It could have been a good night’s sleep, but
the torrential rain rattling against the windows woke me before 6am. And then
next door were clanging their infernal piano at 8am. 8am – on a Sunday (!) I could go round and have a whinge,
but it would achieve nothing.
And having them being so anti-social means I
can be as noisy as I like (whenever I
like) with a clear conscience.
The piano stopped clanging after half an
hour, but the noise was replaced with the sounds of “My Boy TM ” “quietly” collecting the tools with which he was
planning to fix his fence. It was at this point that I gave up trying to sleep
and had a spot of brekkie instead. And then once brekkied I did some ironing
whilst we watched last night’s episode of Doctor Who. I quite liked last week’s
episode: last night’s was good too.
Half way through
the episode the phone rang. “My Boy TM ” wondered if I had a
saw he might borrow.
With Doctor Who watched and ironing done we met
Chippy for a spot of McLunch, and once lunch was McScoffed we set off to
Dungeness. Last year we found out about a guided tour round the sound mirrors
about two hours before the walk started. And when we turned up the walk went
ahead despite torrential rain, hurricane force winds and sub-zero temperatures.
Today (with
a little more notice) the wind was still strong, but it was warm and dry,
and seven of us joined a party of over fifty people to have a look-see at the Romney Marsh’s sound
mirrors.
The sound mirrors were built in the late
1920s: the idea being that at the time no one lived on the Romney Marsh – it
was deserted. And so with no other noises to interfere, the sound of enemy
planes could be magnified by sound mirrors. And the first ever early warning
coastal defence system was built. The mirrors are quite impressive to behold,
and it’s a shame that the things were never actually used in anger. With a
maximum detection range of twenty miles, and ever increasingly fast aeroplanes
being built in the 1930s, a sound mirror would only give (at best) fifteen minutes advance warning of an enemy attack. With
the advent of radar in 1937 (which could
detect enemy aircraft at a range of over sixty miles) sound mirrors became
obsolete.
The sound mirrors are now on private land;
and having fallen into serious disrepair were bought my English Heritage a few
years ago. Some work has been done to them to prevent them collapsing, and a
few times a year they are opened up to guided tours.
Today’s tour was good – the chap running the
tour was on his own: he could have done with an assistant. And it would have
been nice if the pikey element had made an attempt to get their brats to shut
up (or at least go away) when the
tour leader was speaking. But I enjoyed it – and would certainly go again.
On the way home my phone beeped – a text to
tell me that the fence had been completed. So we popped round to see “My Boy
TM ”, his entourage, the fence, and Fudge. It’s not a bad fence
(as fences go): a shame it only goes
half way along the garden, but you can’t have everything…
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