Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Worlds apart – now that’s a hospital
HARRY BELL
These days I spend so little time out of Canterbury that any journey to another part of the country feels like I’m actually going abroad.
And so it was to Birmingham again for a hospital appointment with the head specialist who has performed four operations in the last two years on my increasingly weird-shaped bonce.
This always entails an overnight stay at a mate’s in London and this time the Euston Road was worse than I’ve ever seen it before. There was a beggar every 15 or 20 yards – from people who were quite clearly destitute drug addicts to a shoeless bloke wailing into people’s faces that he needed money to a Roma gypsy woman in full costume and a bloke who didn’t look like he was either homeless or addicted to drugs.
As I queued in Euston for my Virgin train ticket to Brum’s New Street station, I spotted a young woman with shoulder length brown hair and skintight white jeans a few places ahead of me. “Blimey, she’s tall,” I thought to myself.
As the passenger came past me, however, I got a clue which may explain the unusual height: under a coat of very thick make-up was the unmistakable sight of a 5 o’clock shadow.
Having got to the counter, I ordered my ticket and was unsurprised to discover that the woman who sold it to me spoke with broken English. I’m now convinced that no one in a job serving the public in London counts English as their native tongue.
To be fair to Virgin, the 80-minute journey to New Street isn’t bad. But the single greatest irritation on getting on a Virgin train is the fact so many seats are marked “reserved” only for no one in fact to occupy them.
Surely that doesn’t mean that people are buying tickets and then saying “nah, tell you what, it’s raining, Albert, let’s not bother going to Coventry after all” – does it?
I took in a chair in which the information panel contained, erm, no information whatsoever. Great, I thought, right direction of travel and a full window to gawp at central England through.
Except that about three minutes before departure, a group of middle-aged men got on and did that ever-so polite British thing of walking about wearing a confused look, rechecking their tickets and saying out loud “32, 33, 34...”
As I was in the one of the aforementioned seats, but didn’t know which one, I naturally had to play my role in this scenario: “Sorry, am I in your seat?”
Evicted, I moved down the carriage to a far less desirable seat to sit facing the wrong way and near a man breathing loudly. I had deliberately picked the quiet carriage and couldn’t work out whether his respiratory excesses were a cause for complaint to the “on-board team”.
I arrived at Birmingham on time (again) and went straight to the hospital named after our sovereign. Well, I say hospital, but the Queen Elizabeth looks more like something out of Star Trek.
It’s an elegant modern design, looks futuristic, is light and airy inside and leaves one returning to east Kent with the words “if only...” as one ponders the state and fate of the hospital in Canterbury.
All we needed was Crocodile Dundee to mouth a variation of his famous words: “That’s not a hospital. That’s a hospital.”
Returning to Canterbury via St Pancras on a rush hour train always shows how much of Canterbury is in London on any given day.
If I’m not bumping into my friend Spencer Whiting, then it’ll be the Barton ward councillor Steve Williams.
Last Tuesday it was architect and former city councillor Iain Douglas and Dr Paul Bennett of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust.
Like metal string pulling the train back to Canterbury, I was back home in an hour.
It’ll probably be quite a long time before I go anywhere again... Quote of the week comes from journalist Raheem Kassam: “Just watched Dunkirk. Great film, but lack of disabled black transgend er Muslims really ruined it for me.”
I’m a big fan of the Canterbury away from the High Street.
There are some cracking little shops and restaurants along Palace Street and Northgate, but equally Castle Street is on the up.
I know I’ve pointed out before that it’s estate agent central – it still is despite the departure of Geering and Colyer – but it’s also home to the sorts of shops you won’t find elsewhere like Vinylstore Jnr and independent florist Lady Penelope’s.
But it was to the Naughty Egg burger bar I took myself on a Friday afternoon in July.
It was outstanding. It’s an increasingly crowded marketplace in which high-quality burgers are big business these days.
Each burger comes with a fried or scrambled egg – hence the name, yeah – a patty of meat or veggie option, and a choice of toppings. But mere words won’t do it justice. You really need to try it.
So if a burger takes your fancy, then Castle Street’s the place. You might even want to buy an LP and some flowers while you wait and support the western end of the city centre. the people it purports to represent.
“The idea of a €100 billion ‘leaving bill’ seems as extortionate in Berlin as it does in Birmingham: why would Britain want to carry on making huge financial transfers to Brussels when these were one of the main reasons for wanting to leave?”
And: “To a great many of Britain’s friends, looking in from abroad, Brexit doesn’t look like a mistake. Instead, Britain looks like a country that has dared not to accept the unacceptable.”