Fish, Chips and Sea
A deep winter ride along the coast of Kent
A man creased with age shuffles along the path and, with a sigh sits with a thump on the bench beside me. Behind him a bunch of flowers are tied to the backrest. A card made damp with salt and sea is tied to the stems and flaps in the wind; ‘To Rory, always in our hearts, love Mum and Dad.’. The man leans forward on his stick, his root-like hands resting upon its curve and his back arched like a bow. An iridescent drip hangs from his nose and a few shiny beads of moisture pool in the creases of his face. We acknowledge each other with a nod and turn our faces back to look back at the sea and shore.
The day had begun in mid-winter darkness on an empty train from London which purred along the rails to Whitstable. In the blue hour of a chill winter’s dawn, with a brisk northerly whipping off the sea, the thought of books, cake and coffee was a stronger pull than riding. So whilst the slumberous sun inched above the sea wall I nestled into the warm fug of steam, coffee and books in the Blueprint Coffee and Books Cafe.
As the cold tints lightened up the sky, I took the bike beyond the harbour and onto the wide tarmac path beside the sea and rode past gaudy beach huts, banks of grass, bungalows and muddy sand to the bench on which I now sit.
Across the path and over the sea wall the old man and I watch ring necked plovers fussing in the sea-mud, prodding and poking in syncopated rhythms. Far away in the sea, tall white windmills stand idle on the Kentish Flats and the ‘Budapest Express DE’ foams its way along the estuary sea at 18.1 knots towards the London Gateway Port. Away to our right on a spit of caramel sand family groups, wrapped up like Christmas presents with Santa hats and tinsel scarves, walk towards the blue-grey sea. Flecks of chiffon-white skirt the spit.
The wide concrete path is covered with a high tide of smiling people and their many dogs, who after the darkest days of rain and wind, are flooding along the promenade.
Amy is on her new bike
her stabilisers look unstable
as she rocks like a boat on the waves
filmed by her mum on her phone.
’You’re doing great’, says Dad bobbing along beside,
‘Amy, well done’, he encourages.
He glances up at the old man and me as he passes, and widens his grin.
‘Well done Amy’ I add, ‘You’re riding well’.
The old man taps his stick.
She glances up, wanting to smile
eyes on full alert
white knuckles on the pink handlebars,
when Bert, a dachshund,
spins his tiny legs
across her intended path
‘Come here Bert’ a large man shouts from far away, as he propels his extended girth on thin white legs which protrude from his baggy shorts.
‘Hereohmygodyoustupiddog’, he pants as he jumbles towards his coursing hound, ‘cumere. OhI’msorrymoretrainingneeded,’ he adds
as Amy grabs her brake and begins to topple,
her foot sliding on the tar.
Dad is there to catch her fall.
In Herne Bay the rainbow lights of the arcades flash as the winter pansies in the Council flower beds bounce and gryrate in the wind. Fragments of the Victorian resort still stand; the clock tower, and old domed Winter Gardens, now transformed into an Indian restaurant - ‘Book your New Year’s Eve Party NOW’.
Beyond the town, Recluver; a place of close cropped turf which undulates over diminutive white cliffs. The two towers of stone stand sentinel above the sea, immune to storms and tides. The information board imparts, ‘that the ‘dam-busters’ 617 squadron practised over the sea near Recluver as the towers were similar to those on the River Ruhr.’ Beside the ruins of the church, where once there was a Roman fort, a lone thorn bush shudders in the wind.
The wide path descends the cliffs and bends around Chislet Marshes. Strewn across the path are the gilded shells and clumps of dried black seaweed. Inland, the flooded saltings fade towards a distant line of black trees and brown-grey hills. Cigar-brown reeds scratch their leaves in the thorny wind. The horizon is huge, the sky Turneresque; wisps of thin flinty blue-grey clouds are drawn across the faded chintz of blue. JMW would have washed this spectral light across his creamy sketch-book page. Picked bones of cliffs radiate across the foreshore. Ahead as the path curves towards Westgate-on-sea, beach huts, algae green and sea blue, hug the cliff like a Napoleonic fort.
In Margate I try a couple of restaurants, but they’re full. So its fish and chips upon the strand and coffee in a paper cup. As I ride the last few kilometres, the small December sun withers and a penumbral light settles across the coves and chalky cliffs. At Foreness Point all the hall-marks of the estuary are here - isolation, a fenced-off and deserted industrial plant and a nibbled coastline of mud and chalk. Ships in the ‘Tongue DW anchorage (Non-hazardous cargoes)’, sit; ‘Zappadnyy’, ‘Coal Methane’ and ‘Congo Star’, awaiting Orders.
Beyond the tip of Long Nose Spit an invisible boundary line stretches across the Estuary to the Dutch shore, marking the border line the Maritime Thames. I sit for a while and watch the dark and listen to the incessant tide arriving before turning back to the light, and the speed of the train.