From the house-clustered North edge of Deal, starting below the sea-wall, starting below sea level, as is so much of old Deal, towards Sandwich, the grinding pebbles, rough grasses, wind-warped trees on the inward side of our path. Look across the water, hints of cliffs and mud and towering cooling chimneys, past the golf links that bulk out in the distance. That old familiar ozone smell, summer sun or winter wind on skin. The long closed pub, somehow still sign intact.
The golf course next, a fluctuating, alien land of hillocks and valleys. Green everywhere of course but lots of sand. It’s a links course as that’s one built in and around dunes (I think anyway, I may have made that up in my head & frankly I couldn’t care any less about golf). A feeling that I just want to erase the greens, re-wild the pride and joy of the middle class ‘captains of industry’ and their jolly 19th hole takes on the world; in reality they’re just divvying up the town, the planet & dividing the spoils between them. The course is a void, a nothing, a gaping wound in a fragile eco-system, an aberration that encroaches on & slag-heap like, despoils our landscape.
The old house is beaten down, bowed under attacks from sea, wind, salt, you think it’s probably not going to be there many more years. The sea always extracting its inexorable toll from the beach, the land fearful of further inroads. Clumped, sheltering bundles of brush and heather and gorse; the only things that seem to grow easily with the salt air. The large deserted car park behind it makes me think it’s made up of more than one property all melded together by time & economics. Tiles sunlight glinting.
