Kentish Express Ashford & District
Still sparkling on a bleak Blue Monday
This week marked ‘Blue Monday’, when many of us feel at our most glum in the new year because we are still a few weeks off pay day and the weather is terrible.
It didn’t disappoint us this year, with the pouring rain in Ashford providing a suitably bleak backdrop.
But we noticed that despite the gloom, the Christmas decorations in Park Mall remained in place, despite the fact that they should have been taken down before the feast of the Epiphany on Saturday, January 6.
It is becoming an annual custom for the town’s Christmas tree and decorations to be brought down late, with shoppers noticing they remained in place well after that particular Saturday.
At the Kentish Express office we were in good time – we got our Christmas tree down on the Friday beforehand.
But it seems a bit of a laborious process and can add to the new year blues, not least because it is as much of a painstaking effort to take down decorations as it is to put them up.
Some of our staff were very keen to get the festive season over and done with, with some taking down their main Christmas tree before New Year’s Eve.
But the fact that the decorations were left up on a particularly dreek winter’s morning actually added a little bit of unexpected sparkle to our day.
This week we learnt of the plans for a new cafe to open in the former Burton Menswear shop in the High Street.
The shop had been kitted out as a Christmas tat shop and had been empty since the departure of the company. But with so many other cafes opening or already open in the town, we can’t help but wonder: how much coffee is really needed for our shoppers to drink?
The Kent and East Sussex Railway certainly likes to take its passengers on a journey down memory lane to the golden age of rail travel.
Perhaps the romance of the old steam engines and the ornate carriages brought back memories for the company’s press team.
Keen to give us an update on their trading progress, a press release stated: “Positive trading in 1917 has placed the Kent & East Sussex Railway on a sound footing as it makes preparation to link up with the main line at Robertsbridge.”
We were a bit miffed as to why we were receiving an update about the prospects for the railway from 101 years ago, when the railways really were in their heyday.
Maybe we can expect press releases about Passchendaele and the Russian Revolution next week.