Snap and Scribble

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On Friday i went to Southend, to meet up with a couple of old friends from Australia who’ve both been living in London for a few years now. Quite why anyone who could live in Australia would choose to live in London, i’m damned if i know – but there’s no accounting for taste!

Anyway, Phil and Brenton were going to Southend on Phil’s motorbike so Brenton could buy a bike there himself. I guess a motorbike’s the smart way to get around London these days, with the prices of petrol and public transport the way they are. And, as Southend’s only about twenty miles from here, i thought i’d pop over there and meet up with them.

I haven’t seen either of them since i was in England a year ago, so it was good to catch up again finally. We decided to go for a walk along the pier – it’s over two kilometres long, and is the longest pleasure pier in the world. It stretches out into the Thames, which is quite a few miles wide at that point, not far before it flows into the North Sea.

Brenton was talking on his mobile when we all walked onto the pier – paying our £2.50 entrance fee on the way. He obviously wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on as, when were were quite a long way down the pier, he asked “Where does this bridge go?” – which gave me and Phil a bit of a laugh.

It was understandable though, i suppose, as there’s a train that runs along the pier too – which makes it look a lot more like a bridge than it would look otherwise.

When we got nearly to the end, we saw there had obviously been a fire on the pier not long ago. The train track ended a bit prematurely, at a fairly makeshift station, and there were blackened timbers where it would have run before. Looking up the story of the fire on the web, i found that it was only one in a long series of many fires that have hit that pier over its more than 150 years of existence.

Fortunately, the fire hadn’t done as much damage as the one that destroyed Brighton’s west pier a few years back. But that one was lit deliberately. This one appears to have been an accident.

Anyway, we finally reached the end of the pier, but there wasn’t very much to see – apart from the grey waters of the Thames flowing past below. The only thing there is a lifeboat station and some sort of lifeboat museum. We didn’t bother going in though.

We had planned to catch the train back, for some reason. But we didn’t bother in the end. We walked back along the pier and went and got some chips for lunch – which we ate sitting on the seawall, overlooking the wide expanse of mud that’s exposed when the tide’s out. And then we headed back home.

I think that was the first time i’ve been to Southend in about thirty years!

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