Skiathos, Greece – No Improvement, Getting Worse

“It takes a lifetime for someone to discover Greece, but it only takes an instant to fall in love with her” – Henry Miller

Next morning without essentials we took a walk to the nearest supermarket which was rather like climbing Mount Everest, to purchase tea bags.  Back at the room – no electricity so no cup of tea.

At least the sun was shining.

After climbing Mount Everest for a second time we took the local bus into the town to purchase more essentials.  Tee shirts, swimming gear and a dress for Kim, luckily all over in thirty minutes or so.

As we stopped for breakfast, a cup of tea and a Greek cheese pie I read about some of the legends of the island of Skiathos.

Before I get to that however, I return to the matter of tea.  Based on official statistics one third of all visitors to the island are from the UK where we drink lots of tea so, you would think wouldn’t you, that the island cafés and restaurants would be aware of this and have it on their menus.  Not so, you can get all sorts of rubbish teas – camomile, green, mint and then almost every variety of fruit in the World but black tea is curiously missing.  We had the foresight to bring our own tea bags so we just paid for a cup of hot water each.

Back to the legends now…

Every Greek Island has its own ancient Diety, they are shared out among them in a sort of, appropriate for Greece, democratic process  Skiathos has Dionysus, the god of wine and pleasure, which once again is quite appropriate for what is mostly a Summer party island for young people.

These folk don’t seem to be having a lot of fun.  Maybe they have lost their luggage as well, they don’t look happy…

But now I come to Saints and as some of you will know I do like an unlikely Saint story.

According to legend, one night in 1650 a monk called Symeon, who led a disciplined and  ascetic life was intrigued to see a twinkling light in the forest.  Upon approaching it, the light receded, only to reappear and disappear again several times so that he was unable to see exactly what it was.

Intrigued by this he stuck around to investigate and after fasting and meditating for several days (fasting always helps it seems) he finally saw that it was a small icon of the Virgin Mary swaying away in the top of a tall pine tree.  As they do.

Convinced that he had witnessed a miracle he rushed back to report the incident to the priest in his village.   The next day, the excited villagers followed Symeon back to where the mysterious light had been shining. Legend has it that the light grew brighter and brighter, the closer the people got.

When they all saw the icon hanging from the tree a young priest climbed up to retrieve it, placing it in the chapel where Symeon served.  It would later be placed in the Three Hierarches church of Skiathos town for safe keeping.

Here it is…

The Holy Monastery of Evangelistria was built in honour of this miraculous event, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as the island’s patron Saint and protector.

Once every year the icon is removed from the Cathedral in Skiathos and paraded through the streets and taken on a ten mile pilgrimage to the monastery.

It was possible to take a bus to visit the monastery but with the sun shining, the temperature rising and without suitable holiday attire we chose instead to return to the hotel for lunch.

There is another legend/story about the The Holy Monastery of Evangelistria which concerns the flag of Greece.   Leading Greek fighters of the 1821 Revolution against Ottoman rule in the Greek War of Independence met at the monastery in Skiathos to discuss tactics and over a glass of ouzo or two designed, adopted and raised the flag as a symbol of Greek nationalism.

Originally it was blue with a white diagonal cross which was symbolic of the Christian faith but the cross has now been moved to the upper left corner to make way for the horizontal stripes.  Being a seafaring nation, the blue of the flag represents the colour of the sea.  White is the colour of freedom, which is something that is very important to the Greeks after years of enslavement under foreign domination.  The nine stripes of the flag each symbolise a syllable in the Greek motto of freedom – E-LEY-THE-RI-A-I-THA-NA-TOS, which translates literally into ‘Freedom or Death’.

After lunch we simply let the day slip away as we sat on the terrace in our underwear.  The electricity supply was restored late afternoon and we occasionally checked our phones for any updates on the missing luggage.  It came through late in the evening.  The bags would be arriving in Skiathos the following day but it would take the airport another day to sort it all out and deliver them to us but as recompense compensation was now increased to £250 per suitcase.

“There is always a flip side to a dud penny” – John Corden

Kim made plans for a second day of shopping and I wasn’t going to get away with just thirty minutes this time that was for certain..  Oh Joy.

Other Unlikely Saint Stories…

St Edmund, the Patron Saint of Pandemics

Saint James and Santiago de Compostella

Saint Patrick and Ireland

Saint Spiridon and Corfu

The Feast of Saint Paul’s Shipwreck

Saint John of Bridlington

Santa Eulalia and the Thirteen Tortures

Saint Lucy of Syracuse

 

 

Skiathos, Greek Islands – Not a Great Start

The hardest crusts always fall to the toothless” – Cypriot proverb

Last year we went to Portugal with holiday company TUI and they inconvenienced us by making several changes to the flight schedules which resulted in the loss of a complete day of the trip. We said that we would never go on holiday with TUI again.

Six months later we broke that vow and booked a holiday to the Greek island of Skiathos in the TUI January sale.   A noisy fun island which attracts young high spirited people in high Summer but we gambled that it would be less frantic in early May.

After breezing through the check in and the security processes we settled in to wait for the call to the departure desk.  Once on board we waited in eager anticipation for the pilot to confirm take off.  Suddenly there was a crackle of intercom and the introduction from the pilot and then some unwelcome news.

It was raining in Skiathos, the short runway, which is apparently notoriously difficult, was wet and the plane was too heavy to land safely.  The TUI solution was to offload half of the suitcases from the hold and promise that they would follow on tomorrow.  I had some medication in my bag ( a couple of epi-pens in case of an allergy emergency) and was allowed off the plane to retrieve them so grabbed a few items that I thought might be useful such as phone chargers and sun lotion and returned to my seat in the certain knowledge that mine was one of the one hundred.  We hoped that Kim’s might still be on board.

Half way into the flight more news and an apology and a caveat to the earlier promise, this time the pilot said that they would do all they could to get our luggage to us as soon as possible and later still this was watered down again to the company hopes to get our bags to us some time next week.

This has happened to us before when we flew to Reykjavik with British Airways and Kim’s luggage went missing for five days so our optimism was beginning to sink to our boots. 

The aircraft landed at Alexandros Papadiamantis Airport, named after one of the most famous writers in all of Greece who was born and lived on the island of Skiathos.  Later in the week I visited his house, a museum now and purchased a translation of one of his short story novels.

At the baggage reclaim we optimistically watched the conveyor belt complete about five full cycles, maybe six, maybe seven, and a forlorn pink suitcase go round at least four times, when it slowly began to dawn on us that the bag probably wasn’t going to come through the little hole in the wall where the luggage came from. I had a last look through the heavy plastic flaps to see if maybe it had fallen off the belt before coming through but it was hopeless.  We had to concede the inevitability of our predicament that we were completely without luggage except for my epi-pens and the phone chargers.

It was nine o’clock in the evening, the supermarkets were shut so we were forced to take a taxi (I hate taking taxis) and ask the driver to find us somewhere where we might be able to purchase essentials.  He took us to a mini-market where Kim concentrated on shampoo, deodorant and soap and I looked for a couple of bottles of wine.  We continued to the hotel in stunned silence.

At the Agnadi hotel and studios there was happily something to smile about, the location was excellent, the rooms were very good in that very simple Greek style and after we had settled in (quite a short process of course with no luggage to unpack) we returned to the hotel bar and small restaurant and enjoyed a really rather fine Greek meal.  We looked forward to a confirmation e-mail that the luggage would be delivered the following day.  I confess that I didn’t go to bed in an especially optimistic mood.

Sometime during the night I received an e-mail apologising for the problem with the luggage and explaining that due to logistical issues the bags wouldn’t be arriving today after all. Apparently they were being taken from East Midlands airport to Birmingham.  I wasn’t especially surprised about that I have to say.  It thanked me for my understanding and patience which I thought was rather presumptuous because I was neither.  It was a no-reply email so I was unable to tell them that.  On the positive side it offered financial compensation 0f £50 for each bag on production of receipts for essential items.  As far as I was concerned everything in my bag was essential so £50 wasn’t going to adequately cover it.

My heart sank for a moment but it lifted immediately when I opened the door of the room and I was rewarded with a most wonderful view.

East Yorkshire and the Thirty-Seven Mile Holderness Coast

I begin with a question.  What is the longest uninterrupted stretch of beach in the UK?   I mean the longest stretch that can be walked end to end without having to leave it at any point to get around estuaries, rivers, cliffs, ports or towns?

To be honest I don’t have the answer, I have Googled it and there is no help but I am willing to wager that it is the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire.  It stretches all the way from Bridlington harbour to Spun Head at the mouth of the Humber estuary  and it is possible to walk the entire distance without ever  leaving the sand.  Few people know this because it isn’t in Cornwall or on the South coast and celebrities don’t make TV programmes about it.  Is it just me but does anyone else get fed up with programmes about bloody Cornwall.  

It stretches for a distance of thirty-seven miles.

I am more than happy to consider alternative suggestions of course.

I couldn’t manage the full thirty-seven miles in one day but today we planned to walk a seven mile stretch from the caravan park at Brampton  Sands to Bridlington, a distance of about seven miles or so, give or take a yard or so.

We set off just after high tide.  The weather was wild but not cold, big seas, a blustery wind that tugged at our shirt buttons and the occasional threat from a rogue wave that was in apparent denial that the tide was going out and not coming in as it swept in and rearranged the pebbles with a clattering sound like the percussion section of an orchestra.

For a mile or so there was no one else sharing our beach, deserted sands, pill-box remains fallen into the sea, a splendid lonely isolation as we walked on between the rapidly eroding cliffs on one side and the wild angry sea on the other.

Along the way we came across a colony of Swifts who had build nests in the cliff face.  I say cliffs but this is soft mud not solid rock.  Anyway they were going and coming at great speed and you will have to take my word for this because they are so fast that I was quite unable to catch a single picture of just one of them.  They are the fastest land bird of all, flying at a speed of seventy miles an hour in level flight.

After leaving the nest a young bird spends up to four years in the air without coming down, they eat and sleep on the wing, they fly five hundred miles a day and most impressive of all they also mate in the air.  To put that into perspective the only way a human can get a shag while flying is to join the mile high club on a Boeing 737.

A little further on we chanced upon some Oyster Catchers busy dining among the pebbles, they let us approach but not get too close before taking to flight but thankfully they were not as quick as the Swifts.

And then there was a problem.  We came to a field drainage outfall that due to the recent heavy rains was in full flow, maybe two or three inches deep and about five yards wide.  Maybe this was a turning back point?  No, surely not!

I ventured forth and attempted to jump the fast flowing watery streams,  I made the first and the second but then got carried away and quite forgot that what I could manage forty years ago I cannot manage now and took one optimistic jump too many and landed ankle deep in ice cold water with a resulting wet boot.

Kim was a lot more sensible and took time to collect rocks to make a stepping stone path and fifteen minutes later when she was eventually satisfied with her construction efforts daintily crossed over and we carried on.  I manfully kept quiet about my wet foot and soggy sock.

After an hour or so we arrived at Bridlington South Beach, as good as any beach in England in my opinion, a fabulous stretch of golden sand, busy I guess in the Summer months but quite deserted today.  Just a few dog walkers.  I really liked it.  I didn’t like the dog walkers.

From there we passed to the harbour, I was hoping to buy some Bridlington Bay lobster.  I told you about that in a previous post.

Greek A to Ω – P (Rho) is for Ρόδος or Rhodes

The island of Rhodes is one of the most interesting and has been inhabited for six thousand years and due to its geographical position on the major Mediterranean Sea trade routes is situated at a natural crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and this has given the city and the island many different identities, cultures, architectures, and languages over its long and varied history.

Read the full story Here….

Entrance Tickets – The Talylynn Railway

The Talyllyn Railway is a narrow-gauge preserved railway in Wales that runs for nearly sixteen miles from the town of Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1866 to carry slate from the quarries at Bryn Eglwys to Tywyn, and was the first narrow gauge railway in Britain authorised by Act of Parliament to carry passengers using steam haulage.

Read the full story Here…

Greek A to Ω – O (Omricom) is for Oύζο or Ouzo

Ouzo is an anise-flavoured liquor produced from grape must (the remnants of wine-making) and it can only be made in Greece and Cyprus .  No other beverage is as uniquely Greek or as closely linked to a culture as ouzo is to Greece. Greeks drink the most ouzo and ouzeries serve it alongside appetisers called meze. Often drunk on its own or gently diluted, ouzo has a very strong anise  flavour that takes some getting used to.

The ‘Boss Bar’ really had been an excellent place, the staff were attentive and friendly, the food was good, the beer was cold and the prices were reasonable.  It has taken me a while to get to the point of this story but there was always complimentary ouzo to finish the evening (except when there was complimentary melon which quite frankly wasn’t so good) but the place had my fullest recommendation.

Read the full story Here…

Bridlington – A Royalist Queen and the English Civil War

I never guessed that there was so much history in Bridlington.  I have discovered Lawrence of Arabia,  Saint John, David Hockney and next up a Royal Queen.

In early 1642 there were the early exchanges of the English Civil War.  King Charles was anxious to secure the port of Hull because (a bit of a surprise this) at the time it had the second largest store of armaments in England after London and was an important trading port with Europe, mostly for Yorkshire wool.  The Parliamentarians were also keen on the weapons and the gunpowder that was stored there and having control of the city denied him and his forces entry.  Their followed a rather ineffective siege and a hasty retreat to York.

Charles needed an alternative supply of munitions so implemented plan B.  He collected up all of the Crown Jewels and asked his wife Queen Henrietta Maria of France to make her way to Holland and France to use them to purchase arms.

The business concluded, the Queen, protected by seven Dutch ships returned to England in February 1643 but unable to use the port of Hull entered the nearby harbour in Bridlington instead.

The Parliamentary navy attempted to  intercept the Queen and her precious cargo and for some time it had been cruising in the North Sea and was then at anchor off Newcastle.  It immediately set off upon receiving intelligence of her arrival but did not gain the bay until the night after the Dutch vessels had entered the port. The Queen disembarked and escaped.

The Parliamentary fleet persisted and  determined on harassing the royalists and accordingly drew their vessels directly opposite to the Quay, on which they commenced a heavy cannonade in hope of firing the ammunition-vessels.

Some of the shots penetrated the house in which the Queen was sheltering and compelled her and the other ladies in her retinue to seek for safety beneath the precipitous banks of the stream which empties itself into the harbour.  The Gypsy Race is a rather sad little stream now, full of litter and abandoned shopping trolleys but four hundred years ago was a full flowing river.  Still is west of Bridlington.

Eventually the Queen escaped the town and made her way to nearby York with the valuable cargo.

Since my Dad bought me an Airfix model kit of Oliver Cromwell in about 1960 I have always been fascinated by the English Civil War.  I think this was a defining moment in my life, I immediately became a Roundhead, a Parliamentarian and later a socialist, on the side of the people fighting against wealth, influence, lies, privilege and injustice.  Just to be clear that is the modern day Conservative Party.

There was also an Airfix model of Charles I with a detachable head but I had Cromwell first.  Strange how something has simple as that can have an influence on a young enquiring mind.

I also blame a book my Dad gave me about British heroes in which Cromwell was included but Charles Stuart wasn’t.

An illustration from the book…

In 2002 the BBC conducted a poll to identify the Greatest Briton and Cromwell came tenth, hard to believe that he could come behind Diana, Princess of Wales  and John Lennon but there you are, such is the nature of these polls and the mentality of the people who vote.  Two thousand years of history and Princess Diana and John Lennon make the top ten.  It leaves me speechless.

I have always considered the English Civil War to be the most important conflict of modern Europe because this was a revolution which provided a blueprint for those that followed, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The revolution begins with the moderates calling for reasonable and restrained reform for the exclusive benefit of the aforementioned wealthy and privileged who wanted even more power and wealth.  The problem with moderates of course is that they are on the whole reasonable people but by beginning a process of reform they provide an opportunity  for radicals and agitators to go much further and the English Revolution like those that followed swiftly gained pace.  After the radicals came the extremists, then war, then terror, then regicide.

The English Civil War swept away the supremacy of the Church of England, ended the Divine Right of Kings and embodied the principal of Parliamentary Sovereignty into the English constitution.  It was the end of medieval feudalism and paved the way for the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the next century.  At its most radical period it introduced the principals of socialism and even communism through the power of the New Model Army and the social ambitions of the Diggers and the Levellers, both proto-socialist political movements.

It is a shame that King Charles had his head cut off but even after sixty years or so of being given that Airfix model I confess that I remain a loyal Roundhead rather than a Cavalier.

Queen Henrietta Maria was exiled to France in 1649 upon the execution of Charles I but returned in 1660 upon the Restoration.  She didn’t stay long, returned to France and died nine years later at the age of fifty-nine from an accidental overdose of opiates that she was taking for pain relief in respect of severe bronchitis.  Another accidental Bridlington death.

A statue commemorating the English Civil War in the town of Newark in Nottinghamshire…

Bridlington and Lawrence of Arabia

I am often guilty of visiting a place only rather briefly and that means only scratching the surface and I don’t really get to some of the more important stories.

Bridlington as it turns out has been home to some famous people.  First up TE Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame.  This is him in the Arabian dessert, not on Bridlington beach.  What a great story that would have been.

After the First World War and his heroics in the Middle East and a spell in the Foreign Office Lawrence joined the RAF in 1922 and went east again, this time to the east of England and he was posted to the RAF Bridlington Marine Detachment Unit in 1932 where he worked on a project to develop high speed sea rescue boats.  He returned to the seaside town between November 1934 and February 1935 to see out his service pending his retirement.

While Lawrence wrote prosaically about his time in Arabia he had rather mixed feelings about Bridlington. His 1932 visit was during the busy summer season, but a letter written on 28th November 1934 described the town as ‘a silent place, where cats and landladies’ husbands walk gently down the middles of the street. I prefer the bustle of summer …’

Perhaps the quiet atmosphere prompted Lawrence to get away from Bridlington and ride around Yorkshire. He visited York, Skipsea, Hull, Beverley, Goole and it is likely he also paid visits to nearby Whitby and Scarborough.

Lawrence used to amuse himself by driving his motorcycle, a Brough Superior SS 100 along the Bridlington esplanade at high speed.

The Brough Superior SS 100 was a motorcycle designed and built by George Brough in Nottingham in 1924. Every bike was designed to meet specific customer requirements and even the handlebars were individually shaped.  They were a luxury item which cost almost twice as much as a family car at about the same time and they were advertised by Brough as the “Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles”.  The term was used by a magazine road tester in his review of the bike and Brough eventually obtained explicit permission to use it after a Rolls-Royce executive toured the Brough Superior factory to satisfy himself that it was appropriate.

These bikes were really powerful, at a time when the average car would struggle to reach sixty miles per hour, the Brough with its 1000cc engine was guaranteed to reach one hundred and it was the combination of bike and speed that did for Lawrence.

The crash that would end Lawrence’s life came while riding on a narrow road near his cottage near Wareham in 1935. The accident occurred because a dip in the road obstructed his view of two boys on bicycles.  Swerving to avoid them, Lawrence lost control and was thrown over the handlebars. He was not wearing a helmet and suffered serious head injuries that left him in a coma and he died after six days in hospital.

the original Brough factory went out of business in 1941 but the brand has been recently revived and is available again now, this model is named after Lawrence himself…

My favourite story about Lawrence has nothing to do with Bridlington but here it is anyway…

Lawrence kept extensive notes throughout the course of his involvement in the First-World-War and he began work in 1919 on the manuscript of his book ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’.  By December it was almost complete but he lost it when he misplaced his briefcase while changing trains at Reading railway station sometime in the following year.  It was never recovered and he had to start all over again which was obviously a bit of a bugger.

Another famous loss is the story of Thomas Carlyle and his book ‘The French Revolution: A History’.  In 1835 he finished volume one and gave it to his friend John Stuart Mill to read for his comments.

Unfortunately it was the only copy of the work and Mill’s servant allegedly mistook the book for household rubbish and used it as a convenient source of material to get the kitchen fire going one morning!

Unlike Lawrence, Carlyle apparently kept no notes at all and had to completely rewrite the first volume entirely from memory.

Little wonder he looked so glum…

In 1922 Ernest Hemingway lost his entire early work including the only copies when his wife had a suitcase stolen from a train in Paris as she was transporting it to her husband in Switzerland.  I can’t imagine Hemingway being terribly understanding about that.

A sundial commemorates Lawrence’s connection with Bridlington situated in the South Cliff Gardens, a fitting tribute perhaps, given ‘El Aurens’ spent many months of his life under a blazing hot sun.

The inscription reads – “Only count your sunny hours, let others tell of storms and showers”

This is my Lawrence of Arabia impression, also not on Bridlington beach. What a great story that would have been.

Skipsea – A Walk Along a Bigger Beach

Skipsea beach is getting bigger.  Every winter the storms gnaw away at the soft boulder clay cliffs and take away a few more feet and inches.  It is the fastest eroding coastline in England.  The savage North Sea is like a giant excavator.

Sometimes it is possible to visit and not really notice a great deal of change but not so this year.  The Winter storms of 2023 have been especially fierce and the sea has taken away more than usual.

Today we walked along the beach from Skipsea to Barmston, a distance of about four miles.  The tide was out, the sun was shining and the wind was blowing a gale.  The sand was damp but firm and we made steady progress towards our destination.

We were last here just nine months ago but we detected huge change.

The advance of the sea is relentless.  This is an unfortunate stretch of coastline  and I say unfortunate because in the local Coastal Management Plan it  is identified as a place not worth defending against the advancing sea and one day it will be gone.  Every year six foot of land is swept away, an estimated average of two million tonnes which is moved south on the tides towards the Humber estuary and builds land there whilst it takes it away here.  It is called ‘managed retreat’.  

A holiday chalet waiting for the day of destiny…

There used to be an attempt to stop the inevitable and these are the remains of some wooden groynes that the sea just laughed at…

On a previous visit I once came across an official looking man in a hard hat and a yellow high visibility jacket who was taking photographs and making notes.  His name was Brian and I asked him about the erosion.  He explained to me that the problem is that this coastline really shouldn’t be here at all because it is made up of unconsolidated soft clay and small stones called glacial till that were scooped up from the sea bed by a glacier as it advanced south during the last ice age and dumped here as the ice eventually melted and receded north about ten thousand years ago.  

It is just soft clay with the consistency and the look of a crumbly Christmas Cake that simply cannot resist the power of the waves.  In that time an area of land twelve miles wide has been eroded away and returned to the sea bed where it came from.  Not really an ideal sort of place to build houses and construct roads.  Once, not so long ago, there was a row of houses here with long stretched gardens enjoying glorious sea views.  All gone.

Along the way we came across a fisherman tending his nets, nets stretching out to sea and full of fish, he told us that he came down every day to get his catch but it was becoming a chore because a great deal of the eroding cliffs was getting caught in the net and it took him a long time every day to clear them.  He said that he was packing them up now and moving on, aggravation from the recently arrived gypsies hadn’t helped especially as one day recently they had stolen his quad bike and left him stranded on the beach.  Luckily for him he got it back later.

Further along was a great deal of concrete debris, the remains of Second World War coastal defences called pill boxes, because they looked like pill boxes.  It is not known for sure but it is estimated that there were once twenty-eight thousand of them both around the coast and further inland as well.  There were different types and designs based on the type of invasion that might be encountered.  Bigger and stronger if there was the possibility of tanks and heavy artillery, not so strong if the threat was from parachuting invaders and hostile infantry.  As it happened none of them were needed for their intended purpose.  Today it is estimated that there are roughly six thousand of them left.

I can’t imagine that it was very pleasant being on duty in a pill box.  Cold and austere, long hours of nothing to do but scan the water, no toilet facilities and no internet for entertainment.

These ruined specimens once sat high above the cliffs, half a mile or so inland but now they have given way not to an army of soldiers but the invasion of the relentless sea.

Someone clearly has a sense of humour about the situation…

Return to Skipsea, Big Changes

The first time that I went there in 2019, I fell in love with Skipsea almost immediately.  I liked the caravan, I liked the holiday park, I liked the countryside and I liked the beach and the sea.  The exceptionally fine weather helped of course.

I returned again post covid in August 2021 and then again just nine months ago in July 2022.  As the time approached to book a cheap Spring deal again earlier this year (2023) nothing would have stopped me going there again.

 Let me explain about caravan holiday deals.

In the UK there is a very cheap and nasty daily newspaper (I use that description newspaper very loosely) called T’he Sun’ and several years ago they launched a voucher scheme that once collected allowed readers to book cheap caravan holidays in the UK. 

The Sun newspaper is a curious conundrum, it supports the right wing Tory government and its extreme political views which cares nothing for the middle and working class and the middle and working class read the Sun and vote Tory.  It is absolutely unbelievable.

I would never buy the Sun toilet tissue so I never got to benefit from the offer but a few years ago the voucher codes began to be published on-line so it was possible to get the offer without buying the rag.

So, I booked a caravan in my favourite resort of Skipsea for four nights for just £60, everything included.  An absolute bargain.

On arrival, too early to book in, we took a walk to the seafront and were in for a nasty shock.  Only nine months ago there were cliff top chalets which although being in danger of falling into the sea had a sort of seaside charm with friendly owners and there were steps down to the beach.  All had changed. 

A severe winter and a succession of storms had eroded the cliffs to danger levels, the local Council had negotiated a property exchange and compensation and  after the no doubt relieved owners had moved out the gypsies had moved in and now there were caravans, ponies, big dogs, piles of rubbish, bonfires and the acrid smell of burning tyres.  I felt immediately uneasy.

Where had they come from I wondered? Where had they come from I worried?

The village of Skipsea and the adjacent caravan site  Skipsea Sands sits precariously on Yorkshire’s East Riding coast which is said to be the fastest eroding coastline in Europe. Since the Doomsday Book was completed in 1086 twenty-six villages along this stretch of coast have been lost to the sea. Cutting new steps to the beach is an annual job.

The advance of the sea is relentless.  Every year along the Holderness coast nearly two metres of coastline is swept away, an estimated average of two million tonnes which is moved south on the tides towards the Humber estuary and builds new unwanted land there whilst it takes it away here where they would very much like to keep it.

Sea defences are just not financially viable (after all, it isn’t in the south of England), the area is officially designated as a zone of ‘no active intervention’ and it is inevitable that another twenty houses and a fish and chip shop will soon be lost to the waves.  The Local Council is like King Canute and cannot control the sea.

These are houses that were built as recently as 1985 and at that time had long gardens and a road running  along the front but that all seems rather foolish now. There were once houses on the other side of the road too but they had already gone which should perhaps have acted as a warning to the people who bought these properties as holiday homes.  An especially violent storm in the winter of 2008 took the road away and the waves have gnawed away at the soft clay cliffs every year since.

The gypsy community is clearly prepared to take the risk, if the houses and all their rubbish fall into the sea they don’t really care, they will just move on.  The Environment Agency should deal with it but I doubt the balls to do so.  Gypsies can be tough people to deal with.

This was all rather disappointing, they had even blocked off access to the very fine beach.  I try not to be judgemental but I don’t trust gypsies, I had several incidents with them in my working life, they live by a different set of social rules from normal folk.

Anyway, we weren’t going to let this setback spoil our holiday.  Tonight we were staying in a caravan just five hundred yards away so I took the precaution of putting my wallet and car keys under the mattress before I went to sleep that night.

Gypsies are not known for their hospitality…