Tracey Emin's Condescending Roustabout

"Harder and Better" (than all of you Fucking Bastards)"
Tracey Emin

It's with amusement that I read Ms Emin's latest paen to Margate, all misty-eyed nods to a disappearing land of grimy shags in seafront shelters, riding the big wheel and the taste of candy floss, lollipops and moonbeams if I interpret her comment of "Kinky Contradictions" correctly.

It's fair enough I suppose. We all like to reminisce and grumble when things deteriorate from how we remember them.
However, some of us still have to live here, without having been blessed with extraordinary success and one would assume (from her recent contribution to a charity auction going for a cool £800k) no little wealth. I somehow felt we should be looking with shame on our failure to present Margate as she remembered it, on the occasions she deigned to hop in her motor and wander down from Kensington or Notting Hill or wherever it is she lives.

There have also been efforts to revitalise the area as an artist's haven. If she'd bothered to have a stroll around, she might have had a look round some of the areas provided to encourage our rosy-cheeked populace to follow in her footsteps, and in doing so perhaps lend them some much needed support and publicity.
But she does say it was awfully windy and she was busy looking for something to write about for her well remunerated column in the Independent after all.

She then fantasises about a notional benevolent giant, remodelling the place in the image of her memory, preserving it in amber, presumably making the sun shine all year round and forcibly dragging people from the East End to populate a rebuilt Dreamland running at a profit, while the ghosts of the mods and rockers kick eachother's spectral teeth in outside the arcades.

Guess what, Trace?
You're the nearest thing we have to a giant.

And from the sounds of it you didn't even get out of your car. Looks like it's up to Buster Bloodvessel.

Flags of our Harbours + Pubs and Stuff

It was with a joyful heart I saw the fluttering, multi-coloured flags adorning the royal harbour on Thursday. They were truly resplendent, and the wind caught them and made them look tremendous, especially looking down Leopold Street or from the West Cliff.
The sun was shining and all was right with the world. Then, as usual, a mere movement of the eyes extinguished this joyful heart of mine, sat on it and called it a twat.

The Royal Public House. Festering arse-sore nestling like a gap toothed yokel among the haughty sophisticates of the Harbour's more salubrious bars. Previous concessions to public taste, by way of the hanging baskets and old-style facade, have been dumped in favour of a horribly cheap looking red and white sign. The Royal, long the "Tesco Basic" of Ramsgate drinking holes, is now even adopting the same simplistic design.

It's so bland and functional, it can only be a matter of time before they simply write "CHEAPO BOOZE HERE" on it and line the inside with a huge, beer-producing teats, dispensing with any of that tiresome middle-management between the beer itself and the customer. Just ram it down the parched throats of passing idiots, Frank. "A Place to Meet and Be Seen" proclaims the sign by the door. It might as well be written in poo. I would speculate that the only way anyone of any taste or consideration might be seen dead there was if the venerable Gore Brothers set up a franchise in the upstairs bar. It's a weeping pox on the primest of prime real estate on the harbour front.

The competition is now essentially gone. The Harvey, a great little pub once upon a time, gave up the ghost after the owners tried every trick in the book to get the punters in. Unfortunately, they seemed to try every trick in the book all at the same time. At one stage, I swear you could have got a roast dinner at any time, any day of the week, as well as having a full complement of pub grub, a seafood menu or maybe a bowl of scouse. It's the sort of thing that makes Gordon Ramsay roll out the big guns, the big guns which all seem to begin with 'F'.

Jackson's Wharf, disadvantaged by an odd position, nonetheless has potential. Unfortunately, their proud claims to a "beer garden" amount to not much more than some mismatched garden furniture in a courtyard filled with grit. It's like drinking in a car park. If they got their act together in time for the summer, that little area could be a fantastic draw.

The strip between the Royal and the Harvey is the main focus of the entire marina. A strip occupied by an absolute turd of a "pub", the defunct Harveys, a hairdressers and a bloody Estate Agents.

Where's a flaming arsonist when you need one?

Yates's Wine Lodge Closes

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

An Epitaph to an Armpit

There were really no redeeming features to Yates's Wine Lodge in Cecil Square.
An ugly building jutting out like a beery hooker, plying it's wares without shame to the passer-by. Devoid of character, this was a glass and wood teat, suckling a willing, bovine crowd with Cherry Vebas and cider. Spending an evening in there was a cross between a school disco for angry children and being contained in a trapezoid mandala designed to eat your soul. All the same, it was assuredly Margate and assuredly Thanet. Which is probably why it closed.

In other towns and cities, the Yates brand had retained an air of faux-exclusivity, regarded as somewhere to congregate before the drinking started in earnest. A genteel Wetherspoons. You'd rarely find the same old faces propping up the bar, sallow-eyed and oozing surrender. You'd find a smorgasbord of "types", mingling uneasily by the fruit machine. Something about Yates's always seemed aloof, the brass and the shininess, the strictly MOR musical selection and the stout refusal to concede to a karaoke night, football on the telly or a dart board. When it opened, it seemed other-worldy, a place with sofas and natural light, that sold food to the hungry. You were always hungry, as it usually took 2 hours to arrive, which must be considered a cunning marketing ploy.

Of course, the residents of Thanet customised the Yates experience, emptying the shelves of alcopops and acting with bewilderment at the "no hats" rule. I myself was relieved of a felt fedora, previously liberated from a bearded chap at the Britannia public house.
Despite this dearth of virtues, Yates's was a landmark. And in its dying days, it filled with pathos where it emptied of customers.

A friend took dinner in the middle of the dance floor, eating fish and chips with his beau while the tables were cleared around him, like a scene from a New York romantic comedy. Where once spit and sawdust marked the lifespan of the pub, the thudding beat of music and the crazed laughter borne from fluorescent apple shots now haunts the place.

It's bound to be an estate agents.

*******

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.

Dreamland

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire

The ring of fire

So sang the great Johnny Cash, although he wasn't talking about the Scenic Railway admittedly.
Margate is a town where every anachronism has been gripped with two hands and clung to as some kind of sacred totem of a time when it wasn't just an irrelevancy and a parking lot for the desperate.
It's a place of grey faded pointlessness, a festival of dull rutting people, drinking to oblivion and loitering under lurid lights, observed by a passive, patient sea, serenaded by the squawks and pings and pongs of a thousand gibbering arcade machines.

So much of Margate is a study in total desolation. Standing in that small atrium at the rear of Arlington House, feeling the wind whip around you, surrounded by empty, boarded up shops on every side, you suddenly feel transported to a post-apocalyptic world of isolation and despair.

All in all, THAT is the character of Margate for young people today. Not "taking the waters", having fun on roller-coasters, or sitting about and watching cockneys fight on the seafront. Or dodging the mods and rockers with a parka and a leather jacket just in case. Those days are gone.

What we need to preserve is this unremitting feeling of dull ambitionless torpor, nowhere better illustrated by that most elephantine of all white elephants, Dreamland.

When your town is embodied by a closed rollercoaster, it might just be time for change. The hysteria about the admittedly suspicious fire belies a deep keynote of cultural retardation. The same people who decry this unfortunate fire as a slap in the face for Margate, are those who'll look sniffily at the Turner Centre, or huff and walk past the gallery space in the High Street grumbling about a waste of money.

The oddity of Margate is that it's the only vacuum in the world capable of sustaining a fire. Multiple fires in fact. Cheers to the perpetrator. He may be a huge spiv, but he's clearly a town planner ahead of his time.

Nudists - Tit for Tat

Apparently, Thanet has become a possible location to host a nudist beach.
Now, I don't know what you think of when the word "nudist" appears on a webpage, but for me it conjures images of fat old people who always seem to be playing volleyball. Or fat old people artfully shot so that there's always a flower pot or small hedge in the way of their flaccid old cocks or minge.

Notwithstanding that hideous image, it appears that there is some support for this proposal, interestingly the same day that the Thanet Times screams hysterically about men who hang around in public toilets.

The basis of the support seems to surround a possible tourist boost for the area, and a poorly thought-out defence of the right to free expression. Now call me old fashioned - unless you're a woman, in which case just put the kettle on - but will we have the right to go and laugh at them?

I'd love there to be a vast grandstand facing out on the beach, for those people who are avowedly fond of clothes to exercise their own right to free expression by laughing and pointing at these mental cases who think that letting their genitalia hang out is somehow a normal pursuit. This too would help tourism, and would give the toilet traders a new sense of liberation. Come out of the stalls, boys, there's enough cock for everyone down the beach. We could even give them a chance to sell hot dogs with risque and hilarious names. Anyone for a Sandy Crack? It's a frankfurter wedged in a bun and sprinkled with sea salt. Why don't we have a special beach for people who like buggering crabs while we're at it? Would that infringe on the rights of crabs? Maybe we could designate a bay as a place for people who like having a crap into top hats too.

I sense that many of these people thrive on the attention they gain from their edgy and radical practice of being naked, shocking us narrow minded squares with their liberated sexual organs. Well, personally my reaction is to laugh like a cavalier or fight the urge to vomit.

When oh when is the council going to provide for my right to self-expression?

And has anyone seen my top hat?

A Load of Rubbish

There's loads of rubbish about these days. Literal rubbish, I'm not talking about Saturday night telly or 98.09% of all blogs.

Apparently, twice a year, we're likely to miss a rubbish collection due to the whims of the council calendar. In a place where seagulls are like massive flying, shit-eating rats with razor sharp beaks, is it really desirable to have bags of refuse wrapped in flimsy black sacks left out for a fortnight?

And the answer isn't the feted wheely bin either. They don't fit everywhere. Not everyone can use them.

The problem isn't actually the collection either, however late it is. It's the aftermath of the split bags and shredded, rotting rubbish left behind. The joys of skipping through a minefield of mouldering potatoes and nappies is fucking depressing, and you can hardly expect the lazy twats up my road to get out there and tidy up their own crap.

It's an outrage. Of sorts.

BooHoo! Won't Somebody Think of the Town Centres...

An Open Letter to those Shopkeepers Decrying the Death of Ramsgate Town Centre

The traditional town centre is dead. Let them rest in peace. They had an innings out of all proportion to their actual worth. I look forward to the sainted day when all of this ugly, grasping commerce is out of town, and the centres are places for recreation and leisure, not the dull, drudge hum of a market selling cheap, nasty crap, or small businesses in ramshackle hovels flanked by charity shops and boarded-up buildings. We live in a world of style over substance. Try either and you might see some results.

However much you whinny and gripe about it, what are we the consumers actually losing if we accept the assessment that the death of the traditional town centre is a bad thing? Moth eaten, mouldering, tatty shops selling poor quality rubbish for an unreasonable mark up? The usual array of "pile 'em high" chainstores like Woolworths and Peacocks? Please.

Are consumers really supposed to subsidise these shopkeepers for the "pleasure" of using these local businesses? The pleasure is usually non-existent. Reasons for shopping in the town centre were always necessity or convenience. Necessity has disappeared with the advent of internet shopping and out-of-town retail parks, and convenience has been compromised by poor parking, uncompetitive pricing and a fucking market blocking up the street. Get creative. You don't earn the right to a living merely by dint of your location, I'm afraid. Can't earn money? Whose problem is that exactly?
If it's too hard, don't do it. Don't make out you're doing us all some kind of favour by existing.

If shopkeepers want to compete with the out of town complexes, by all means let them. Even make it easier through tax breaks if you like. But the way for them to succeed isn't through a price war, or shovelling poor quality rubbish into the pockets of consumers, it's through being different; offering a quality of service where they can't offer choice.

This old view of the town as the hub of commerce and trade is frankly Victorian, but in a way, that retrospective approach would be a way forward. Imagine a row of pleasant, ornate shop-fronts in the old imperial style, etched lettering proudly proclaiming the name of the store, some ironwork - railings or signs, personalised service, goods to be proud of in the window, a civic pride in the area - all this would make a joined-up approach that balances the heritage of our towns with the best our small businesses have to offer. See York Street for an example.

It's not up to the consumer to shop in the towns for the sake of "our heritage", it's up to the towns to address the reasons why shopping there is an almost entirely unrewarding experience in the first place.

The town centres are disappearing because they don't work. That's not the fault of the consumer. We don't owe you a living. Now fuck off out of it and stop blaming us for your own shortcomings.