A 5 hour driving lesson in the blazing sun. The day after, I walked from Upnor to Hoo and back to Borstal. You can follow the shore at low tide and collect oyster shells and broken bottles along the way; warm milk happiness decoding the glass remnants, learning the story of some old bottlemaker, somewhere down the coast. This time it was Powell and Ricketts from Bristol, and the drink was done with in 1880 something*.

 Across from Upnor is St Mary's Island. The island is well-developed now, but in the 1500s it was a minor defensive post. A chain ran from Upnor Castle, across the River Medway to St Mary's; they'd simply raise it up in the case of threat from a Spanish fleet. Elizabeth I had a fort built opposite, at Hoo - Cockham Wood Fort - with bricks after the colour of her hair. St Mary's later became the burial ground for the Napoleonic POWs imprisoned on the local prison hulks. Rumours have it that some of the more badly behaved prisoners were tied to stakes and left for the tide to take them. I'm waiting. ⁣ ⁣ 

I reached Hoo Marina Village, a prefab community of shrinking cockneys with beautifully tended rhodedendrons and sinister pasts, before I crossed the fields towards Borstal. The woodpigeons were plump: feathered, flying Beryl Cooks.⁣ ⁣ 

 Today, another 5 hours then Aylesford Priory. ⁣ I hadn't returned there since primary school. I remembered a hollow bush and a dreamy weeping willow and was greeted by the Tower of Babel and a modernist chapel in green. Unreal. The artist was a Polish gulag survivor, Adam Kossowski. He's also responsible for a mural - The History of Old Kent Road - in Peckham, and work at St Aloysius, church-head of the sorely missed Tapestry Club. I'd love to be religious and have a place to put all the awe this kind of work inspires, but it just bounces around my head, causing tiny hairline fractures in my furious, miserly skull. Sunburned today.⁣ ⁣ 

 *"Since to die is to become the contemporary of everyone, except the still living." ⁣ (Aleksandr Kushner)

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