The longest pleasure pier in the world

Southend today. Almost exactly a year – to the day – since the last time I was there. Very, very lucky with the weather.

It was bitterly cold at the end of the pier, which made the absence of McGinty’s all the more disappointing. I was looking forward to the traditional cheese and onion sandwich, sheltering from the wind as it battered the windows, and the waves crashed into the pier legs far below. Instead, though, after the mile and a quarter walk to the end, there was nothing for us to do, but turn around and walk back down to the landward end, almost unable to breathe as the furious wind blew along the river from London. It tore at our hair and clothes and turned our fingers purple and stiff, and we had no choice but to hide in a greasy cafe with oily table cloths, and warm our hands on big mugs of tea.

I have to give the town its due, though. It was a fun afternoon out, and the drive back along the front through Westcliffe, Leigh, and Hadleigh was interesting and highly reminiscent.

So was last night. I think I’ve been to every one of Mark’s pancake parties, the most recent being yesterday evening. So the sheet was rolled out to cover the kitchen floor, the kitchen table was filled with our contributions to the fillings and toppings, and we all clustered around his tiny two-ring hob, flipping batter in a tiny frying pan and a huge, sink-like wok.

I think we all did quite well. Ystabub made pancakes the colour and consistency of well tanned leather. Mark made little duvets. Nick and Michelle made a very competent stab at producing thoroughly edible pancakes that looked, smelt and probably actually tasted like pancakes. Rich surprised us all by not setting a tea towel on fire this time around. I was the only one who managed to flip a pancake right out of the pan and land it wet side down onto one of the rings of the cooker (it cooked a whole lot quicker after that). And Peter put his years at McDonalds to good use by putting us all to shame. He’s clearly a man who knows how to flip like a pro.

Inevitably, after so much batter, chocolate, syrup and cream I’m now fighting a fresh threat of spots just lurking under my skin.

Tea-tree a go-go.

My writing quota has shot up lately, and I find it very rewarding.

After a little shuffle around at work, I’m now producing most of the content for our web site, so the stories you can see running up the right-hand margin of this blog, which are scraped directly from the MacUser news feed, will almost all be written by me.

I’m enjoying the speed of web publishing, which in my role has always been quite secondary to print, but now that we’re running things as a brand, with the printed mag and the online site working hand-in-hand, and overseen by the same team, things have turned about, and they are suddenly on an equal footing as far as my workload goes.

But beyond that, I’m also blogging and noveling more than I have been lately.

I’ve revisited the travelogue, and it’s progressing rather nicely – if a little slowly – with a bit more being tidied up or written from scratch on the train every morning or evening. I’m concentrating on Bulgaria at the moment, as it is one of the most recent sections completed, and so one of the clearest in my mind, and getting a lot out of snipping off raggedy paragraph ends, twisting sentences into more attractive rhythms, and reorganising my thoughts.

And Blagger, my green and low-cost living blog, has been up and running for almost a month, and it’s getting some decent hits. In the last three weeks it’s scored almost 2,500 visits, and the daily count seems to be growing by the day. That’s a very different kind of web publishing to what we’re doing at work, of course, as I’m aiming for a single post a day to build up a steady feed, rather than minute-by-minute coverage. To that end, I have a few entries stacked up for the next few days, ready to go live each morning just before half eight.

The idea is that I’ll use it to chronicle my efforts with growing fruit and veg and getting into the swing of home-producing a lot of my food once I’ve moved, so it will change over time, but right now it’s pootling along with general green issues, and I’m quite happy with that.

So at the moment I’m spending a lot of time with my fingers on a keyboard, and it’s been immensely rewarding. Perhaps the only thing that’s being given less of my written words is this personal blog.

Suffice it to say, though, that no news is good news, and really that’s all that matters.

Rich taking photos of Framlingham Castle

Saturday, unquestionably the brighter of this weekend’s two days, we went to Framlingham to walk around the edge of the castle. It’s another part of the country I’ve never seen before, and it certainly proved to be well worth a visit. Muddy, of course, but very picturesque, and the 900-year-old castle is remarkably well preserved, even if you can see the odd bit of red-brick patchwork here and there.

The only slight downer was the car playing up. It decided that every unlocking twist of the key was actually a lock command, despite already being locked tight shut. When we eventually got the door open it fell into an endless gdzzzg-gdzzzg gdzzzg-gdzzzg loop as it tried over and over and over to lock up again, but every time failed because the passenger door was open. The driver-side door was refusing – stubbornly, in my opinion – to do anything at all, so I had to clamber in and out from the opposite side.

So, that made for a very early start this morning. Dad’s over (apparently for an extended period), and had popped down to Sal’s for the weekend for his birthday. She’d booked us into an Italian restaurant ten minutes’ drive from home, but the car had to be fixed first, or we’d never get there in the first place.

Poxy thing refused to stay broken after a 6h45 alarm call and a scoot around to the guy who services it. He greased it up just in case that would help as an interim stop-gap, and showed me where to thump the door panel if it should stick again, but in the absence of any proper repeatable problem there wasn’t much he could do, except order a replacement part for a commonly-failing mechanism and estimate a fix date of Thursday.

Poo.

Still, it made the trip down to Sal’s quite safely, and back in one piece, and in between we all had very nice lunches at the restaurant, snuggly cuddles with the cat, yummy cake with cups of tea afterwards, and backwards-forwards treks from the bookshelves to the kitchen as we moved things out of the way of tomorrow’s carpet fitters.

Oscar is looking thin and increasingly bald, poor thing. He must be the only cat in the world that suffers from depression, and an allergy to dust, cotton and wool.

Lots and lots and lots of things happening, including big (but good) changes at work that have made for some very busy but enjoyable days.

Last night, though, was time for a change of pace and a slow walk from the office, through the dusky and eventually dark night-time streets, along the side of Regent’s Park and up to the top of Primrose Hill with Rich.

It’s a long time since I’ve been there, and the last time was at the height of summer – August 2005 – when I walked there in a lunch hour to have a look at the view. I was bowled over by it that time, but it’s even better at night, when the whole London skyline is lit up and laid out before you, from Canary Wharf in the east, through St Paul’s, Parliament and the London Eye and out to the western suburbs.

You can see why it was so busy up there, and people sitting on the benches at the very top were popping champagne corks to celebrate Valentines’ Day.

We followed their lead, but instead of champagne had steaming hot tea from a flask down at the foot of the hill, out of the eddies of wind, in a pool of light cast by one of the black iron lamp posts.

It was a beautiful evening, and I didn’t really feel the cold until the very end; my scarf, hat and gloves kept it out as we sat for an hour or more enjoying the view, and watching the dog walkers and their hairy little pets pass by on a never-ending loop.

So I exchanged contracts on the house today. That means I’m legally obliged to go through with the purchase, and she’s legally obliged to sell. Only trouble is, she wants to complete in seven weeks. Seven weeks! Normally it’s four. On the flat it was two.

Hmmm.

Well, I’ll cut her some slack. She’s lived there since she was four, so that’s 62 years, so I’m guessing that there’s probably some stuff in the loft she needs to sort through. And besides, I’m in no hurry. I’m very comfortable where I am and I have no need to move out quickly.

It does mean, of course, that my completion will happen almost simultaneously with becoming an uncle, so I’m guessing that April is going to be a very busy month indeed.

In the meantime, there’s bathrooms to fit, furniture to pick, washing machines to buy, trees to trim, gardens to plan… I suspect those seven weeks will fairly fly by.

This weekend in Ipswich.

Looks like the forecasters were right. It took all the squirrels by surprise, of course, as they’d not been paying attention, but once they got over the shock of it they spent most of the morning either breathing on their fingers to keep them warm or throwing snowballs at each other…

…or playing hide and seek in the trees.

It was very picturesque, but the roads up here on the hill were treacherous, so I took the opportunity to knock out the two features I’m due to write by the end of the week, and instead worked at home as it piled up all around.

I was up by six to check the travel news which was singularly useless as there was no detail at all, but a look out of the window around eight o’clock made it clear that it was already piling up three or more inches deep.

The London Paper runs a column every day, where city singletons who glimpsed someone on the tube lay their hearts on the line and pop out a free ad to see if they can make something meaningful out of a chance encounter. They’re about as specific as a horoscope, so to test our theory that anything, no matter how random or general could bag itself an entry, Paul Nesbitt and I came up with the androgynous name Sam Tressle and wrote our own. Rich spotted it printed in last night’s edition.

Theory proved.

Dear people of Suffolk

I rode the train north out of Chelmsford for the first time in 10 years at the weekend, and feel I must apologise for the mess of my county strewn along that line.

Entirely biassed, I know, but I’ve always considered Essex to be a beautiful county – in parts. Those northern fringes that run along your border are among the most picturesque in the whole of East Anglia, and the coast that runs down from Walton and on through Frinton is a mini paradise on any summer’s day.

So imagine my surprise and mild shame to see speeding past me (yes – speeding; hard to believe, I know) factories, scarred pits, rubbish dumps, run-down housing estates and industrial parks, the whole way from the county town in which I live, to the border with your own green and hilly domain.

Perhaps we Essexers are more closely related than we’d like to admit to the Romford, Ilford and Barking lot we wisely jettisoned through some simple remapping in the sixties. Maybe I shouldn’t be so vociferous in my barracking of the BBC and Sky when their news sites make silly mistakes like proclaiming that Essex is the luckiest country in which to play the lottery, as evidenced by the number of winners hailing from Ilford and Romford, which sit happily in the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Havering. And both Redbridge and Havering are welcome to keep them.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if things hadn’t changed quite so dramatically or so suddenly as we crossed the county line, and shook off the factories in favour of fields, the pits in favour of ponies and the dumps in favour of small Anglian dales.

All I can ask is that as you next speed through our county on your way out of London you remember that beyond that burnt out wreck of a car, that malt processing factory and that sink estate there is a land of green trees, small undulations that in our pancake-flat land count for hills, and slowly eroding coastline largely free from mucky brown flotsam. Remember that it is somewhere we love, and that the grim vista you see through the train windows is not representative of the rest of the region we choose to call home.

Or, at the very least, bury your head in a copy of London Lite and try not to look through the glass.

Lots of love
Nik
x

How’s this for confusing? On the one hand (if you search long and hard enough), there are apparently grants for greening up your home by adding wind turbines of solar panels to your roof. That’s something I was hoping to do after moving, particularly when the next generation of more efficient turbines comes out later this year. They should work at lower wind speeds, all being well.

Now these grants are pretty forward thinking, and it looks like they could pay off in more ways than one. Not only do you get free energy, but the planet benefits (admittedly in a very small way), and it could make your home easier to sell.

As thelondonpaper reported a couple of days back, from June all home-owners looking to sell their properties will have to pay