Athens - Christos Aneste!

We arrived in Athens on Easter Sunday - somewhat inauspiciously I came over all weak and feeble walking up the ramp out of the plane - and Mark had to carry my laptop bag, which felt as if I had filled it with leaden bricks.

I had spent most of the flight reassuring Finn - who is afeared of flying - that when the plane wobbles as it banks over Surrey, it is not planning to plummet down again, and I also warned him about likely turbulence over the Alps.  He was relieved about that; he had the good sense to buy us some mini-Chupa lollipops to deal with the pressure changes and was just generally a pretty good companion.  He hasn't moaned much yet, although he has been annoyed about the slightly odd wifi signal here.

The journey was in clear skies, mostly - sereno as the Italians say - so we were able to see everything - the Medway, Whitstable, Herne Bay, Pegwell Bay, Ramsgate Harbour - then a whisk across the sea and across Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, crossing the Austrian Alps - which were beautifully snowcapped - then down the Adriatic, with lots of rocky islands and beaches on the Croatian (?) Coast.  We crossed Greece, seeing the geography laid out below us - including a solitary, tall snow-capped mountain - Olympos? That was what I guessed, but it can't have been.  Soon we were flying over Attica and saw the great miles of Athenian sprawl beneath us.  I hoped we could make out the Acropolis (you can see the Colosseum when you fly over Rome), but instead I saw the harbours at Piraeus very clearly.   The long spine of Mount Hymettos separates Athens from the new airport.  It sounds such an evocative name, but I don't really have any connections with it.

Nice taxi driver - I tried my best Greek phrase on him,  "Then milo Hellenika... " but I have "ligo" in fact... after a while I realised "ligo" was derived from "oligos" - a familiar ancient Greek friend, but one's ancient Greek friends are dangerous - the pronounciation is incredibly different and the meanings have been updated..

The most beautiful thing was seeing motorways signs with  "Kale Pascha - Christos Aneste - "  couldn't read the 3rd line, but Happy Easter, Christ is Risen.... the idea one could see Christ is risen on any public place in UK is incredible.  I felt rather emotional at this public witness of faith.

We drove for ages through suburban Attica and finally arrived, turning a corner, the driver said "This Athens!"  Then we drove down wide boulevards lined with trees and vast 19thC neo-Classical buildings, and narrower, more modern streets with shutterd shops and "to let" signs.  Eventually we reached Omonia Square, and turned into some tiny narrow streets to Monastiraki, there was the modern hotel, with a manager who spoke excellent English and we went up to our room.   We do not have a view of the Acropolis from our room - but we can see the square below - the Mitropoulos Cathedral and in the distance the Lycabettos hill.  Which is quite enough.

That Camilla Long riposte in full.

Warning - this article is really only of interest to anyone who (a) lives in Thanet South, and (b) read Camilla Long's article in the Sunday Times last week    Her article is here http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/focus/article1537512.ece   Mine didn't break the surly bonds of social media to soar into print, since needless to say no one on the Sunday Times was interested, and no one thought to offer it to the Thanet Gazette.

CAMILLA DIDN’T STAY LONG ENOUGH

No seaside town looks its best at the end of winter, and yes, Margate looked sad, but it’s not in Thanet South, so why did Camilla Long start her Sunday Times piece about Thanet South there? Genteel Sandwich is in the constituency too – and the trains to Margate stop at Ramsgate first, where she could have seen the heart of Stand up to UKIP’s (SUTU) fightback against the Farage menace, or she could have written about Broadstairs – parts of which are practically Wandsworth-on-Sea.

Those of us who have been living under the Farage Barrage for the last 8 months or so, are bloodied but unbowed: the struggle is hard, and we don’t need frankly snooty London journalists coming in and giving out a load of flippantly sloppy misinformation. Some of us have been London journalists ourselves, but we like to think we occasionally allow the facts to interfere with our blinkered prejudices. We see Thanet South in entirely different way.

A few dozen UKIP loyalists tottering to the Walpole Bay Hotel on a January evening does lively up the place no end. Most of the liveliness usually comes from SUTU’s banter with Farage’s vast security detail – whom we are assured are not armed. UKIP supporters at these faux-democratic “open” gatherings tend to be elderly; UKIP’s a nostalgia party, with (very bad) attitude. Their other supporters look frankly “well hard”. If Long is talking about the meeting at Walpole Bay Hotel in January this year, the attendance was around 40-60. She may be confusing it with the 500 who attended the Spring Conference at the Winter Gardens. Or is she referring to some secret mass meeting held long ago before Cllr Rozanne Duncan besmirched the “good name” of Thanet UKIP?
We’re not surprised Long had difficulty getting accurate information from UKIP. She should have asked us. Numbers aren’t UKIP’s strong point – they claim 500 as a matter of course – would that be the 500 who were photographed listening to the Dear Leader’s speech at Walpole Bay on a winter’s day? We counted 92 in the photograph. At the hustings Long refers to there were considerably more than 6 independent people, or does she think the audience was entirely composed of friends and relations of candidates? Thanet is small (140,000 population) and a lot of us are related to each other, but apart from Will Scobie, most of the election candidates are not Thanetians.

We know the correct immigration rate, the number on the council, and how many actually attend these UKIP meetings. At least 600 of us, mostly local people, marched against UKIP on 28th February. Not because we want to suppress their freedom of speech, but because we all want something better for Thanet than UKIP.

Yes, Thanet is poor – but worse than that, its education and skills levels are at the bottom for Kent. Education is skewing our demographics – grammar school kids go off to university and often don’t come back for years. Poor education, especially in economics, leaves a section of the population susceptible to UKIP’s “common sense” policies – which bear little resemblance what happens in the real world. Yes we were once an island, but we aren’t isolated: we’ve had higher rates of marriage to outsiders since the 17th century according to a recent academic article, more recently the USAF has made a few contributions to the genepool. Some of the most intransigent insularists are the first generation incomers, offspring of Londoners who came here after the war. In the last 5 to 10 years particularly, artists and professionals priced out of the London housing market have moved here, and Ramsgate is becoming renowned for its music scene, as well as the visual arts that flourish all over Thanet. Others have started small businesses, employing local people. Stand up to UKIP is a group which has united people from all backgrounds in Thanet – natives, returners, DFLs (Down from Londoners) and, yes, even immigrants!

We are a deprived area, but we have pockets of resistance, we have hope, and prospects. In the last few years weekend tourism has grown, people visit and then return, delighted by the beaches, the cliffs, the architecture, the glories of Ramsgate harbour, the bars and restaurants. And although Thanet has suffered a good deal from the decline of the coalmines in the 1980s and the removal of Pfizer’s industrial activities in the first decade of this century, there is the beginning of a growth in jobs, with the prospect of a new industrial development on the former airport site. We need jobs, inward investment, a proper university of our own, but we don’t need UKIP and a clear majority of us don’t want it.