Right off, I knew things were different. Getting off the train I needed the toilet and there in front of me on the sink were bars of soap. It was many years since I had seen soap in toilets. These days it’s all handy dispensers. I felt I was going back in time. In a way I was. It was years since I had been to Kent.


One year I worked in Folkestone. I was teaching English to foreign students, mostly from UAE, Japan and Spain. The Spanish lads would tease the guys from Dubai.


“So how many camels do you have?”


“Why you think my home is all camels and desert?”


“So how many?”


The Arab boy would slam the table, palms down and hold up 8 fingers. “SEVEN CAMELS!”


Note to teacher; work on numbers.


I lived in a listed building with a guy, Nigel. Nigel could talk for England and as far as I knew, never had a job. He must have been 40.


“I’m thinking of doing a little computer course. So if any local businesses want to go away for the Summer I can pop in and run for the office for them.”


So this is how offices work in Kent, I thought.


A friend of Nigel’s was the writer, David Seabrook. Nigel gave me his book ‘All The Devils Are Here’. This book is a ‘deranged exploration of the Kentish coastal towns’. It takes in the ‘desperate jollity’ of Margate where T S Eliot stayed, Broadstairs where John Buchan wrote ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’. There’s also Charles Hawtree, Dickens, and Audrey Hepburn’s father.


It was just the sort of thing I loved, personal experience mixed with fascinating facts. And also it allowed me to come prepared. Flick-knives at the ready.


This weekend I was visiting Lisa, a fellow former teacher, in the city of Canterbury. Her house was a terrace bordering the train tracks, overhung with trees. As I approached the neighbours were all out in the street, sitting on deck-chairs, reading the Guardian, warning me of psycho cats.


Of course, I was prepared.


This cat had something of the Charles Hawtree about it. At least, it made me laugh.


On Sunday, a blazing day, the Tour de France was in town. At first the cavalcade. This was lots of Frencies flinging bottles of Evian, swarthy gendarmes whose police vehicles blared out dance music (I don’t remember that from ‘A Bout de Souffle’), motorised dustbins and loads of Skodas (no doubt a sponsor).


Then, for a long time, nothing.


One of my favourite films is ‘Belleville Rendezvous’. In this film a number of cyclists are kidnapped by gangsters and taken across the ocean and made to work in gambling dens. Perhaps this happened on a larger scale. They were all gone.


Or maybe they had taken a wrong turn and were at Dover, sailing over the white cliffs like lemmings in Lycra before cycling across the seabed to France.


But then the whistles started and in onetwothreefourfivesixseconds they were here and gone. A blur of muscurlarthighandtightarseallwrappedupinabrightshinysuit.


“Fantastique!” I said and we went home for a French buffet while listening to the Amelie soundtrack.


I felt like I was on holiday. Kent does that to you. It’s like another country and once it gets its hooks in you it won’t let go.


Nigel still calls some days. I won’t have heard from him for years and then he will be there on the end of the phone.


“Drew, I am stuck on this clue. Seven down. ‘A pound of flesh best served cold’” and then he will talk for hours. He’s married now, a Filipino hotel worker. They are buying a house on the outskirts of Manila.


“It’s like Chatham by the sea. Drew you will love it. Come anytime.”



See my pics of the Tour De France.





Currently reading. ‘The Final Solution’ by Michael Chabon.


Currently listening. Soundtrack, ‘Amelie’