Fortunately yesterday’s morosity (moroseness?) has passed. The black cloud that enveloped Eastbourne has magically drifted North, against the wind, and is now curling its polluted tentacles around the Village of Westminster where tomorrow, the world as we know it might well come to an end. For “might” read “May”. Theresa would appear to be in the soup right up to her elegant choker. But the vicissitudes of parliamentary democracy can wait for another day. I’m much more worried about the Black Cloud.
My wife (Alison) and I left a very comfortable lifestyle in Hong Kong two and a half years ago mainly because of the severe pollution there that was furring up my tubes and was very likely going to do the same to our young children. Via a short stopover in leafy Surrey (why is Surrey ALWAYS leafy? Come and have a look at Grange Road, Eastbourne if you want to see leafy. I spent most of November doing the Council’s job for them, shifting gazillions of rotting embers of the Fall.) we arrived in Eastbourne about seventeen months ago, mostly because Alison (my wife) had secured a splendid job at Eastbourne College, but with the added bonus that we would be inhaling the ozone rich, clear and life-giving sea air that city slickers can only wheeze about. Coincidentally it was also returning to my familial roots. Numerous cousins lurk amongst the rolling South Downs and, by chance, the leader of the Conservative group on the Council is a Tutt. But back to the air. We have walked Callie (the whippet lurcher) almost every day across the stunning Downs eulogising about the wonderful variations of light, the ever-changing vistas, inland and out to sea and most importantly, the particulate and impurity free air that is such a delight to suck deep into the complicated network of pipes that were rapidly becoming limescaled and imperilled in the Orient. Imagine then my absolute horror, my soul-destroying despair, when told a few days ago by a friend and long time resident that Eastbourne is not only ridiculously over-burdened with charity shops but it also has some of the worst air in Britain, according to EU inspectors. HAH, I knew there was a good reason for leaving that mob across the Channel! Being a well-trained journalist I had to verify/disprove this atrocious example of “fake news” and where better to start than with contemporaneous reports from The Daily Telegraph of late 2017. Sure enough the damned party-pooping Brussels bureaucrats had detected supremely dangerous levels of the really nasty particles that bury themselves deep in your lungs never to be seen again, except by the Coroner. It seems that some meteorological quirk means that all the nasty gases travelling south from London, run into all the equally nasty vapours heading north from France and they coalesce and congeal over Eastbourne. Not Brighton, or Hastings or even Bexhill on bloody Sea, but right here, over the Grand Hotel, the expensive new Devonshire Quarter and Eastbourne College’s massively impressive 150 project, the £35m development that allows privileged children to swim, dance, act, play innumerable different ball games indoors and dine in the sort of five star luxury that Jamie Oliver would have orgasms over.
So, what to do? Move the children yet again to another brilliant job for Alison in the untarnished but midge infested Scottish Highlands? Send the children away to a boarding school that we can’t afford in the Yorkshire Dales and accept that we’re going to die quite soon anyway, relatively speaking? Or contact the local Army quartermaster and indent for four respirators (gas masks in civvy parlance) that will only make us look faintly ridiculous as we scale the heights of Beachy Head whilst sucking in even more air than normal….albeit well filtered and sanitised?
Nah, I think we’ll just ignore the findings, which probably got muddled up with Tower Hamlets anyway, and just go on believing that we really do live in a pure and saintly seaside town full of pure and saintly people……
ADayInTheStrifeOf 