Sheerness has some of the best sea to swim near London. This is largely due to the temperatures in Sheerness being in the last few years usually the warmest of any seaside near London. Also, the beach is consistently easy to swim in with reliable water levels without the water retreating into the sea and leaving a muddy mess like in Southend-on-Sea sometimes and without any slippery or treacherous ground (other than maybe the odd local youth throwing stones at visitors). The colour of the sea water near the Thames Estuary is not the prettiest blue but rather olive if one does not offend any Brexit natives by comparison to something growing only or best overseas. The beach has been awarded the European Blue Flag for cleanliness and safety.
Despite even history as a seaside resort, nowadays Sheerness could probably make more of its seaside but maybe the local council’s sense of entrepreneurship is that of the Brexiteer who seems to think that prosperity comes from closing away and cutting links with the largest and nearest market which the European Union is to the United Kingdom at a time when countries more than ever rely on international trade for their prosperity. It seems that much has changed since one of the first co-operative societies was situated in Sheerness.
The area has some colourful history as reported in KentOnline on 21 September 2020:
The area at that time was known to be popular with smugglers. It was considered shady but necessary so residents learned to “turn one's back while the gentlemen went by”. Which is how we understand illicit contraband ended up in the church belfry.
KentOnline also recounts the legend of Grey Dolphin and Sir Robert de Shurland, of Shurland Hall, Eastchurch:
In those days Sheppey was covered in woods and was an ideal hunting ground. Indeed, Henry Vlll is recorded as staying at Shurland Hall with Anne Boleyn... Sir Robert was "a stocky man of considerable strength and quick temper."
Sir Robert also had the right to claim possession of any wreck or flotsam and jetsam which came within reach of his lance at low tide. To this end, his father Sir Roger had started training his most capable horses to swim off the coast of Sheppey to seek out sinking ships and Sir Robert carried on the practice.
One evening as Sir Robert quaffed ale and devoured a plate of Faversham oysters he became aware of a commotion. Villagers had discovered the body of a sailor washed up on the beach and were pleading with the priest to bury it.
But Father Fothergill, a plump and portly Augustine friar based at Minster Abbey was unsure the cadaver should be buried in consecrated ground and refused. Word was that this 'grinning sailor' had previously been buried in Chatham and then been dug up and thrown back into the sea.
Hearing that the priest was refusing to bury the body, Sir Robert in a rage called for his 'kicking' boots and summoned the man of God. A violent confrontation was coming.
"Bury me that grinning caitliff!" insisted the baron.
The chaplain argued back: "Water and earth alike reject him."
"Give him his passport to Heaven," returned Sir Robert.
"He has already gone to Hell," stammered the friar.
As the baron reached for his sword, which he called Tickletoby, the friar turned to run and the baron lashed out with his foot.
Ingoldsby says: "It was but one kick but such a one!"
The friar landed heavily into the already dug grave and died as the force of the fall broke his neck. The baron, in a foul rage, ordered the body of the sailor be hauled in on top and the two buried together.
In those days the church was very powerful and enjoyed the full protection of the king. News of this shocking event soon spread to Canterbury. A crime against the church was a crime against the king so an army arrived at Sir Robert's front door. Any other man would have been quaking in his boots but Sir Robert merely took them all on and won.
But he realised he would still need a royal pardon. King Edward l (1272 to 1307) was to sail past Sheppey on his royal barge to inspect his navy moored at The Nore which was preparing to go into battle against the French.
So Sir Robert dashed to his stables and had his favourite steed Grey Dolphin saddled up. The horse had been specially trained for swimming out to sea.
The pair swam two miles to the king's ship battling strong tides and wind.
"What have we here?" asked the King.
"It's a mermaid or the Devil," suggested his courtiers.
As the baron had fought alongside the king in the Holy Wars he was granted his pardon and, clutching it to his chest, turned his horse around to swim back to shore.
But once on dry land the exhausted pair were met by an "ugly old woman" who warned the baron: "Make much of your steed. He has saved your life but he shall yet be the means of you losing it."
... "Sir Robert was as superstitious as everyone else in those days and was aghast. Grey Dolphin was his favourite horse and yet he valued his own life more than the horse.
"So to thwart the hag's prophecy he took his sword and sliced through the horse’s neck. Grey Dolphin, weakened by the swim and now struck by a fatal blow dropped to the stones, dead. A distraught Sir Robert buried the horse where it lay."
According to Thomas Ingoldsby, three years later Sir Robert was walking along the same beach at Scrapsgate when he spotted the bleached skull of Grey Dolphin sticking up out of the stones. Angry at losing his favourite horse he lashed out with his foot. The force was so strong that one of the teeth from the skull penetrated his boot and lodged in his toe.
Sir Robert returned to Shurland Hall and was forced to take to his bed. The splinter of bone caused blood poisoning leading to gangrene. Within days Sir Robert De Shurland was dead. The witch's prophecy had been fulfilled.
Clock tower of 1902 commemorating the coronation of King Edward VII
Sheerness has much fine Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian architecture even if it is not maintained very well. The local Conservative Club seems to be based in a surprisingly fine Victorian building, considering the Party’s increasingly impressive record in destroying extensively British heritage. At least they have added some hideous 1970s style lowered internal ceilings, consistent with the lowered standards of the once moderate Party that even brought the United Kingdom into the European Community but latterly with leaders sinking to the classic politicians' cheap trick of seeking to shift blame abroad, e.g. to the EU, for their own domestic failure to contribute to the success of many areas of the UK. Already Horace said, delirent reges, plectuntur Achivi (the kings err, the Greeks are punished). An old proverb says that it hurts most when your own dogs bite you. The current party is not even a cheap reproduction (that was New Labour, blue tits up 1997) but a downright fake (blue tits up 2016 and 2019). At least the Conservatives have some claim to versatility, bringing both the worst and (formerly) the best to the nation, the latter represented by moderate people like Kenneth Lord Clarke and Dominic Grieve.
One treat before lockdown was the local beauty pageant in the summer displaying the substantial attractiveness of the local belles, with aesthetic gravitas, all testifying to the aesthetic benefits of a traditional nationalist English diet rich in mouth-melting fat, salt, sugar and saturates, the sheerness of the celluloid. One can only impatiently wait for such great entertainment to resume under the unrepentantly conpetent handling of the pandemic by the infinitely wise government, to restore this celebration of Brexit Britain, to heavily outshine such dreadful skinny European fashion as one might endure in Paris or Milan. Each to their own!
Indeed, for the self-marginalising isolationist, xenophobic and above all racist Brexiteer attractively few aliens seem be in Sheerness, which seems to remain a largely native Tory and Brexit old f*rtland. It was reported in 2013 that a group of Jewish school children was warmly welcomed by the local youths who threw stones and eggs at them. It can be an exciting adventure to visit Sheerness.
One wonders about Sheerness, but people usually become wiser as they become older. One exception seems to be the elderly people who voted for Brexit - 'there is no fool like the old fool.' They seem to have proved themselves worthy of the Viking concept of elderly care. In Aland there is still a cliff off which elderly people were pushed which is not even materially different from contemporary western government policy on the care of the elderly. Luckily there are no cliffs in Sheerness, only the white cliffs in Dover, another fine pearl of Kent, cherished by the British political élite. After both major political parties have done such an excellent job in creating deprived areas around the country, the Tories now try to make the whole country a deprived area.
Old wisdom has it that it is good to have ones friends near and ememies far. However, as ‘global’ Britain purportedly begins to trade with the rest of the world other than the too close for comfort EU even if in smaller quantity and quality than was the case within the EU, doubtless the benefits of this nouveau prosperity will soon reach Sheerness like the British political élite's efforts in looking after deprived areas of industrial decline for decades in the UK. But maybe better not to take 'global' Britain’s new exotic trading partners there for recreation unless they are interested to encounter at close quarters local stones and eggs being pelted at them, echoing the Brexiteers’ appreciation for prosperity from the EU. Indeed, such terrible ‘citizens of nowhere’ could surely never appreciate such a wonderfully parochial locality at the doorstep of the still cosmopolitan metropolis of London.
Have the formidable locals however understood their own area? By going and living elsewhere, especially in another country, one can also discover one's own area better, not that one has to abandon one’s own origins and heritage but maybe improve and complement it with other inspirations – like discovering how to eat healthier, tastier, and more varied food. Not too many English people in Spain or elsewhere abroad however seem to have embraced the local culture and cuisine, rather exporting their parochial lack of sophistication, but the same can be said of various other Northern Europeans, not only the English. Like many other places, they could make more of it themselves, not remain stuck in a never-moving inertia, not expect only others from elsewhere to make something of it, like we must live our own lives ourselves and make something of it ourselves rather than expecting someone else to live it for us, like we can only think individually independently ourselves and not let only others think for ourselves.
In Hints on Etiquette by Charles William Day in 1842 it is rightly said that:
There is no more common or absurd mistake than supposing that, because people are of high rank, they cannot be vulgar; – or that, if people be in an obscure station, they cannot be well bred.
Gentility is neither in birth, manner, nor fashion – but in the MIND.
Living proof of all these elements is at the very top of the leadership of Brexit...
People who grow up ‘abroad’ with other people from all over the world, can feel home in the kind of international environment that one can find in London for example. While the worst nationalists can have surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry, the Cosmopolitan can be of anything but Cosmopolitan ancestry – from the same families in the backwoods marrying each other for centuries, frustrated and bored by not finding anything more exotic in the DNA test than less than 0.01 percent Central Asian, Melanesian, and Sub-Saharan African, for example, the rest 99.6 to 100 percent being of just one national origin and even on the documented ancestry having to be content with the nearest known ancestor of another nationality being 800 years ago from Scotland and even that with no documentary proof, leaving any Scots in their veins more likely to be something other than blood. They are nomads of a slightly different kind to the fine horsemen of Darfur, one of whom as a refugee ended up in the UK riding one of the Queen’s horses in the races, as recounted in The Journey by Abdul Musa Adam. Like gentility, cosmopolitanism is also less in birth and fashion and more in the mind.
Every country has its good and bad sides and no country is better or worse than another like no person is better or worse than another. Every country has its parochialism and cosmopolitanism. As Dimitri Shostakovich in his Memoires tells us, under Stalin it was no longer permitted to say French bread which was renamed town bread. Incidentally Stalinists called Jews Cosmopolitans which was meant to be insulting while people who call themselves Cosmopolitans rather like it, like Cavaliers came to like what was originally a term of abuse. Like some people find fat attractive while others prefer slim, some like Cosmopolitan and others do not, but we should respect different views and not think our views are the only right ones.
As the fine European-British Actor Sir Dirk Bogarde described xenophobic middle class Britain "... in their dreary little bungalows outside... Budleigh Salterton [pronounced like Bugley or ugly sod... ] pottering about in their rain-drenched gnome-ridden gardens... loathing all bloody foreigners, hating and mistrusting anything beyond their sceptered isle... when I think of that it makes me really ill..."
In 1935, the Composer Richard Strauss wrote:
Do you believe I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am 'German'? Do you suppose Mozart was consciously 'Aryan' when he composed? I recognise only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none.
One step further left from the extreme left brings one to the extreme right and vice versa, like Communism and national socialism, like the union of the far right Trump and the far left Putin, like stone-pelting xenophbes in Sheerness and the haters of 'citizens of nowhere' are unified in similarity with Stalinists and cheaply reproducing the Iron Curtain in the English Channel and making the North Korea of Europe of the UK – where the Soviets failed the Brexiteers succeeded.
Similarly some fashionably extreme left-wing radicals of the late 1960s few decades later became the best capitalists and Trump supporters, nouveau enriching themselves to the extent of buying fine country houses from the aristocrats who no longer could not afford to maintain what had been in their families for centuries – to the manor not born, turning their coats to fill their pockets!
A chilling example of how much extremists on all sides have in common is, how rioters seem more interested in stealing beer and televisions, than promoting any even purportedly legitimate cause, as could be seen in far-left 'protests' against the police killing a Black suspect and purportedly anti-immigration protests by the far-right.
The extreme left of Bolsheviks and the extreme right of republicans have more in common than the moderate centre ground where most decent people are in Sheerness as elsewhere.
"Though I am a native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance" (Hamlet).
Footnote: in such seaside places like Great Yarmouth one sees no bicycles in the cycle lane but rather a cavalcade of mobility scooters whose native white riders nowadays would be offended by being called merely 'fat' as the correct word is of course the far more flattering 'enormous'! There is a market for an entire shop selling mobility scooters - Costa del Dole.
