Taking time in Thanet.

Hello again and welcome back to my ongoing tale of what happened when I went to Broadstairs in the summer of 2019 to play the wonderful Broadstairs Folk Week as I normally do, then fell fairly seriously ill and spent nearly a month in the QEQM hospital as I have never done before! I am now writing and backdating this on the 17th of October but I am catching up slowly but surely.

If you have been keeping your wits about you (pay attention at the back there) you will have noticed that this post is some way after the last one and the reason is that nothing of much interest happened as I had settled into a bit of a routine of a fairly quiet life recuperating by the sea and I have to say there are a whole lot worse places to recover from illness. In a few posts I will tell you about Queen Victoria doing the self same thing so I am in good company.

You will be bombarded with images of breakfasts which are as much to prove to people that know me that I am actually eating as to remind myself of the same. I am even debating investing in a set of weighing scales when I get back to London, a piece of kit I always spurned before on the principle I wasn’t too worried what weight I was. I was certainly never in the position of wanting to lose weight, rather the contrary as I could never bulk up enough to play the level of rugby I would have liked to. I had, however, been a little surprised when they weighed me in hospital and I found out how light I was but I have now had to ease off a notch on my belt so I might be putting on a pound or two.  Perhaps it is just my stomach swelling from all the fluid I am injecting into it.

As well as the images of the morning repast, there will also be my almost daily weather report images, again purely to save me looking up old weather reports when writing this up. OK, so there are some pleasant vistas to take these images in which helps. Please feel free to skip this post if you like, I am merely publishing it for the sake of completeness and as a personal diary. It will get interesting (relatively anyway) in the next episode.

28th September.
No images and no joy in the rugby.

A Saturday when apparently absolutely nothing happened if the images I normally use as an aide memoire are anything to go by as I took a grand total of nil but I happen to know that plenty happened and most of it not good! I suspect my failure to get shutterhappy was probably brought on by depression in the latter part of the day as I shall explain.

Regular readers will know that I love rugby and am following the Rugby World Cup in Japan avidly. This Saturday saw Ireland facing the hosts Japan in a game that they should have won on paper but, as they say, matches are played on grass and not on paper and the Japanese ran out deserved 19 -12 winners which raised the entire nation to a state of euphoria. The Japanese really are embracing this tournament with a passion. I won’t go into the whole ins and outs but effectively we needed to win this to avoid potentially meeting the New Zealand All Blacks in the quarter finals. The “Blacks” are a superb side and were my pick to win before a match was played. Oh dear, oh dear.

29th September.
Weather bad, rugby good, band brilliant.

The Sunday after that awful rugby Saturday saw me back in the George for yet more rugby with Wales squeezing past Australia 29 – 25 in a great match all accompanied by Dave’s Sunday lunch bar nibbles and in good company as this is very much a sports pub and I know a lot of the guys in there. Regrettably, I could not be as convivial as I normally am as I was still sticking faithfully to my new “Ciderwater” regime but I was getting slowly used to it by then. I am glad the company and the rugby was good because the weather was abysmal as you can see by my daily weather bulletin, it was a proper monsoon yet again.

There was more to the day than rugby and cheese and biscuits as I knew there was music on in the Wrotham for the 1600 -1800 slot which Jackie is trying to get up and running. Whilst she books most of the bands for the rest of the week, this slot is booked by my mate Euan who books for the Folk Week and has a lot of contacts. He had tipped me the wink about a band called the Thumping Tommys who he had booked for the Festival and had gone down a storm although I did not see them.

What eventually turned up was a stripped down version of three of them in a semi-unplugged mode and they turned out to be very good, a bit like Flogging Molly or the Dropkick Murphys. I say eventually because they had travelled down from London by train and fuelled, on their own admission, by gin and tonic they had managed to get off at Margate instead of Broadstairs and then wondered why they did not recognise where they were! They were only a few minutes late, made a joke out of the whole thing and nobody minded. They seem to be that sort of band, good time folk rockers who like the audience to enjoy themselves as much as they evidently do.

After they had finished they headed off for the train back to London where they had to play another gig that night. I know that route well and what public transport in London can be like on a Sunday so I really do not envy them that day’s work.
Sunday evening is always quiet in the Wrotham and that suited me fine. A couple more pints of cider spritzer, a bit of blogging and it was time for bed once again.

30th September.
A spam fritter and (a) jam.

Monday morning, a new week and what to do with it? Well, I knew what I was going to do with at least a part of it as it was the Monday jam in the Magnet which I may or may not have told you about previously and where I have a standing invite to play.
Before that it was rugby time again with the Scots taking on the Samoans inn the same group as Ireland were in so there was an added bit of interest there. Scotland trotted out 34 – 0 winners, collecting their bonus point on the way. With the rugby out of the way, I trekked the 100 yards or so from pub to pub and turned up at the Magnet where things were just getting underway.

The concept of playing sober is completely alien to me and I must confess to having had a touch of the butterflies which I have not suffered from for years. Fortunately, the venue really is tiny and I knew probably 70% of the “crowd”, most of whom were musicians I had played with in one shape or form over the years so I wasn’t that bad. I did manage to start one of the numbers in entirely the wrong key (why did I transpose that from G to A?) which I have not done since Captain Kirk was a space cadet but other than that I got through it pretty much unscathed. Like so much else, it is something I am just going to have to get used to for a while.

The jam really is great fun and very laid back and you really never know who is going to turn up. The idea of a jam on a Monday afternoon in shoulder season in a seaside resort should be dead in the water but it thrives and has done for some time now, long may it continue. The images show my great mate Pete Stockwell on the banjo, another guy I have never met on the guitar (very good) and another guy I don’t know with possibly the youngest rhythm section I have ever seen. That is just the kind of gig it is.

Packing up at about 1600 it was back to the George for the evening and a lovely supper of Spam fritter and chips. I love Spam fritters which used to be common in chippies but the Seafarer is the only one I know that still does them. Not only that but they deliver across the road to the pub! That’s what I call service.

 

 

1st October
Another spam fritter and some red hot blues.

Tuesday was another day of doing not very much and there wasn’t even any rugby on as it was a rest day. I was quite happy with that and another spam fritter supper (told you it was a boring post) and then it was back to the Wrotham as Tuesday night is Blues night with tonight being the Eric Ranzoni trio.

Apart from his own excellent trio he is the keyboard player for Mud Morganfield who is the son of the blues legend Muddy Waters. I knew he was a serious operator when he told a story (without showing off at all) about hanging out with John Mayall backstage at some big Scandinavian blues festival. Not too shabby and he put on a great show, full of energy. Towards the end my friend Nigel Feist got up and blew his harp (that is muso speak for played his blues harmonica!) to the extent I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. They were really going for it.

If you were hoping for an image here I am afraid you are going to be disappointed as a combination of a large and well-deserved crowd coupled with my reticence to use flash meant that I didn’t get an image I would post here and you know how bad they must have been if you have seen some of the images I have posted in the past.
The great thing about going to gigs at the Wrotham is that it is not too far to go to bed, two flights of stairs to be exact.

2nd October.
A bit of a wasted trip to Margate.

The Wednesday was quite a pleasant day weatherwise as my daily meteorological snapshot hopefully shows and I had the vaguest of plans of at least one thing I wanted to do with the day.

I mentioned that on a previous trip to Margate I had seen an impressive half-timbered tudor house which I had inexplicably missed for 30 years and that it only opened at limited hours. Well, Wednesday afternoons were amongst those limited hours and so I jumped on the bus and off I went to Margate. In the way that my mind often works I couldn’t help but think that a century ago people would look forward for months to a daytrip to Margate and here was I having a couple a week sometimes.

 

I jumped off at Cecil Square and set out on the short walk up the hill but before I got to my destination I saw something that depressed me greatly, yet another closed pub or in this case a hotel, the George by name. I have mentioned that I contribute to the Lost Pubs website and so it was a quick couple of images for that before heading to my destination just across the road but as always there is a story or two before I move on.

The first is that the George was supposed to be haunted. It was bombed by the Germans in 1943 and the room above the bar supposedly played host to a ghostly apparition of a female dressed in 1940’s attire. I wonder if she left when the hotel closed down. The second is a piece of synchronicity in that the building was home for some time to the Ambrette, a very upmarket Indian fusion restaurant which has now re-located to another closed pub called the Hoy on the seafront opposite the Turner Contemporary Art Gallery. The Hoy was previously run by my friends Dave and Bev who I have spoken of often and who now run the George in Broadstairs. It’s a small world (Thanet is anyway) but I wouldn’t like to paint it, as they say.

Across the road to the Tudor House and it did not look good from the off, in fact it looked very closed which turned out to be the case and the image above explains why. Not to worry, there is always another day so I might as well go for a walk. I was walking partially because the Doctors had told me to keep active and partly because I love walking. I was still trying to get my strength back up and it was returning slowly but surely.

On my fairly aimless wander I came upon the sign you can see to your left. Now I knew what it was but I am going to tease you dear readers a little here and not tell you as it will all become apparent a few posts down the road or should I say down the footpath? Go on, work that one out.

 

 

I also stopped off in the churchyard of St. John’s church but I did not find much of interest as so many of the headstones seem to have been weathered away to the point of being illegible. I suspect it must be to do with the type of stone used locally and obviously antiquity but I really don’t know. I managed a reasonable image of the churchyard though.

 

 

All the walking was making me a bit hungry and so I headed back to the seafront and the Mechanical Elephant where I knew I could get a decent feed at a reasonable price. In Wetherspoons pubs all over the country Thursday is curry day but today htere was a manager’s special of chicken tikka masala for £4:99 so I decided to have that. It is milder than I would normally have but it was very tasty and at less than a fiver for a curry with all the trimmings I thought it was very good value.

After that it was back on the bus and straight back to the Wrotham for another quiet night and off to bed.

3rd October.
Nothing to see here folks, move right along please.

I managed the sum total of one image on the Thursday which was of the exterior of the George and I won’t bore you with it. I spent the whole day in the interior of the George, initially watching Ireland dismantle Russia in the rugby for a 35 – 0 bonus point win as expected but it was all a bit academic after the loss to Japan and the All Blacks were still looming large in the quarter finals.

4th October.
One unusual sight and not much more.

Again nothing much to report on the 5th except that I stopped to take an image of a sight you do not see too often, a closed Beano cafe although in truth this was not one of the traditional ones but rather a kebab / burger joint open late nights and which used to be very good some years ago. It is literally 200 yards from the more usual style of Beanos which is still going strong and which still makes a brilliant breakfast as the before and after shots here show.

As my late grandmother (RIP) used to remark, “Are you sure you don’t want to eat the design off the plate as well”? It really is a fantastic breakfast and I love Beanos. As I cannot go “collecting” pubs any more perhaps I should try to visit every Beanos instead. Well, everybody needs a hobby.

The only other excitement was a visit to the pharmacy to get yet more medication to variously swallow and inject, I really was getting tired of those jabs.
After a whole lot of nothing in this post you will be glad to know that something which may be of vague interest to you happens in the next one so bring your napkins, knives and forks (all will be revealed), stay tuned and spread the word.