A Pet Day

This is not about cats and dogs

Yesterday was a beautiful day, more like May than February. Once again I have been exiled from my flat as now the painters have started work and I have to go out everyday. I decided to visit Rochester.

There are numerous reasons why I like visiting Rochester but mainly it is because it is easy to get to as I can catch a train from Deptford which is within walking distance of where I live. Rochester has both a cathedral and a castle and a very attractive High Street. It is also under the control of the Reform Party which I try not to dwell on. When I think about Kent I associate it with pretty villages, thatched houses, orchards and very affluent residents. The towns in North Kent are not at all like this.

The railway from London to Rochester follows the Thames - although you rarely catch a glimpse of it - and it takes quite a long time to get out of London. It stops at any number of London stations that most Londoners have never heard of even though tens of thousands of people live in these neighbourhoods. Mainly what you see from the train windows are council estates and neglected back gardens. Some of the residents fly St George flags.

It was a bright sunny morning yesterday and we passed several schools where children were outside enjoying their morning breaks. I watched some red-uniformed boys galloping round a playing field and it reminded me of how cattle behave when they are let out of sheds at the end of winter.

The Thames gets wider and wider as you approach Dartford and the train passes warehouses and junkyards, some filled with caravans as well as junk. In the distance I could just see the towers that support the Dartford Bridge which soars high above the Thames. The traffic was crawling across it and I couldn’t work out if the lorries and cars were moving really slowly or it just looked that way from a distance.

Dartford is the only town in this part of Kent that I have actually visited. On a project I worked on we had consultants who were based in Dartford and occasionally we went to their offices for meetings. All I can really remember about it is how once when we were driving back to London from Dartford, on a really hot day, we got stuck behind an abattoir lorry for what seemed like hours and the stench was unbearable.

I often associate places with books I’ve read and when passing these towns I think about Meg, a character from A Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor, who has to move outside London to a dreary town on the Thames as it is much cheaper to rent there than it is in London. (Brighton is associated with Malcolm Saville and the Cromwell Road in London with Noel Streatfeild.)

After Dartford you can see cranes at Tilbury port in the distance. This is where container ships dock. Sometimes cruise ships dock here too and I wonder what the passengers think if this is their first time in England. Everywhere you look there are huge pylons marching across the landscape.

As the train draws into Rochester, crossing the River Medway, you can see the cathedral and the castle on a hill above the station.

The air conditioning on the train was blowing out icy air so I didn’t realise how warm it was until I got off the train. My mother would have called yesterday a pet day*, which means a day when it is unseasonably warm. To me it felt like a gift, making up for the dire weather we have had for weeks. Lots of people in the streets had shed their coats and there were people happily sitting outside cafes drinking coffee. The ice-cream shop was doing excellent trade.

As always when in Rochester I mooched around the cathedral and had lunch in the crypt cafe. I spent at least 45 minutes in Baggins Bookshop Bazaar, which I think wrongly claims to be the biggest second-hand bookshop in England. Amongst other things I found a lovely old book about Australian Birds which is beautifully illustrated. The colour plates are really charming and I imagine quite a lot of people would happily remove and then frame them. I find the idea of cutting up books very challenging, especially books that are older than me.

It was a successful outing and I managed to get a train home just before the Rochester school-children were released for the day. It is definitely a well-established fact which I have just made up that Kent children are a lot noisier than London children.

Today I am passing the time in the very chilly reading rooms in the British Library.

*Pet day is an Ulster-Scots expression although its origins come from the Scottish Gaelic word peata which was used for an animal companion or a much-loved child. The word peata also means pet in Irish.

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Australian Birds