When I went to Ramsgate last week I didn't stop there, I continued around the coast. This means I can also bring you reportage from Broadstairs, thereby getting additional value from my day out (and if you're really lucky I'll bring you Margate later).
✉Broadstairs is probably the most seasidey of Thanet's coastal towns, and in a good way too. A horseshoe of a promenade overlooks a crescent of a beach, very much from above, with food and ice cream up top and sand and seaweed down below. A lift connects the two but it's often closed, and permanently closed at present, so rather a lot of stairs remains your best option. This is Viking Bay, no longer subject to horny-helmeted invasion from offshore and all the better for it.
✉ One arc of beach huts runs along the sand and another, much smarter, on a raised terrace behind. The southernmost corner of the sand has been genteelly fenced to surround swings and roundabouts - more of the former than the latter. The beach wasn't at its busiest midweek, despite the very decent weather, so two very large signs pointing inland towards 'Deckchairs' were proving unnecessary. That said a few topless bookreaders had turned up, plus a grazing couple safely tucked behind a windbreak, and I was wholly unnerved by the ring of seagulls surrounding one particular elderly couple.
✉ Up on the boardwalk a lot more activity was going on. A crowd of appreciative pensioners were engrossed beside the bandstand listening to a bloke in a flat cap singing Valerie. Restaurant terraces were packed with couples dining on seafood and fizz, especially at the back of the hotel where Charles Dickens stayed in <checks plaque> 1839, 1840, 1845, 1849 and 1853, penning a few chapters of Nicholas Nickleby while he was here. The Broadstairs Information Kiosk apologises for being closed for the remainder of the year, a sign which I suspect went up in March, but hopes to be back in 2021. The longest queues were outside Morelli's, Broadstairs' fabulously Art Deco ice cream parlour, which was a shame because the prevailing rigmarole proved just enough to put me off buying a classic double scoop.
✉ Twirling offshore were the turbines of the ThanetWind Farm. They're actually eight miles offshore, so somewhat indistinct, but a decent zoom (or a good pair of binoculars) make them a lot clearer. The 100 turbines are laid out in rows half a mile apart, so if you walk along the coast to the right point the seemingly random blades suddenly combine to form a multi-fingered beast. This wind farm was the largest in the world when it opened in 2010, generating enough juice to power a quarter of a million households, but technology has moved on since and it's no longer even in the Top 20. Plans for 34 more turbines, closer to the shore and collectively more powerful, were turned down by the government earlier this year.
✉ The clifftop between Ramsgate and Broadstairs makes for an attractive (and extremely accessible) stroll. At one point the path heads through a secluded park but most of the way it's all coast-facing promenade, lined on one side by homes you'd retire to (or buy up well before you retired to take full advantage). A lot of dogs get walked here, generally of the small kind. Memorial benches remind passers by that Jack and Doreen, Gordon and Vera, Moss and Joyce loved this place. What I didn't really get was a proper sense of the sheer chalk cliff face beneath me, save at a few choice spots where a headland provided an oblique viewpoint... or by reading the repeated signs warning me that clambering over the railings probably meant death.
✉ Outside one of these clifftop houses I found this car with this numberplate, which I present without comment, other than to say of course it's a Kia, and that when this particular plate was released in 1996 the DVLA can't have been as censorious (or as alert) as they are today.
✉ The only break in the cliff face south of Broadstairs occurs at Dumpton Gap, a V-shaped notch where a steep straight path provides access to a small beach. In 1914 this spot was chosen as one end of the Siemens Brothers Anglo-Belgian telephone cable, consisting of 28 copper wires wound into seven groups of four, the other end being at Ostend. A separate cable ran from here to the North Goodwin Light Vessel. European communication is no longer reliant on the hut at the top of the ramp, so you could probably ring down to Sam's Cafe and get them to do you a bacon sandwich using much superior mobile technology.
✉ Meanwhile to the north of Broadstairs the sandy bays and residential clifftops continue. The surf was up this time last week so a few groups of wetsuited boarders trod water in the breakers waiting to ride the North Sea back to shore. Cyclists whizzed by in slightly podgy lycra, following the Saxon Shore Way for an exhilarating long distance ride. And on North Foreland, where the houses got larger, grander and much more security conscious, I made sure to check out the top of the staircase cut into the chalk which inspired John Buchan's 39 Steps. I wish I'd dared to follow it down to the beach the first time I came here in 2008 because it's subsequently been gated and locked with an electronic security code. I tried 3939 on a hunch, but sadly it didn't open.
Today it's six months since the Prime Minister addressed the nation and ordered us to lockdown, and the toilet roll ran out and the economy collapsed and everything was cancelled and thousands of people got sick and died and we didn't see one another for weeks and months, maybe still haven't.
And last night he was broadcasting to the nation again, reversing some of the normality he'd chosen to unlock and warning us these restrictions might be in place for another six months, six months, crushing normality until next spring or even longer, who's to say, that is if normality ever comes back at all because our old lives might just be gone and this is how things are now, forever maintaining a distance from one another as the economy crashes beyond the point of no return and everything we ever built up is systematically destroyed by a mismanaged pandemic.
They urged us not to catch the virus and then caught it themselves, they told us to stay at home if we were ill and then drove across country regardless, they failed to plan ahead and left millions vulnerable, they appointed their mates, they misjudged the tipping point between freedom and common sense, they paid us to eat out and then told us off for mingling together, they urged us to go back to work and then urged us not to, they promised a world-beating system which failed to deliver, they dripfed us rules too complicated to follow, they blamed us when everything went wrong, they left us to burn.
The country's been going to hell in a handcart for some time now, society has somehow been divided into two opposing factions, entrenched positions well beyond the fault lines of normal politics, prejudices keenly whipped up by social media and a hysterical press, fellow citizens hurling insults and invective, each side hating the other with deep-seated intolerance, how dare they think that, breaking us apart at precisely the time we should have been working together, whatever happened to consensus, it's now one extreme or the other and woe betide if you dare to disagree.
And it's not just us here in the UK, other countries have found themselves engulfed by division, America in particular, what did they do to deserve the current incumbent of the White House, a man so self-obsessed that he lies by default, a dangerous ignoramus who should never have been allowed near high office in the first place, and yet he could easily be re-elected in a few weeks time because millions believe what they're told without question, and admittedly we've survived almost four years without him pressing the nuclear button, or worse, but that's no guarantee we'd survive another term.
Meanwhile Brexit is still ticking away, not the endless agonising debate that's now behind us but the awkward truth of what happens next if at the end of this year a deal fails to materialise, like that hasn't been the underlying plan all along, unless it's all a grim game of poker and our side is holding out against sanity until the last gasp, but the Irish border question remains logically unsolvable, an entirely undeliverable pipedream, so best expect paperwork meltdown, queues at the border and gaps on the shelves one week after we've all failed to meet up for Christmas.
How did we end up with a government like this at a time like this? Boris's election strategy last year flushed out the moderate MPs and appointed only lickspittle disciples, ideal for voting through the necessary agenda but hardly a pool of talent, from which has been selected an inexperienced cabinet dealing with problems the like of which nobody has ever seen before, for which the country will pay the price for a generation, and all the while forwarding a radical deregulation agenda, because what better time to tear apart our national institutions than under cover of a global disaster.
The economy was always too finely poised, the rules of competition forcing companies to function on the narrowest of margins, hard enough to make profitable in the best of times, nigh impossible in a year of unprecedented disruption, and if you had the bad luck to be in a business targetted by social distancing doubly so, some jobs simply won't be coming back, so when furlough tips over into redundancy millions of workers' livelihoods are doomed, it's a benefits lottery on a grand scale, and while it's possible to continue to throw away billions to keep the wolf from the door the country'll be indebted for years, if not the rest of your life, if not forever.
Our fellow citizens have become intransigent and bitter, getting furious about things they'd never previously been angered by, jumping to conclusions based on incorrect assumptions, twisting words to ridicule opinions never intended, cancelling others on limited evidence, emboldened by support from people as irrationally furious as themselves, screaming into the void and poisoning public debate, because this is how we live now, in an echo chamber of hysterical fury, overlooking consensus, seeing only the bad, raising hackles rather than listening to reasoned arguments, forever ignoring the fact we might be wrong, and history warns us where all this ends up.
Meanwhile the ice sheets melt and the atmosphere warms up, inexorably, because although we could do something to stop it we can't be bothered, why save the future if it might inhibit the present, and yes we might create deserts where there are none, and yes we might end up flooding the land where billions of us live, and yes we might eventually struggle to feed the planet, and yes if you think the migrant crisis is bad now just you wait, but never mind because it's only our grandchildren who'll suffer so who cares that an investment not made today will be a catastrophe tomorrow.
And who's to say there isn't another pandemic waiting in the wings, and what happens anyway when all our antibiotics stop working, and a single solar flare could neutralise all our technology tomorrow, and we're only ever one large meteor away from total destruction, and artificial intelligence is sure to rise up one day rise up and override us, and it only takes one human error to create the doomsday scenario that destroys modern society, and what if 2019 was genuinely as good as it ever gets and from this point on we are merely freewheeling to our doom?
We are but one tiny planet in the vast emptiness of the universe, maybe even the sole example of cultural intelligence in the history of creation, custodians of innumerable generations of human advancement with a whole range of possible models of society at our disposal, and yet we seem happy to throw everything away and live in increasing misery, led by idiots we somehow elected to a position of absolute power, brought to our knees by a virus we always expected but never prepared for, and all because self-interest and short-term thinking trump foresight and cooperation, until the whole of human existence collapses around us and if we weren't all dead we'd only have ourselves to blame.
At the autumn equinox, which is precisely now, the northern hemisphere passes from the brightest half of the year to the darkest. But how much darker is it? Let's bash some numbers.
London gets about 4480 hours of daylight a year (the equivalent of 187 days). If that daylight was spread equally then each month would see about 8% of the year's total, but it's not so they don't.
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
8%
7%
6%
5%
6%
6%
8%
9%
11%
11%
11%
10%
September and March get the average of 8% because they're the months when the year's two equinoxes take place. December has the least daylight, less than half of that enjoyed in June and July. July actually has a smidgeon more daylight than June, solely because it's one day longer.
But what I'm more interested in today is what percentage of the year's daylight falls between the autumn equinox and the spring equinox. How much darker is it about to get?
In London autumn and winter get 39% of the year's daylight while spring and summer get 61%. This may not be as great a variation as you were expecting given how dark it's about to get. But viewed another way it means that spring/summer has about half as much daylight again as autumn/winter, and maybe that chimes better with our imminently disappearing evenings.
The daylight balance varies at other latitudes.
autumn/winter
spring/summer
London (51½°)
39%
61%
Paris (49°)
40%
60%
Rome (42°)
42%
58%
Cairo (30°)
45%
55%
Manila (15°)
48%
52%
equator (0°)
50%
50%
The closer you get to the equator, the smaller the discrepancy between the brighter and darker halves of the year. In the tropics it's almost imperceptible.
But the closer you get to the North Pole, the greater the imbalance.
autumn/winter
spring/summer
London (51½°)
39%
61%
Newcastle (55°)
37%
63%
Shetland (60°)
34%
66%
Reyjkavik (64°)
31%
69%
Svalbard (78°)
13%
87%
North Pole (90°)
0%
100%
The further north you go the smaller the proportion of the year's daylight occurring over the autumn and winter months. Up in Shetland it's only one-third, and by the time you hit the Arctic Circle more like a quarter. The North Pole's weird, so let's not go there.
In short, the further north you live the gloomier the next six months are going to be, possibly quite significantly so. Hang on in there and the good times will return, half a year from now.
