a mile out to sea

a mile out to sea

It's a late summer weekend and Brighton is full. K's popped me in a train and we go further and further south out of the City and into countryside. We pass a stone fortress that could almost be a castle. We get off at Southend, a tacky seaside resort, no, just a tacky seaside city that is amusing to no end. There are large old hotels, a fairground with frightening looking rides. The sea is way out somewhere beyond a wide expance of mudflats. We check into a Bed and Breakfast and our room, on the top floor with steep angly ceiling, has ohjoy a bathtub so it's a BB&B. We tentatively go out and up and down the walkway along the sea and laugh at other tourists until we think they are actually kind of scary, so we stomp along the mudflats looking down at encrusted rocks and chains and wood and bricks and other odd sea debris. Boats are lying on their sides waiting for the tide to come in. A burly sailor is fiddling around his boat and we talk a few minutes about fires in Florida. Way out beyond the mud is the Sea and semewhere further over the Sea is France. I squint and just see smokestacks of some powerstation. We squoosh along, passing under a short pier with rusty sharp scary abandoned building atop it. underneath is an orange fan of rusted something that looks greater the closer you get to it. K finds herself stuck in the mud, teetering and stepping out of a shoe, in great danger of falling over, 'whoa, eek! ack!', but i rescue her. Back on the sidewalk we play some cheesy video games. We find a booth with custom made stamps and make a snog and gribble one with our faces on it. As sun sets, we sit at the other side of the sea wall curled together and looking at the little lapping waves and bobbing boats. We eat chocolate and congratulate each other on escaping the BB&B bar, where our hostess was humming and singing softly to 80's pop songs... 'dancing on the ceiling, oh what a feeling'... we return to our room for a long Bath and the comfort of Bed.

The next day means the Breakfast and then a lazy late Sunday morning of newspapers by the sea, where we also construct a very fabulous sandcastle, with a seaweed forest and village nearby. The sand is mostly orange and green paled pebbles and i find myself getting all excited about each little pebble being different, and this leads me to how every person is different and would i please stop thinking? It is very warm out and a pleasure to bury toes under the sand. there's also quite a breeze, so the pebbles are particularly useful as a newspaperweight. The sand meeting the water is of finer grain for sandcastle building, so the construct is very much to our satisfaction and we dub it Wonky Catle and feel very happy. So happy we reward ourselves with lunch at a small cafe also right on the sea. the pleasant staff feed us exactly what we want and engage in nice small talk. otherwise we read more of our papers and eavesdrop on greyhaired Essex ladies. After much hesitation, we start the eventual sightseeing, towards the Amusement Park, contemplating going into the Aquarium along the way, but families pushing goblin babies dissuade us.

So we get ourselves onto the Pier, and hop on the train, a small slow clanky train that takes us a mile out to sea. well, a mile and another third of a mile. Southend Pier used to be the longest pier in the world, and the only reason is because the builders wanted it to be. It's all steel out to the end, which is made of Greenheart wood, something that sure helped whenever the pier caught on fire, at least three times so far. Some of the most recent damage has not been repaired, but turned into a museum of charred posts algaed green and adorned with many rusty bracket bits. We get some coffee and spend quite some time admiring this. I wander past a flimsy gate with some warning about not going past it and reach, after passing a few fishermen, the very far end of the pier, a cement block of a building with a precarious ledge around it. Peering up at the end i see some arcane woody metal weather vane, i think. I keep waiting to hear sea lions. I've been taking lots and lots of pictures of the burnt posts, the textures at the end, and then go downstairs to a lower deck, which is predominantly grey and slick from the muddy tide rising over it i suppose. The ceiling is a splotch of creepy patterns, like how the walls in Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth must have looked like. This story scared me senseless when i read it as a youngin', and the lower deck has brought it all back... The whole place is a delightfully squoochy haunt. At the back of the lower deck are more views of burnt wreckage and up through it i can see k blowing bubbles.

Returning upstairs i sit and blow bubbles with her on a bench next to Madame Rene's Clairvoyent Reading shack, a yellow flacky wooden hut with pictures of the many famous movie stars and footballers whose palm she's handled. Sunbeams poking through clouds spot blue on the grey sea. The view of Southend from a mile out is giving k flashbacks of Giudecca in Venice; she shivers with the feeling of a dream of the memory. Myself, i am getting lost in the silence abd dreariness of the place. All festivity has been burned away. While looking up the pier on the Web for more information about its history, all i find is a site describing the pier's attena-like focus for communication with or from Aliens, and a message on a Rollercoaster chat site about the World's tallest coaster being built on the pier to open next year. The coaster will be called the Swine, and much of it will be over the water.

Back on the land end of the pier we are in time to watch a Pirate Show at the amusement park. Excitedly we wait at the mockup of the ship, sitting on barrels with scratchy rope coiled on them as families and several amusement park honchos gather. Once the show gets started it's a bunch of noisy hoohah, speakers blaring 'Man the cannons,' and 'Good shot, soldier!" Wooden pirates, one in the crow's nest, a couple popping out from the deck, shake flimsy cutlasses as the water aroung the boat bloops up now and then, Some clouds of black steam puff around. The show ends as it started, making us feel like storming the ship ourselves and kicking a few things. After this it is a long leisurely stroll down the Golden Mile, along the sea, and then inland, past Essex Suburbia of middleclass homes pretending to be upperclass and failing. A home with a stone hippo in the front yard outshines them all. We sit at the train station, again listening to sounds in the silence, the rustle of a crisp bag being blown along the platform, someone's headphones tinning out a faint beat, and the clicks of the railway clock when the minute is up.

we take the train again, miles away from the sea.

i took many gloomy pictures of the pier...

...and of other rusty bits
tangle | ocean gaps

a mile out to sea
It's a late summer weekend and Brighton is full. K's popped me in a train and we go further and further south out of the City and into countryside. We pass a stone fortress that could almost be a castle. We get off at Southend, a tacky seaside resort, no, just a tacky seaside city that is amusing to no end. There are large old hotels, a fairground with frightening looking rides. The sea is way out somewhere beyond a wide expance of mudflats. We check into a Bed and Breakfast and our room, on the top floor with steep angly ceiling, has ohjoy a bathtub so it's a BB&B. We tentatively go out and up and down the walkway along the sea and laugh at other tourists until we think they are actually kind of scary, so we stomp along the mudflats looking down at encrusted rocks and chains and wood and bricks and other odd sea debris. Boats are lying on their sides waiting for the tide to come in. A burly sailor is fiddling around his boat and we talk a few minutes about fires in Florida. Way out beyond the mud is the Sea and semewhere further over the Sea is France. I squint and just see smokestacks of some powerstation. We squoosh along, passing under a short pier with rusty sharp scary abandoned building atop it. underneath is an orange fan of rusted something that looks greater the closer you get to it. K finds herself stuck in the mud, teetering and stepping out of a shoe, in great danger of falling over, 'whoa, eek! ack!', but i rescue her. Back on the sidewalk we play some cheesy video games. We find a booth with custom made stamps and make a snog and gribble one with our faces on it. As sun sets, we sit at the other side of the sea wall curled together and looking at the little lapping waves and bobbing boats. We eat chocolate and congratulate each other on escaping the BB&B bar, where our hostess was humming and singing softly to 80's pop songs... 'dancing on the ceiling, oh what a feeling'... we return to our room for a long Bath and the comfort of Bed. The next day means the Breakfast and then a lazy late Sunday morning of newspapers by the sea, where we also construct a very fabulous sandcastle, with a seaweed forest and village nearby. The sand is mostly orange and green paled pebbles and i find myself getting all excited about each little pebble being different, and this leads me to how every person is different and would i please stop thinking? It is very warm out and a pleasure to bury toes under the sand. there's also quite a breeze, so the pebbles are particularly useful as a newspaperweight. The sand meeting the water is of finer grain for sandcastle building, so the construct is very much to our satisfaction and we dub it Wonky Catle and feel very happy. So happy we reward ourselves with lunch at a small cafe also right on the sea. the pleasant staff feed us exactly what we want and engage in nice small talk. otherwise we read more of our papers and eavesdrop on greyhaired Essex ladies. After much hesitation, we start the eventual sightseeing, towards the Amusement Park, contemplating going into the Aquarium along the way, but families pushing goblin babies dissuade us. So we get ourselves onto the Pier, and hop on the train, a small slow clanky train that takes us a mile out to sea. well, a mile and another third of a mile. Southend Pier used to be the longest pier in the world, and the only reason is because the builders wanted it to be. It's all steel out to the end, which is made of Greenheart wood, something that sure helped whenever the pier caught on fire, at least three times so far. Some of the most recent damage has not been repaired, but turned into a museum of charred posts algaed green and adorned with many rusty bracket bits. We get some coffee and spend quite some time admiring this. I wander past a flimsy gate with some warning about not going past it and reach, after passing a few fishermen, the very far end of the pier, a cement block of a building with a precarious ledge around it. Peering up at the end i see some arcane woody metal weather vane, i think. I keep waiting to hear sea lions. I've been taking lots and lots of pictures of the burnt posts, the textures at the end, and then go downstairs to a lower deck, which is predominantly grey and slick from the muddy tide rising over it i suppose. The ceiling is a splotch of creepy patterns, like how the walls in Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth must have looked like. This story scared me senseless when i read it as a youngin', and the lower deck has brought it all back... The whole place is a delightfully squoochy haunt. At the back of the lower deck are more views of burnt wreckage and up through it i can see k blowing bubbles. Returning upstairs i sit and blow bubbles with her on a bench next to Madame Rene's Clairvoyent Reading shack, a yellow flacky wooden hut with pictures of the many famous movie stars and footballers whose palm she's handled. Sunbeams poking through clouds spot blue on the grey sea. The view of Southend from a mile out is giving k flashbacks of Giudecca in Venice; she shivers with the feeling of a dream of the memory. Myself, i am getting lost in the silence abd dreariness of the place. All festivity has been burned away. While looking up the pier on the Web for more information about its history, all i find is a site describing the pier's attena-like focus for communication with or from Aliens, and a message on a Rollercoaster chat site about the World's tallest coaster being built on the pier to open next year. The coaster will be called the Swine, and much of it will be over the water. Back on the land end of the pier we are in time to watch a Pirate Show at the amusement park. Excitedly we wait at the mockup of the ship, sitting on barrels with scratchy rope coiled on them as families and several amusement park honchos gather. Once the show gets started it's a bunch of noisy hoohah, speakers blaring 'Man the cannons,' and 'Good shot, soldier!" Wooden pirates, one in the crow's nest, a couple popping out from the deck, shake flimsy cutlasses as the water aroung the boat bloops up now and then, Some clouds of black steam puff around. The show ends as it started, making us feel like storming the ship ourselves and kicking a few things. After this it is a long leisurely stroll down the Golden Mile, along the sea, and then inland, past Essex Suburbia of middleclass homes pretending to be upperclass and failing. A home with a stone hippo in the front yard outshines them all. We sit at the train station, again listening to sounds in the silence, the rustle of a crisp bag being blown along the platform, someone's headphones tinning out a faint beat, and the clicks of the railway clock when the minute is up. we take the train again, miles away from the sea.