...And on Sunday we walked for a few miles along the coast heading north, along Viking bay and then round the edge of the cliff-tops of the Isle of Thanet to The Captain Digby pub. Basically, you know Kent, well, the top right-hand corner. All very sunny and blue skies. As a result, I very nearly have a tan; I look like I’ve been dunked in coffee whilst wearing swimming goggles.
Speaking of which. Lots of people in their late middle-ages sitting out on the seafront in bikinis or less. Obviously they hadn’t been ‘cc’d in on the memo about skin cancer. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but there’s also a kind of correlation between how much flesh someone has on display and how much you wish they didn’t. I blame Jerry Springer and all those overweight women shouting about how wearing revealing clothes is a right and if they feel comfortable with their bodies then why should anyone else have a problem with their bulging stretch-marked midriff being on display. Not even ‘for the sake of human dignity’; I mean, we all of us have unsightly bits, and it’s out of a sense of embarrassment that we keep them tucked out of sight. But not these sunbathers, prickling brownly in the heat. I’m reminded of my mum saying that if you eat too many sausages, you’ll turn into one.
Passed the cove where Joss Snelling, the ‘famous Broadstairs smuggler’, did his smuggling. Until, according to the sign, he died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 96. I’m not sure quite how much smuggling he had been doing at the age of 95. I suspect by that point he had scaled down his operations to wobbling gamely through duty-free with an expensive cheese under his hat.
