Margate Pride seems to be going as per over on the seedy north side of the island, with the hookie perfumier's banter competing nicely with the Boy Georgealikes on the sound stage. I deliberately call it 'Margate Pride' as it's a much more honest description than 'Thanet Pride'. The 'Thanet' being a recent invention to justify everyone else's council tax funding it.Call me a curmudgeon [You're a curmudgeon - Ed] but quite why I need to pay for Margate to hold a shindig every week when the basics are being neglected is beyond me. Derek Harding, who heads up Margate's Renewal Partnership, apparently commands a £60m budget. Although it's now slipped to £40m according to a story in yesterday's Gazunder about schoolkids who've come up with the slogan 'More than meets the eye' for the town. So what's all that mazooma being frittered on Derek?
Maybe the kids are right. Maybe it does require the Transformers to step in and demolish the lot in an epic battle with the evil Developons. But a more honest tagline for the town would currently be this from T S Eliot's The Wasteland:
On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Inspired as he was sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter, which has received national publicity this week due to the campaign to list it, he wrote that in 1921. If he sat there today, gazing across the wasteland of the Arlington complex, the disused NCP and the derelict Dreamland site, I think he'd come to the same conclusion!
