A day in Deal

Yesterday we went for our annual office summer outing. Any excuse to not be stuck inside at your desk on a sunny day is always good, but this was particularly nice. We got on the new super-fast train from St.Pancras, changed at Ashfird and then got on the much slower local line through Kent which took us through Dover - half pretty seaside town, half repulsive industrial docks, and along the sea front to Deal.

I wouldn't want to live there, but Deal is just about everything you could ask for from a British seaside town. Picturesque houses, a pier with a fancy cafe, a relatively cheap but well curated vintage shop (the imaginatively named Vintage by the Sea), shops with amusing names and old fashioned signage, a decent restaurant for lunch, a kitsch ice cream parlour by the sea and a pebble beach. The rather glorious weather brought out the local school kids who were splashing about in the water in their school uniforms and rolling down the pebble slope to the sea. And some exceedingly large seagulls. I am not scared of seagulls, but these ones were twice as big as our cat and had a manic glint in their beady eyes. If they were in London they'd probably be carrying knives and hanging around in groups around the corner from a local shop in Plaistow. 

It's not a short trip to get there, but it's short enough for a nice day trip as long as there isn't a fire in the Thames Tunnel that means that the fast trains get suspended and you have to take the painfully slow route back into London...