A Grand Day Out

Today we went to Margate and Whitstable -- Margate because it is the home of the Turner Contemporary Gallery which is hosting an exhibition of watercolours by noted Regency and Victorian painter J M W Turner (the exhibition in fact closes tomorrow); and Whitstable (breaking our return journey to London) because it is a historic fishing town with an oyster processing and consuming trade which predates the arrival of the Romans in Britain. As ever, I took lots of photographs of the interesting old buildings -- rather more of Margate than I expected to take, because everything one reads about it suggests that it's a post-Victorian seaside resort which has been down on its luck ever since the Second World War; and rather fewer of Whitstable than I expected to take, because it is Overrun With Bloody Tourists who simply get in the way of everything: wobbling along with their vast chip-stuffed bellies and their hideous pasty-faced shrieking children, or if not obese and clad in terylene of mixed pastel and electric shades then rail-thin teenage gels with dyed blond over-straightened hair in skin-tight jeans and the peculiarly dead-eyed expressions which result from permanently welding themselves to their iPods, out for an afternoon of avoiding their parents in the company of their repellent concave-chested shaven-headed boyfriends with their trousers thrust down below their bottoms to show off their manky multicoloured underwear I'm sure I must have posted a rant not unlike this in a previous entry on this blogsite. But since we were in Whitstable we had some oysters for an early dinner, and very nice they were too. I should have taken a photograph of The Wugster (and the oysters) just as she was about to tuck in, to prove that we were there, but unfortunately I was too busy tucking into my own plate to grasp this point. Instead, here's a photograph of the oyster shell midden outside the particular emporium at which we consumed our seafood; and a photograph of The Wugster posing alongside a slightly overlifesized wooden model of a pirate at Whitstable's old harbour (so old that it is still in everyday use and in any case the north Kent coast has never, ever been subject to piracy -- but if you want people to photograph themselves against the supercalifragistilic parts of your town you of course have to provide the requisite props, what what?).

More photographs of Margate and Whitstable in the next post. (Perhaps.)