Hast­ings Summer of 2006

Published Categorised as Photography, Travel, UK No Comments on Hast­ings Summer of 2006

I got some films developed a little while ago, and it turned out some of them are from quite a while ago, and had been lurk­ing around in draw­ers for a long time. This one is from 2006. I’m not sure what camera I took these with, some kind of box camera or Diana or some­thing.

boat double

 

I was work­ing at a summer camp in Rochester after I’d gradu­ated from uni. The kids came from vari­ous differ­ent coun­tries and came over for a few weeks to improve their English and do sight­see­ing. My job was super­vising trips and sports and running art and drama sessions. We had a lot of trouble with the trips. They were supposed to be booked from Head Office, but whoever was doing them obvi­ously didn’t have a clue about the vari­ous tour­ist attrac­tions in the region. As well, these summer camps usually have the tick­ets for things paid for in advance, and you just show your work id and collect them when you turn up with the kids. They just gave us cheques to pay with when we turned up. The fact that Head Office didn’t have to contact the places in advance to pay for them resul­ted in things like us being sched­uled to visit the Dick­ens Centre which had closed down about 5 years previ­ously. They also hired the cheapest bus company they could get, and the buses never had work­ing air condi­tion­ing and often didn’t know where they were going.

castle 1

The clue­less person doing the book­ings also had some very strange ideas about how long you should spend at places. We were only booked for 2 1/​2 hours at Leeds Castle, and a whole day at Hast­ings Castle. I guess they thought “Oh the Battle of Hast­ings, Hast­ings must be an import­ant castle.”. It’s a ruin that takes about 45 minutes to see every detail includ­ing the educa­tion­al video and the disused dungeon. Leeds Castle is a huge place with an intact castle that people still live in, and a maze and aviary in the gardens and a museum inside and all sorts of other things to do. Hast­ings Castle is also on top of a cliff, accessed by hundreds of stairs. We were sched­uled to march all the kids up to the castle at midday in a very hot summer where the temper­at­ures were above 25c every day. They weren’t happy by the time they got to the top.

castle 2

After spend­ing the required desultory 45 minutes at the castle, we took pity on the kids and let them spend the rest of the day look­ing at the shops and cafes in the old town or on the beach.

beach 3

beach 2

When the tide star­ted to come in I told the kids it was time to leave the beach. A group of Turk­ish girls were slow about getting up, because the Medi­ter­ranean has much lower and slower tides than the Chan­nel. When the water was suddenly near them, they jumped up in surprise, and one of the girls twis­ted her ankle on the stones. As her friends were help­ing her hobble back to the bus a seagull shat on her head. Not a great day to be her.

beach

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