A series of unlikely outcomes

Thursday 13th August.

Slept ok but not as well as usual for some reason. Note correct use of apostrophe above!

Up at 0715 as have a call with Mike at 0815 then we are off to Whitstable – timed trains as Trainline have started aping the airlines cunning plan of advertising a cheap price and then, for any flexibility, making you pay more. No matter, we aren’t on a timetable and I need to look after the pennies nowadays too.

Anyway – I listen to Heart Breakfast now with Jamie Theakston and at the moment – Vaughan Williams. She is that lovely Irish lady off the fairy washing powder advert and… she pronounces the letter h (correct pronunciation aitch) hayyyytch – I bloody hate that – was killing me today and is one of my (too many) pet hates …

And so to St Pancras for our SouthEastern Highspeed service to Whitstable. St Pancras … what a station.

Also saw this in the window of Waterstones and rather sums my life up now I feel.

On train a memory stirred re Whitstable. When I was at the London Nautical School, from 4th year on we did an annual ‘Viking Camp’. We had a boat house at Regents canal Docks (the rather swanky Limehouse Basin nowadays) but in the 70s it was a disused dock with dead rats floating in it with nothing much but the LNS boathouse. We used to practice rowing (or coxxing) the clinkers every Wednesday morning as part of our practical training for our Seamanship O Level (I got a B – I think I have an old paper stored somewhere that I’ll share – gobbledygook nowadays). So, Wednesday rowing – toss oars never failed to amuse pubescent schoolboys. We had a 48ft cruiser called Melbar (that I saw on the Thames at Walton a year or three ago – see photo) an open top motor boat called the Kings Reach (helmed by one of our mad Master Mariners Captain (Norman) Fortune Fowler – smoked a pipe and literally looked like pop eye – and – the clinkers that we rowed (davit launched ships lifeboats from back in the day) and several admiralty sailing craft (ASCs).

Anyway the format for ‘Viking Camp’ was that we would take all the boats laden with camping gear up and out of the Thames and into Medway) to Conyer Creek (from where I learned Chris had given birth to Teresa) or somewhere nearer Faversham. From google maps seems a plausible memory.

All day we would play on the water – mainly sailing the ASCs so hard that we would deliberately heel them until water came over the gunnel (without capsizing although I vaguely remember we did just that, once) – anyway, am sure one day we sailed them to Whitstable and beached them and then went for fish and chips before sailing back to the campsite again. I look forward to Whitstable to see if that memory strengthens a la Sidmouth.

Train full to the gunnels (am back in Naval speak now) and I need the heads (lol).

Arrived and hot footed it to The Old Neptune for our lunch booking – a pub on the beach that was recommended – had fish and chips … was ok but not as good as Kennedy’s and wouldn’t rush back

After lunch, we wandered along the seafront to what seemed like the main drag, had an ice cream then sat on the beach and I went for a swim – the sea was a lovely temperature.

After a lazy hour or two on the beach we walked back to station for train home – however there was a line side fire near Gravesend so we sat for 35 minutes at Higham thus arriving into London about 50 minutes late.

Carla singularly unimpressed with the day – I didn’t think it was so bad although no memories stirred of beaching the ASCs all those years back I am pretty sure we did. Doubt we will be rushing back to Whitstable.

One final thought – the bar staff in Kent are as dippy as Sidmouth with two speeds – dead slow and stop – I am too ‘London’ for spending much time outside zone 1 I feel.