"You appear to have been eating your profits," he'd inform me.

Keith would promise me if I worked hard I could be like Jockie, a wheezing Scotsman who had a lucrative pitch by the cattle market. He made about $500 a week.

Jockie was flushed, overweight and choleric. He looked like he ate his profits, too. I figured he's only be around for another couple of years and his cattle market pitch might be all mine.

But who was I kidding? I saw through Dodgy Keith and the frightening gray flannel pants he wore in all weathers, his over shiny shoes and his top of the line Ford Granada with velvet seats and electric windows.

"Nope, Keith. I've been offered a 9-5 office job that doesn't involve going anywhere near Swindon. Thanks but, no thanks."

Back to Britain - Part 3 - Ullswater

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.


I've heard it described as a heat wave; I've also heard it called summer in Virginia.

On these days when the heat hangs heavy on the concrete freeways and every time I get out of the car I feel I have been mugged and dragged across the parking lot under the armpit of a 300 pound Sumo wrestler, I think of England, and the Lake District in particular.

The Lake District is perhaps the most beautiful place in England but it can also be the most fickle. In the tourist trap villages choked with cars in the summer the Lakes can feel kitsch as if their beauty has been their undoing. Also as the wettest place in England you can visit the area for a week and find the reticent peaks shrouded in low cloud for the whole time.

Ullswater is said to be the most beautiful of the lakes, bearing comparisions with Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Wordsworth certainly thought so when, inspired by a profusion of daffodils by the lake, he wrote his famous poem of the same name.

The secret to the Lake District is to get away from the honey pot villages and up onto the vast empty fells, although as I found once when climbing the hills above Ullswater, the exertion can test those knees. Climb a thousands meters and you are in a different world of high grantite hills and foreboding peaks, with what once seemed to be a vast lake now a mere gray sliver below you, like a narrow pewter mirror that captures the fleeting clouds.

On days like today I miss the shrill summer breezes of Lakeland and the freshness of those fells, even on the warmist of days. But there's something melancholy about the Lake District too.

In the early 19th Century William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived here around Keswick, writing some of the most famous verses of the romantic age. But they were to fall out and Coleridge's life became beset by maritial problems and drug abuse.

I have mixed memories of the Lake District too, of two relationships that unravelled on vacation here, of days that promised dizzy climbs only to be beset by driving rain, or beautiful vistas that never quite materialized the closer you got to them.

The idealism of the Romantic poets was ultimately flawed. Daffodils is a deeper poem that it seems to be on the surface. Wordsworth writes of his vacant and pensive mood.

The cold waters of these lakes run very deep indeed. And with the heat index hitting 118 today, I have an unfulfilled longing to swim in them.

Back to Britain - Part 2 - the White Cliffs of Dover

There’ll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see



The White Cliffs of Dover are synonymous with England and the sense of relief of those Spitfire pilots who saw them loom out of the blue after engaging the Luftwaffe or the souls huddled on boats escaping Dunkirk, must have been palpable.


Admittedly whenever I have seen them the White Cliffs of Dover were slightly grey and slightly dirty and not as sparking as in our imaginations, scarred by ferry terminals and other industrial installations. The Seven Sisters in Sussex are considerably more majestic.

During a childhood holiday in Kent I remember the forbidding gray terraces, the clouds and the drizzle as I shivered through a bout of tonsillitis. My parents were underwhelmed by Kent which makes it all the more ironic that they recently moved here. I recall the bulk of Dover Castle and a shell temple, one of the few interesting things they found to do on this holiday.

In more recent time I took a late ferry from Dover. The town seemed down at heel and full of ragged asylum seekers. It seemed rather ironic that a nation that had repulsed the Nazi invasion on those long days of vapor trails and death over the eggshell blue skies of Kent, had allowed a European invasion thanks to the European Union.


If I have time I’ll go back to the white cliffs of Dover.