“Oh, this
will be a good year”, said Mrs A.
But the place was fantastic, imaginative, funny, unique and out-of-the-ordinary as well. I couldn’t decide whether the shelf packed full of Virgin Mary statuettes was more troubling than the inflatable moose’s head fixed above our bed. Or the papier mache mer-man hanging in the bathroom more unsettling than the black and pink floral wallpaper. It was a real house though. Janice lived there when she had no bookings, so it felt homely, comfortable and cosy. There was no telly, so we necked red wine and played Scrabble, overlooked by a ghoulish portrait gallery. I lost. Again.
And then another
Saturday and another car journey. This time to meet our friends Fay and Adrian for a dog walk-pub-lunch. Over a pint and a robust
plate of ham, egg and chips, Adrian fixed me with an inquisitive demeanour and
said “So let me get this right. You booked a cottage in Broadstairs packed full
of strange art without telling Helen first. And then you took her to a pub in a
stable that didn’t serve red wine? How are you here to tell the tale?” I had no
answer, but offered to make myself available for any assistance they needed
with future accommodation bookings.
1970? I
doubted it. Paul Gambaccini was bigging up the likes of Pickettywitch and Judy
Collins in a post-Beatles, pre-Glam edition of Pick of the Pops. A dead zone
for music. A Dark Age akin to the Romans leaving Britain. A void filled by drivel
like Brotherhood of Man and Peter, Paul and Mary until we were saved by the
1066 watershed of T Rex and Slade. (I offer you the Ladybird guide to both popular
music and medieval history...)
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Picketywitch in their pomp |
Radio 2’s long
running chart retrospective was filling the car with pap as we headed to the
coast for some fresh air. Mrs A knew every word of every song, whilst I was
bleating on about the shallow quality and inane content. Even Elvis let me
down. I’d never heard ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’ before, but what a cast iron crock of indigestible
sentimental soup that is. The chorus saw me with my head in my hands: ‘Daddy,
you've still got me and little Tommy/And together we'll find a brand new mommy’.
Even Helen winced. “OK, so this isn’t his finest moment.”
Coronavirus
was by then beginning to take grip of the country. We could see snippets of evidence
with our own eyes. For instance, the roads were suspiciously quiet. I can’t
recall the M25 ever being so tame in the middle of a Saturday. Mrs A was
worried that we would get to our destination before the 1970 chart reached its
zenith. I was not.
This was the
weekend before the Cheltenham Festival and I was constantly expecting Coronavirus
to result in its cancellation. Italy had already entered lockdown. Events
elsewhere were being cancelled. It was only matter of time, surely. Those few
days before the year’s horseracing fiesta are always distracting. A mix of
fevered expectation combined with stress about the targets/chances of fancied
horses causes a strange, short-lived brain impairment, the symptoms of which are
Festival Tunnel Vision and Festival Babble. The event’s potential pandemic-induced
impediment was making these symptoms worse. There are many other much weightier
and deadlier reasons why Covid-19 is devastating, but in the week before
Cheltenham I was pretty much impenetrable to all of them except the one that
might impact on my week of horse racing.
A trip to
the seaside was a bit of light relief. As Mrs A tapped her foot to ‘Na Na Hey
Hey Kiss Him Goodbye’ by Steam, and then ‘Venus’ by Shocking Blue, I wondered
what she would make of the Airbnb I had booked in Broadstairs. More
distractedly, I also wondered why both those tracks had been covered by Bananarama
in the 80’s. I speculated that Keren, Siobhan and the other one that no-one can
remember, sat down to plan their next ditties in one of the three houses they had
bought together on the same street in north London. One of them undoubtedly said,
“I know! Let’s just pick one chart from a week at random and cover everything
in the top 10!” And that’s what must have happened. 7th March 1970
was that chart and over a number of years, they released their covers. Only
these two became hits, obviously. I guess the other bilge failed to trouble the
scorers.
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Bananabarmey |
Back to the
evening’s accommodation. I had failed to book a fine hotel overlooking Botany
Bay, north of Broadstairs, because they had no pet-friendly rooms left. Undaunted,
I found a couple of town centre Airbnb gaffs that would happily host us and our
hound. One place stood out. All the reviews used words like ‘quirky’,
‘individual’ and ‘eclectic’. Excellent, I thought as I snapped up a bargain
with Janice, the host. We would soon realise that the website’s gallery didn’t come
close to portraying the real vibrancy of Janice’s abode, but they were nevertheless
enough to spook Mrs A. Too late, I’d already booked. She shared the listing
with Daughters 1 and 2 who were suitably horrified by pics of the ‘busy’ décor,
floor to ceiling shelves packed with ceramic bric-a-brac and walls crowded with
framed art.
We hit
out-of-town shopping centre traffic west of Ramsgate as I was marvelling at the
insight and philosophical depth of Peter Noone’s insipid vocal on a 1970 Herman’s
Hermit hit. Cop this wisdom: ‘Years may come/Years may go/Some go fast/Some go
slow’. Genius.
The traffic
snarl up meant Mrs A got her wish. We were parking up in Broadstairs as Gambaccini
gave an undeserved build up to Lee Marvin’s gawd-awful chart-topper from that forgettable
week, a dirge-like, teeth-grating rendition of ‘Wandrin Star’. I rested my case
and indeed Mrs A had nothing to say.
Although, funnily
enough, she found her voice again when we entered the cottage. Descriptions of the place emptied
our collective thesaurus: unusual, eccentric, peculiar, idiosyncratic,
characterful, disturbing…just plain weird.
But the place was fantastic, imaginative, funny, unique and out-of-the-ordinary as well. I couldn’t decide whether the shelf packed full of Virgin Mary statuettes was more troubling than the inflatable moose’s head fixed above our bed. Or the papier mache mer-man hanging in the bathroom more unsettling than the black and pink floral wallpaper. It was a real house though. Janice lived there when she had no bookings, so it felt homely, comfortable and cosy. There was no telly, so we necked red wine and played Scrabble, overlooked by a ghoulish portrait gallery. I lost. Again.
Broadstairs offered
up all the fresh air we craved, and plenty more besides. The coastline between
Ramsgate and North Foreland is particularly attractive with chalk cliffs shot
through with streaks of sandstone giving way to half a dozen coves and inlets filled
with the golden sand you only see in filtered holiday brochure pics. Viking Bay
is at the foot of the town’s main street, lined by hotels, houses, shops, restaurants
and pubs that give a fair impression of a well preserved Victorian resort.
Back up the hill
and past the train station, we stumbled upon a fantastic pub, carved out of a
stone flag-floored stable, serving real ale and cider straight from barrels
piled up behind the bar. I’ve added Broadstairs to the list of seaside towns
I’m trying to persuade Mrs A that we should move to.
On Sunday we popped over to Whitstable, another fine Kentish town on my list, and joined our friends there for lunch. More lung-fulls of fresh air. Whitstable bay is just so photogenic.
By the time
the Cheltenham Festival kicked off on Tuesday, the Coronavirus death toll was
creeping up and the level of confirmed cases was on the march. Attendances were
down at Prestbury Park each day. Watching on telly at home, the Festival party
looked increasingly like a last hurrah before an inevitable lockdown. I joined
the racing crew in the Barley Mow on Gold Cup Friday for our traditional session
of punting, drinking and making merry. Top day.
I didn’t go
the Festival this year, but still had a week away from work to immerse myself
in every twist and turn of the action. So hitting a crowded pub felt like
breaking my own self isolation after a week of social distancing. In hindsight,
we had probably absorbed some of that Cheltenham final stand feeling in a gung-ho
sort of day. Possibly not the wisest move.
For the
record, I had a shocking festival. Backing horses that found new ways to lose, from
grinding to a standstill up the hill to getting short-headed in a last furlong
dog-fight. And most galling of all, an unseat from jockey Jamie Moore when
miles clear. His horse Goshen managed to lock together his off-front and off-rear
shoes for a stride when stumbling through the final hurdle. A cruel and freak
incident, bringing down my Festival-saving four-timer with the jockey.
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Bacchy and the Fantasy Festival winners' whisky round |
On the way
over I insisted we had The Planet Rock Years on the radio. Gambaccini had been
kicked into touch since his woeful picks the previous Saturday. Mark Anthony
was digging 1975. Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd. That’s better.
Stay safe
all.
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