Surge Of Sympathy

Sitting here in the luxurious splendour of my five star suite at the Bournemouth Travelodge, I can't help feeling sorry for anyone on the Ile de Thanet affected by last night's storm surge. Mind you, speaking personally, the old cliff top mansion stands at least 100 feet above any such watery nonsense, and Natasha, my housekeeper, reports it's as dry as a bone this morning.

TBH, quite why anyone would want to purchase a property at sea level these days, what with climate change and the world's oceans rising at the rate of a metre a year, gawd knows!

And it is with that tenuous link in mind that I congratulate the lovely Emma Irvine and her husband Ben on finally getting the keys to Albion House, high and dry on the trendy East Cliff in the Millionaires' Playground, off the council. They plan to spend a heap of dosh on refurbishing it, and opening it as a boutique hotel next year.

They recently held an open day, with guided tours of the pile. There's a video of that below.

And congrats, too, to that nice Dr Who lady, who's also finally got the council's thumbs up for her Project Motorhouse in the old Ramsgate Motor Museum! There's another video below the video below showing her plans for how that will pan out. So, it's all go Ramsgate!!!!!!!

Anyway, moustache as I need to devote a coupla minutes to polishing my Twankey ahead of this afternoon's matinee. Toodle-oo!

Swell Party

Oops, silly me! I was trying to turn comments off last night so that Peter the Onanist from Westgate couldn't wipe his wad off on my blog in between midnight knuckle-shuffling, and I appear to have taken the entire thing offline. Sorry.

Reader Gary has sent me these rather grainy photos taken on his camera phone at Broadstairs jetty last night. He says that, despite it not being an especially high tide, there was a strong northerly blowing and most of the jetty was awash. The cars in the picture were being slammed into each other by the force of the waves apparently. A number of people had gathered to gawp at the scene, and Gary adds that there was quite a party atmosphere.

It does make me wonder why anyone would buy a beach front property such as Royal Sands. And as Margate was probably taking the brunt of it, I dread to think what state the Kunstbunker construction site is in this morning. Anyhow, here are a few more of Gary's photos. Sxx.

Noah Hope For Thanet

I'll be going round and having a word with those feckin eejits at the Environment Agency so I will. Standing up today and saying they'll be abandoning our beautiful south coast to the sea. Sure already the arses have put forward a bollix plan to flood the place as far as the Thanet Way. We'll be after building a feckin ark next.

Brewing Up A Storm?

Not exactly 'flaming June' is it? Nope. Well, Wimbledon starts this month so what do you expect? After last week's free fireworks show I thought I'd better check the excellent Ipswich-based Storm Tracker to see if anything was brewing, and sure enough there do seem to be some thundery events trundling over the Channel from France as you can see from the grab above. You can find Storm Tracker in my sidebar on the right, along with all sorts of other useful stuff including Thanet events listings, local weather and tides.

Last week's doozy of a storm, described in Friday's Gazunder by none other than local pub millionaire Frank Thorley as the worst he'd ever seen, caused blackouts, flooding and fires across the island. Personally, barring the damage caused of course, I'm a fan of thunderstorms. Nothing better than watching lightning streak across the sky. Or 'lightening' as the Gazunder insisted on calling it across four pages of coverage. Lovely. Or should that be 'luvverly'?

Click here to check Storm Tracker

Storm Surge Hits Ramsgate

Lumme! These were the scenes a few minutes ago as the predicted storm surge/high tide combo hit the Millionaires' Playground. Must look out those green wellies! Yikes, there go the maroons for the lifeboat!