Dover Beach-Combing

The wife and I went to France at the weekend using my £19 each way Speedferries tickets. Utterly punctual, clean and efficient in each direction, the Australian-built hovercraft “Speedferries One” shuttles back and forth from Dover to Boulogne and there is talk of a “Speedferries Two” joining the fleet in a few months. It makes a pleasant change from the monotony of the channel tunnel crossing, especially as you are allowed outdoors during the crossing to get the wind in your face and a proper feel for the sea.

The only slight drawback is that Speedferries have a small number of crossings each day so if you arrive early you have to hang around a bit – unlike the tunnel where you stand a good chance of getting aboard an earlier train. Having arrived early for our outward crossing we sniffed around for some entertainment in the region and found the strange Samphire Hoe, an area of natural beauty nestling at the foot of the towering cliffs (signposted off the main A20 a mile outside Dover heading towards Folkestone).

Being an Essex boy Samphire Hoe is my sort of place. In the way that Essex gravel pits get turned into golf courses, so this little strand of Kent has been shaped(and re-shaped) by man over the past two hundred years. At first glance you see (and read on the information boards) that the area has been recently formed from the 4.9 million cubic metres of chalk marl which were excavated during the construction of the channel tunnel (our side only). The marl has been carefully landscaped to make joyful nature trails amongst the hillocks and there is a café/tourist centre in the parking area as well as a memorial to those who lost their lives during the building of the tunnel.

A bit more research however reveals that this is also the site of an ill-fated coal-mining operation which lasted from 1895 to 1921 during which time only 120 tons of coal were produced. Before that there had been an early Channel Tunnel attempt by a Colonel Beaumont in 1845. This went 2000 yards before the project was abandoned, perhaps over concerns that the French would use the tunnel to launch an invasion (damned right they would). A couple of years before the tunnel attempt a huge section of the cliff had been dynamited out to provide the platform for the Folkestone-Dover railway which is still used today. More recently in the 1970s the existing single-track road tunnel through the cliff from the A20 was created and an earlier version of the Channel Tunnel was attempted. This time only 300 meters were excavated before the government withdrew funding.

I haven’t had time to figure out the channel swimmers who might have set off or landed at that point, or the early aviators in their flying machines. I did find out that Samphire Hoe is nicknamed Fisherman’s Foe by local anglers (because of the way that the chalk marl cuts away fishing tackle), and that it is a fairly good area for shipwrecks. All-in-all a pretty full history for a nature conserve.

Recent Books

The Return of The Dancing Master
Henning Mankell

It’s Sweden (again), but a different part of Sweden from the Ystad of Kurt Wallander and a different cast of characters. We’re in the North (around Sveg) and Mankell has produced a new policeman (Lindman) who has recently been diagnosed as having cancer of the tongue. It’s a decent enough thriller, fairly violent and (being Swedish) somewhat depressing. I miss Wallander however.

Michelin Guide Great Britain & Ireland 2006

Now that the UK guide to hotels and restaurants has become more established it gets better and more reliable with each edition. JSW in Petersfield keeps their deserved rosette (maybe I’ll make enough money to eat there again sometime), and I was startled to find that there is a highly recommended B&B hidden from view near Rogate which I pass on my drive to work each morning.

Naked Conversations
How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
Robert Scoble & Shel Israel (foreword by Tom Peters)

Very rarely do I read the books I sell (I’ve never been over-interested in the way computers work) but I did pick up this one which evangelises corporate blogging and is more of a business book than a computer book anyway. Now corporate blogging could be a good idea and there are certainly some convincing examples of how blogs can alter a company’s interface with its customers. On the other hand it might just be a bit of hogwash which will act as a 5-minute wonder before blogging becomes a thing of the past. The authors’ enthusiasm leads me to think that there is a message there and I’m going to give it a go. You can preview my early draft on a new site http://spaces.msn.com/booksinspace/ but don’t get carried away.

Le Guide: Selected Autoroutes France
Karol Libura

Unless you have a caravan or a baby, or are in constant need of SOS telephones when driving in France, then this book is virtually useless. It takes the main autoroutes and describes each and every “aire” – whether or not there are picnic benches, nappy changing facilities, cash machines, etc. The only new thing about motorway stops in France that I learned was the reason that the A6 south of Beaune is adorned with strange coloured mushrooms (it’s all about the mushroom-themed “Aire de Jugy”. The book has advice for drivers in France (I didn’t know that the French for clutch is l’embrayage) or the difference in police fine between being caught at 180kmph (135 euros) and 190kmph (750 euros). However no mention is made of the rather complicated “diamond” road signs in Francewhich indicate priority to the right (or not) and which are only fully understood only by Frenchmen and the younger brother. I suppose the reason is that those signs are not to be seen on motorways while it is possible that the French motorway traveller might benefit from knowing "what colour wine to drink with chicken" on a stopover. I repeat this is a useless book.

Breast reduction

The diet continues and amongst the ups and downs I can report the loss of the first stone. The wife is convinced that most of my weight loss is mammarial but I reckon that one of my several chins is looking a bit depleted. Somewhat astonishingly the main pillars of the regime are still intact – no bread, no potatoes, no alcohol, and (more astonishingly) no Cheeselets, Twiglets, crisps, Roka cheese whatevers, etc, etc. The wife is also participating and the only really sinful indulgence continues to be our regular intake of liquorice allsorts each evening. Still, it won’t last!

I’m also rather ashamed to report inaccurate information was imparted in my “More Good Intentions” blog when I gave my starting weight. The scales we use have been checked against some more serious equipment at the local health centre. It is reckoned that our weight has been understated by about 2.5 pounds. Ah well, I’m walking more than ever before and looking forward to getting back to France and la bicyclette.

While we're on the subject of walking the wife has presented me with a Valentine's Day gift of a very small pedometer to attach to my belt. As well as measuring the miles (or kilometres) I walk at any time, the gadget also serves as a clock, a stopwatch, a heart-rate monitor, a step counter and a pulse counter. With all this going on it is hardly surprising that neither of us can get the thing to work - even though we endeavoured to input my weight, my "stride distance" and the time (selecting 24-hour clock or am/pm). At first the darned thing reckoned that whenever I took a step forward it would reset itself to zero (including my weight, my "stride distance" and the time). Now the darned thing seems to have jammed on 3,179 paces and won't budge at all. Anyway it is not for me to be ungrateful for such a thoughtful present, but I hope the small pot of roses that I reciprocally gave to the wife doesn't cause so much trouble.

Gassing On About Oil Companies

It’s been an unusually active Friday morning in our village cul-de-sac. The recycling (red) wheely bin had to go out early for the dustcart; the last of the Christmas bills came through in a “bills only” post delivery from Royal Mail; and we took delivery of yet another batch of liquid gas to satisfy the huge thirst of our Aga cooker and heating system.

I used to scratch my head when the oil companies publish their annual results. Shell and BP this year (like every year) complain that virtually none of the paltry £25 billion profits they make comes from sales on the petrol forecourt. The profits come from “finding and extracting oil”. What a load of codswallop! The amount of liquid gas consumed by our Aga each winter doesn’t fully cover Shell’s share (£13.2 billion) of the profit pool, but it comes close. I’m tempted to join Friends of the Earth who suggest that the government should act to curtail these companies making quite so much money out of climate change and political circumstance. The suggested windfall tax could then be used to subsiding an alternative, cleaner, more efficient heating system for our kitchen.

Hauptmann Joseph Oestermann

The man on the Flora Margarine advertisement suggests that you should do something that scares you a little every day. Well, I climbed Beacon Hill on the South Downs today and, what is more, I came down again.

It all started as part of my general health and fitness thing. A bright sunny day and with things quiet at work I succumbed to taking the afternoon off. I resolved to walk a section of the South Downs Way to see if I could find a rather curious monument to a German fighter pilot whose plane was shot down on the Downs in 1940 after a bombing raid on Aldershot. My problem was that what looks easy on a map ain’t necessarily so. An easy three and a half mile (as the crow flies) stroll in the countryside had me puffing and panting something rotten. First there was the climb from the house (sunk at the bottom of a valley) up to Harting Down. From there the walk progressed rather like a helter skelter ride with Beacon Hill acting as both the steepest (serious huffing and puffing) ascent and (slippery) descent.

The view from Beacon Hill is of course marvellous with the sea to one side and several counties the other. In the late 1700s there was a building on the hilltop with movable roof shutters which were raised and lowered to relay the signal of a French invasion from Portsmouth Docks to London.

Just a little bit shattered from my exertions I eventually found the small monument to Hauptmann Joseph Oestermann, the German pilot whose Heinkel bomber was brought down by anti-aircraft fire at that spot on the edge of Philliswood. The memorial is a testament to Hauptmann Oestermann’s bravery as he fought to control the plane whilst his twenty-five crewmen parachuted to safety (and p-o-w camp). Fittingly (and rather mysteriously) a number of poppy crosses have been placed by walkers – British or German, who knows?

Fried Tuna

Last weekend was spent at Frinton-on-Sea visiting my mother and looking around the town. At this time of year the mile-long, sandy beach is virtually deserted apart from the odd dog-walker, the odd horse, and the odd elderly bookseller shuffling along whilst he contemplates life’s miseries. The end-to-end walk passes the best part of 700 beach-huts and, being Frinton, only a few huts have names - Barb’s Place, Yer’Tis and (inevitably) Jabba the Hutt being random examples

Odd to think that at the time of the Napoleonic Wars Frinton consisted of just a small church, the long-since-submerged Frinton Hall and a Martello tower. The tower was never garrisoned because it was reckoned to be an unhealthy place with malaria-infested marshes. The Victorians created the resort and, apart from the little old church at the bottom of Connaught Avenue the town is now all Victorian or later. Ursula Bloom the novelist lived there. Ernest Luff (he who sang the first recorded Oh, For The Wings of a Dove when a child) ran his Christian bookshop and cycled around the town. Arthur Havers was the golf club professional in my childhood (he was Open Champion in 1923 at Royal Troon), and there is a Sherlock Holmes connection. But it mainly for its conservatism that Frinton is known – the resistance to buses and pubs, no ice cream sellers on the beach, no slot machine arcades, no candy floss.

Nowadays there are two Frintons, one on each side of the railway line and its famous level crossing which operates as a sort of frontier border control. Those on the easterly (sea) side of the line are the real Frintonians but there is actually more Frinton housing and there are more Frinton residents to be found on the less-fancied side of the railway track – miles of carefully tended bungalows in roads like Freituna Way, running most of the way into neighbouring Walton-on-the-Naze. For myself I am very fond of the stylish Art Deco houses which form just a fraction of the planned Frinton Park Estate to the north of the town. Less than thirty of these houses were ever built including the famous Round House (originally the Sales and Information Office for the estate), but the original plan was for 1,100 of them.

Last words on Frinton come from the window of the Olive Luff Bookshop in Connaught Avenue where a bible is displayed with a framed text. The text for last weekend was Samuel 1:

As she remained long at prayer before the LORD, Eli watched her mouth,

for Hannah was praying silently; though her lips were moving, her voice could not be heard. Eli, thinking her drunk, said to her, "How long will you make a drunken show of yourself? Sober up from your wine!"

“It isn't that, my lord," Hannah answered. "I am an unhappy woman. I have had neither wine nor liquor; I was only pouring out my troubles to the LORD.”

And this reminds me to give news of my diet. Like Hannah I have had neither wine nor liquor, nor have I had bread or potatoes for more than two weeks. After my last report of a half-stone loss things have quietened down a bit. At my last visit to the scales I weighed in at 16 stone, 10 pounds. A long way to go, still.