Tales from Kent
Inspired by my surroundings, I consider bellowing ‘Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda’, with all my might. Even as I’m thinking it, a trademark stare from my wife, Jane, curtails the freeing of my spirit.
We are at Botany Bay, all golden sand and blue sea, with prerequisite sunshine to boot. The classic Antipodean song has been thrumming around my head since leaving Nottingham, but my wife’s intervention reminds me that we are in East Kent, not Australia. Thanks in part to Paul O’Grady’s Great British Escape (ITV), we are on the Isle of Thanet – and absolutely loving it.
Kent, the Garden of England, is a county that throws up question after question. ‘What is the difference between a Kentish Man and a Man of Kent?’, ‘Is the Isle of Thanet an island?’ and, indeed, ‘Which Botany Bay was named first?’
But the most pertinent question of all is, ‘Why do we usually pass out of Kent no sooner than we’ve entered it?’ It’s so very easy to get caught up in getting over, or under, the English Channel that this last bastion of England goes by in an instant, despite us cooing about lovely scenery, oast houses, white cliffs and what have you.
Having stabled the trusty steed, New Mobes (our Swift Bolero), at Nethercourt Touring Park in Ramsgate,
