Great Weekend In Broadstairs

My brother and I went off to Broadstairs (Kent, South East England) for the weekend to see my Godmother, Aunt Win, (my mother’s sister), and our cousin Susan and her husband Alan.

Amazingly, our respective flights landed at Gatwick at exactly the same time so I’d no sooner raided the first cashpoint of some readies, when Robert appeared. We picked up our hire car and headed south-east. The motorways were empty and so we completed an AA internet route which was scheduled to take 1.5 hours in just over the hour although we both thought we saw lots of cameras flashing from the overhead gantries as we roared under them.

It was great to spend time with our aunt and our cousin whom we’ve only seen a couple of times in the last 40 years and it was also nice to see some real old fashioned English seaside resorts. On our way from Birchington-on-Sea where Sue lives, we passed through Margate where I used to be taken on holiday as a child (aged about 7-9). It looked really tacky with many of the sea-front stores closed and the rest either ‘kiss-me-quick’ gift shops or really seedy-looking clubs. I couldn’t remember a single bit of it, but it has been about 50 years since my last visit so maybe that’s not surprising. Broadstairs was quite different though. It still retains its old splendor and is not dominated by shops on the sea-front which gives it an altogether more classy feel. The beach looked amazing, the sun shone and we had a great meal on the sea-front, in fact the best meal of the weekend as far as I was concerned – apart from Sue’s bacon butties on Saturday night, of course!

Sunday arrived all too quickly and after a traditional roast-beef and Yorkshire pudding lunch, it was time to depart back to that monstrous edifice of total inefficiency – Gatwick Airport. Having been fined millions last year for its long security queues it’s oddly reassuring to see that absolutely nothing has changed! Why should it? BAA are being forced to sell it and there’s no way they are going to make it efficient for the next owner to reap the benefit and so it took Robert just over an hour to complete check-in and get through security.

We had a quick drink, argued over who owed whom what and then went our separate ways. Well I did. I left Robert in the bar – maybe he never got home?

Picture – (from left) me, cousin Sue, her husband Alan, my Aunt Win and my brother Robert.