Dover Soul
Beautiful coastline, illegal immigration, the economy and Net Zero folly.
I planned to tour Montenegro for 10 days in August, but ended up in Dover for the weekend. That’s another story, but suffice to say that I’d forgotten how beautiful Kent is.
The Garden of England is all charming towns, archetypal English villages, chalky hills, haunting marshes and dramatic shoreline, oozing English history. As the child of a German immigrant, I took many cross channel ferries so, for me, the White Cliffs of Dover are a heady mix of home and holiday. I was not sorry I’d swapped Montenegro’s dramatic coastline for our own.
The mark of a good holiday is when you simply have to tear your eyes away from the view in order to scour property websites and fantasise about ‘The Grand Move’ across counties. I often find myself pondering about where I could live in order to escape ‘them’ and ‘it’. ‘They’ are the vast technocratic government, vampiric taxes, snobbish elites with luxury beliefs and useful idiots with ridiculous ideas and targets. ‘It’ is an almost indefinable sense of decay and unravelling. I’m a country girl at heart and I like to imagine I could move deep enough into the countryside to find a place where the birdsong drowns out the news.
I did my best to detach from news for a weekend, but even if you put your screens aside, the effluence of cultural capital and bureaucracy follow you everywhere, in conversation with strangers. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, when weather chat has been replaced by woke wars.