Margate Sea Bathing

Walking over the low cliffs of Margate one comes onto the sight of Walpole Bay Sea Pool, suddenly right below you. Laid out as big as an athletic stadium. In the seaweed-covered rocks between high and low tides, it looked darned cold in the blustery, spitting, Thames estuary rain. 

 

WALPOLE SEA POOL
 

But there did seem  to be ten or twelve swimmers around the broad pentagon of concrete walls that surround it. Though being so big one could miss a few. Simply spotting the lonesome afficionados either dabbling near the iron runged entry ladders or lunging in front crawl in dark wetsuits in the dark green water was hard. It's gigantic.. 

We changed on the sand, balancing on one leg, as people do in such circumstances, holding towels around us, stepping into clingy swimming costumes and then, for women, further wriggling and  contortions to prevent the merest sun beam of vision to escape to the watching hordes above, ready to be shocked or offended by a glimpse of puckered and pruny human skin of one kind or another. 

I am myself less inclined to support all this stuff, at my age, and tend to use my long-tailed shirt and a quick step and turn around, and then all is well with the world again. But I had to wait a time for my two companions to complete a great number of stretching, and assembling, and adjusting, and so got to thinking. Perhaps it's time to officially give over on all this prudery. 

It's not as if you don't see a darn sight more on the telly most nights, certainly on Netflix, and given that we were intending to pass by the Margate Turner Exhibition created by Tracey Emin, I reckoned that we were going to be in for a great deal more flesh on show over there then if we dispensed with a towel for a few seconds here on the beach. 

Anyway, I made my way eventually over to the slim and painful iron-runged entry point only to discover that there were in fact only a couple of rungs left and one might as well sit back and let the 15C sea water do its thing from the topmost..  

This time I wore my new wetsuit, and found that swimming in it was at first rather hard, bobbing about like Michelin man. Barbara however declined to bring one. I swam the 200 yard width with her as she told me that she had only learnt to swim aged 60 and now did around a Km each time she went in nowadays. 

"Let's do the circuit," she said when I tried to raise the idea that a simple return width might be a good and sensible round trip, followed by coffee and a cake over at the cliff top cafe. So we headed upwind into the salty wavelets and then duly around the seaward end which is so far from land that it has its own navigation beacons, in case a tanker comes too close to the pool at high tide. 

We got out after a while and talked to the girl on the beach, on holiday still, with her two boys from Leeds. Margate is a Victorian old lady and we sat in the lee of the cafe hugging three coffees under a shattered plastic roof, amidst the fag-ends of countless there before us. 

I counted seven padlocks for closing the cafe up at night. But as the Leeds nurse said, "the seaside is the only place to be nowadays."

We went back to the main town where another identical sea pool exists, but which had a sign saying "Boating pool." and  "No swimming," but also oddly  "No walking on the poolside wall" which seemed tough on the small model-boaters but the sign was hard to read in the seaweed. Had we been there longer I would have gone in for a dip, and reported here who shouted at me, why, and how it all went. Maybe no-one would have been that bothered

A family of Syrian refugees were seated on the beach being watched over by a flock of seagulls who rushed in at the dinner laid out on a carpet now and then. We went to see the exhibition over at the point and found quite a lot of weird wordy poetry around the place. I asked one of the bored looking curator-guards if "she knew Tracey... Emin?."  

"Yes she's my friend" she said

"Oh, please tell her I want to hug her"

"I wouldn't try to do that !" she replied mysteriously

"Well then tell her I'll marry her." 

"She's already married" she replied "...she's married to a rock." 

As we all left she smiled and waved. 

Anthony Gormley: 'Cast iron man in the sea.' (with safety warning notice)
 

When we came out again the seagulls and Syrian children were still warring.  Fluttering, screaming attacking and retreating. I quite like Margate.  It's fun for many and cheap, and cheerful. One hot sunny day I will return and swim again in the sea pool.