At the beginning of January 2006 I began researching the route of the Drawing Breath journey. The journey is central to an ongoing arts and health project which includes the aim of raising awareness about lung disease. The journey's route was along the coast between Whitstable and Hastings and I completed the five week trip on 19th August this year.
The blog has been reversed so that the start of the journey is at the top of the page. You can read about the journey chronologically from its beginning in mid-July to mid-August when it ended. To see the whole blog continuously on one page, please click on "2007" at the top of the blog archive on the left.
If you have feedback, suggestions, or thoughts about breathing or biking, please get in touch via the website's forum page, or through the email address above. Thank you!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Welcome to the Drawing Breath photo-blog!
13.7.07: Thinking about leaving
When I began working on the Drawing Breath project in 2006, Whitstable beach was in chaos. Fortifications were being renewed - the beach raised, new groynes - sinister yet friendly diggers keeping the town safe from flooding.
Now, after much preparation, Whitstable beach is the start of my journey on Monday morning and to make it, I am dependent on another machine, my new prosthetic bicycle whose bright efficiency contrasts with the inconvenient cellular breakdown in my lungs.
14.7.07: How to pack
Packing for the trip means taking oxygen deficiency into account.
If you have insufficient oxygen for normal activity, you need to carry as little weight as possible. I am weighing everything and making choices, packing nothing which is unnecessary for survival, no change of clothes .... just hoping they'll dry out overnight.
16.7.07: Whitstable to Herne Bay
12.00 pm:
Temperature: 19c, humidity 39%, light west wind. Distance cycled: 9 miles
Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable
Breathe Easy group members and friends have come to see me off. I have brought my finger pulse oximeter which measures oxygen saturation in the blood and we all measure our own levels. 96% and over is normal and ours collectively range from 87% to 98% depending on our health and the state of our lungs. Mine is 93% but it changes from moment to moment. 
Leaving via the harbour, past Brett's strange giant inhaler-shaped structure I head east for the wide promenade (forbidden to bicycles in the summer but still used by most cyclists). After the past months of planning chaos and trepidation, it feels strangely calm to be on my way.
1.30 pm:
Gentle ride towards Herne Bay pier ...
... where I call in for lunch with Rosemary and her partner John. They entertain me with stories of cycle journeys they've made in the past. Rosemary's oxygen equipment crouches by the front door in the hall - she shows me how its tubing reaches all over the house and offers me a whiff to perk me up.
Later near to the pier I begin a conversation with a woman who asks me about the yellow buoys in the sea. My first conversation with a stranger on this trip is interrupted by sudden heavy rain as she runs for cover. I didn't discover her name.
3.15 pm:
Shelter from the rain at Herne Bay Junior School with teacher Rosie Cullen. We will be working together with Year 5 on the project next year. The current plan, which could change, is to make a giant sculptural bicycle out of coastal waste materials.
Later and hungry I buy fish and mushy peas from Bhanal who works at Kings Fish Bar and eat them on a bench in the mournful damp of Memorial Park before heading inland.
6.30 pm:
Overnight with Vicky, Tom and Nancy in nearby Broomfield - peace, calm and generosity. At the end of this first day I'm exhausted and exhilerated.
17.7.07: The road to Minnis Bay
3.00 pm:
Temperature 18C, south wind. Day's distance cycled: 6 1/2 miles
Computer up-loading problems, so I set off late. My blog appears to be on US time, which feels somewhat surreal and appears that I'm blogging at 4am!
Such gusts of wind at Reculver(past Herne Bay), all my concentration is focussed on not being blown off the path, so that I forget to photograph the iconic tower. Earlier in the summer I had some coaching on this stretch to Minnis Bay with Paul the cycle instructor at a weekly club for people with disabilities. 
We would ride together on a kind of conjoined tricycle - 3 wheels, 2 sets of handlebars, 2 saddles - where I could gradually build up strength by taking a greater proportion of our combined weight. Sadly for its regular members the club is now closed.
Joyful ride in sunshine - I'm sustained by apples growing wild below the path and collect fennel to cook later. 
Closer to Minnis Bay I meet Carol and her dogs. They are very obedient.
Carol's grandfather had emphysema but still lived into his 90s. This is cheering.
6.30 pm:
Arrive at Annie and Jenni's in Minnis Bay.
18.7.07: Frustration in Birchington
Annie and Jenni are away. I have their house to myself and the morning to get stuff done. But some days just don't work out. I miss meeting my friend Connie at the Minnis by ten minutes.
I cycle uphill towards Birchington Library before realising I've forgotten my USB lead for uploading photos onto the blog. But returning with it later, the library turns out to be closed on Wednesdays. On to the bank to get cash, but it's been ramraided - two cash machines squat glumly and uselessly on pallets inside the building.
And then my pink perspex waterbottle vanishes from my bike. 
For the record, this was it, pictured Monday, in Memorial Park, Herne Bay. I loved it but clearly someone else did too.
18.7.07: Minnis Bay to Margate
3.45 pm:
Temp 24C, West wind, sunny. Day's mileage: 6 miles
Easy ride past chalk cliffs and inset dank adolescent hidey-holes and brick infills. If anyone knows how and when these brick parts of the cliff were built, please post on the forum. Further on a young couple on holiday from Derbyshire are on the other end of this kite ...
... and Cori who works in the West Bay Cafe sells me an icecream.
6.20 pm:
Reaching Margate, I turn off the front near the old Sea Bathing Hospital and arrive soon after at Di's house.
19.7.07: Around Margate
Windmill Community Allotment rocks!
9.00 am:
Outdoor yoga class, tutored by Di who is putting me up; the yoga breathing works well to open up my lungs. The project is funded by Surestart and it's a beautiful, vibrant and well-used place with children learning about the vegetables, lots of different people digging, holding classes and hanging out. There are also several rather sinister scarecrows.
Some of the people I meet are Surestart worker Enid, beside the "salad chair", James who is preparing smoke to use with the bees he keeps here and Steve who tells me about re-mineralising the soil by inoculations of sea water several times a year and links my search for oxygen with the photosynthesis of plants. 
Volunteer worker Marion tells me about a man she knew with a serious lung condition whose care home constantly placed him in the smoking room, and only moved him before health inspections.
2.15 pm:
Rush by taxi to Cliffsend village to give a talk about the Drawing Breath project to the Thanet Breathe Easy group. Some of the group are upset as their other speaker from the oxygen supply company has cancelled as she is sick. Unsurprisingly they are unenthusiastic about my talk right now. I feel nostalgic for my own Breathe Easy companions.
20.7.07: Royal Sea Bathing Hospital
2.00 pm:
Margate Museum
On Wednesday evening I passed the old Sea Bathing Hospital on my way in to the town. I am looking for details of earlier lung disease treatment in the museum files.
The hospital opened in 1791 in order to offer poorer people the pioneering benefits of seabathing and sea air treatment for scrofula which was already available to the rich in Brighton. However its intended treatment of pulmonary TB was not to be: it was found that Margate's sea air was far too bracing for damaged lungs.
The placing in the museum of these dolls, early teaching aids from the RSBH, has been contested by some medical practitioners who see them as more appropriate to a hospital context than their current home in museum, where they are much loved.
Finally closed in 1996, the RSBH has been sold and resold to be developed into luxury flats. The front is finished but what about the rest? A workman laughs: "How long is a piece of string?" he says. 
21.7.07: Pride in Margate
Last night I moved a couple of miles on to stay with Jenny and Fiona in Cliftonville. At the nearby Walpole Bay Hotel a month back they were preparing for the smoking ban ....
.... and today Margate is jumping. 
We all walk along the front into the town which is hosting Thanet's first ever Gay Pride which is spread out along the main road by the sea. This is Fiona's hat.
This evening she is dj-ing at a local Pride club event but I am too exhausted to go and flop in front of the telly.
22.7.07: Party at Botany Bay
My friends are organising a beach party at Botany Bay to raise money for the British Lung Foundation. Fiona has made an encouraging banner! 
I get cranio-sacral treatment from Val (Room2Breathe,Whitstable) who is sponsoring my journey with free sessions, and Moi Jill and Cath have cycled from Whitstable to give my bike emergency treatment.
Val helps me photograph the horizon through holes in termite-eaten chalk stones. They make me think of holes in the lungs which are a feature of emphysema. A member of the Thanet Breathe Easy group told me they are called PUTTOCKS!
These chalk cliffs attract graffitti carvers on different quests for immortality. Last year I found this unpleasant symbol high up out of reach. It calls out for some corrective sculptural readjustment.
22.7.07: Botany Bay to Broadstairs
8.00 pm:
Temperature: 18c, humidity 41%, wind south west. Day's mileage: 5 miles
Set off to Broadstairs on what has been the shortest but hardest ride so far and it's the part I've been dreading. Up hill to North Foreland lighthouse, I dismount and push for 30 steps, then wait 60 seconds for oxygen to go up and pulse to come down; 30 steps, 60 seconds - 30 steps, 60 seconds - at least five cycles of this before reaching the top exhausted. It is at the lighthouse that, in Shipping Forecast terminology, I cycle out of "Gibralter Point to North Foreland" and into "North Foreland to Selsey Bill".
9.30 pm:
Arrive at Connie's - she has become worried as there's no phone reception and I'm late and got lost - and collapse in a room used by her son when he visits, but in truth owned by her cat Jess. 
The room is covered with Laurel and Hardy posters and maps, including one of shipwrecks on Goodwin Sands. Connie tells me about being evacuated to Bristol during the war, and how evacuees walked past houses in a long crocodile and were picked out "like goods" by the people living there. She was twelve and still remembers the pain of being chosen last.
24.7.07: The kindness of strangers
Monday:
Spent time showing Connie my website, then blogging in the local library. In the evening we watch the latest stage of the Tour de France, and Connie explains its rules and rituals, including the various jersey awards. Connie was a touring cyclist, regularly covering up to 60 miles a day.
Tuesday:
Backwards to Margate rail station, then cycle past the harbour to collect forgotten items and meet with Isle of Thanet Gazette photographer by the Lido. He admires the Leica lens on my little camera. 
In the afternoon Connie and I go by taxi to visit the famous Morelli's icecream parlour. Connie hasn't been here for two years. She has a rum baba, and I have chocolate icecream.
Later when I say goodbye and depart for Ramsgate, I ask Connie why despite warnings from friends she asked me, a stranger, to stay at her home. "Because you're a cyclist, dear," she tells me.
24.7.07: Broadstairs to Ramsgate
4.15 pm:
Temp: 23C, humidity 34%, south wind, distance cycled 5 miles.
Sunny uneventful ride to Ramsgate along the cliff top and down past beach games and into the town where I come across Louise having a fag break outside Mad Max, sister shop to the one in Whitstable. She doesn't want to be photographed but tells me about her mother who has an inherited form of emphysema caused by a missing enzyme, alpha1antitrypsin.
I am heading for Karen's house. Karen is the friend of a friend and she hasn't met me before either. After riding around Ramsgate Harbour I arrive at her house. Karen knows what it's like to get diagnosed with a frightening illness and we talk about the fears and the coming to terms. She has cats (there are a lots of cats on this trip), and a small beautiful garden with a fairground figurehead.
After dinner I drop my extremely expensive pulse oximeter into my cup of tea. We attempt to dry it out with a hair dryer; the screen goes berserk, appears to die, but later it seems to have made a miraculous recovery!
25.7.07: Ramsgate harbour
10.00 am:
After I leave Karen's I return to the harbour, wait while John the security man lowers the drawbridge, then cross and meet Alice, a law student working over the summer for Thanet District Council as a fuel barge operative. She refuels pleasure craft in the marina and lets me go on board her floating fuel station. 
At a kiosk at East Cliff, Gerry of Ramsgate First, who does regular breathing therapy to cope with after-effects of an accident, tells me the way to artist Ruth Cutler's sea garden, which is being constructed at Eastern Undercliff out of sea and beach materials and is designed to be viewed from the cliff top above. Go see!
25.7.07: Ramsgate to Sandwich (the raw and the cooked)
9.30 am:
Temp: 22C, humidity 40%, south wind, distance (by signpost as register on bike is playing up) 6 1/2 miles.
Long climb up the hill out of Ramsgate, walking and resting alternately all the way up. During a couple of minutes rest at the top my rescued pulse oximeter, photographed last night after its dunking in my tea, shows my oxygen level in my blood going up from 91% saturation to 96%, and my pulse coming down from 122bpm to 88bpm. Hopefully it's accurate.
Southwards along the cliff top into a headon wind and on along National Cycle Route 15, and the Viking Coastal Trail, past Pegwell Bay. This nature reserve encompasses a disused hoverport, a surreal eery place with wild plants re-colonising the space by breaking through the concrete grid markings of the hoverport's former carpark. 
Last year a man with a dog told me the area's history and the legacy of greater unemployment since the hoverport closed. Showing through the trees up on the cliff above is a reproduction viking ship in perpetual grass dry-dock by the road I am taking.
I take the bike route which goes parallel to the A256 and there is evidence here of earlier unseasonal warmth: huge, sweet blackberries and in July, how strange! Further along the main road is a plum tree heavy with plums bursting out of their skins.
On past a paper recycling plant . . .
. . . past the heavily guarded Pfizers where some of our medication is produced . . .
. . . and arrive at Sandwich at 2.15pm. 
After a chocolate icecream, but leaving the cone, I am collected and driven away to a secret location hiding so far inside my jacket hood that I look like Kenny from "South Park".
26.7.07: Sandwich to Deal
3.25 pm:
Temp: 22C, humidity 40%, coastal wind warning: southerly, force 6 - 8.
Day's mileage: 5 1/2 miles.
Nightmare on Cycle Route 1
National Cycle Route 1 is a small pretty road going south between the Royal Cinque Ports golfcourse and fields of cows and corn. The wind is so strong the golf balls are flying backwards. Even so, other cyclists power past me whilst, feeling miserable and alone, I struggle with the gusts. This is a real low and five miles feels like five hundred.
Cycling under the seawall on the outskirts of Deal, a powerful gust blows me off the pavement and lands me sprawling in the road with the bike on top of me, just missing a car. Shaken but mostly unhurt I reach Deal, shelter on the front from (remarkably) my first rain of the journey and wait for Nigel to get home from work at 6.00. Nigel likes to cook and later makes me a tasty fish soup. No snaps on this ride - too busy surviving - but this is the soup. 
26.7.07: Betteshanger Brass Band
7.00pm
I am due at Betteshanger Band's rehearsal in Mill Hill and Nigel gives me a lift. Formerly known as Betteshanger Colliery Brass Band before Margaret Thatcher closed down Betteshanger colliery along with the entire mining industry in the late 80's, the band was part of a mining tradition, where participation in brass bands and choirs helped miners combat the lung disease which was a consequence of working amidst constant coal dust.
The Betteshanger band holds the south-east brass band championship. It encourages those with as little as six months' experience of playing a brass instrument to join. My visit to the band's rehearsal last night was to take photographs, my interest the historical association of music made by breath and breathing with occupation lung disease. I had hoped to talk to Ifor Thomas, an ex-miner and tuba player but he is at the town's carnival. Ifor's children, Sue and Ian, are also in the band.
In the right hand photograph is Phil, aka Shrek. Later, baritone player Alan, broadband service manager with British Telecom, who also runs the band's website (www.betteshanger.org) emails me helpful instructions on how to delete the cookies which are slowing down my laptop at home.
28.7.07: Days in Deal
Friday 2.00 pm:
After a morning of catching up blogging, I visit Victoria Hospital to see Karen from the Eastern and Coastal respiratory team. My spirometry reading is better than one taken before I left - the key test, FEV1 (forced expiratory volumn in one second) shows a slight improvement. However there is a question as to whether my weight has been entered consistently both times which would invalidate the improved result.
Most of the day is spent on Nigel's computer and in the evening we go out to get fish and chips.
Saturday 3.30 pm:
Distance cycled: 5 miles (approximation)
Passing a burnt-out car, I ride out to Fowlmead Country Park, a SEEDA-led regeneration project which has turned the Betteshanger Colliery into a nature reserve and massive area for outdoor leisure pursuits. It contains an Olympic-level cycle track on which young children are performing wheelies. The track will also host hand-cycling events.
It is bleak and beautiful, and camomile-like flowers sparkle on the dark shale of the former slagheaps, which is all that remains to honour the toil of miners below ground. 
At the visitor centre, Elliot is sweeping up outside. Fowlmead has only recently opened seven days a week and Elliot, a mathematics student, is working here for the summer. He agrees to put my project cards with the other leaflets inside the centre.
29.7.07: Deal to St. Margaret's-at-Cliffe
2.30 pm :
Temperature 22C, humidity 36%, wind north-easterly, sun. Distance cycled: 6 miles
After a quick dash to catch friends Dave and Lizzie doing their shopping at the nearby supermarket . . . 
. . . I set out along the front, and meet A, S and N more or less at the point where Ordnance Survey Explorer Map No.150 (Canterbury & the Isle of Thanet) ends and No.138 (Dover, Hythe and Folkestone) begins. 
It's good to have friends riding with me on this deserted uphill track. We descend to St. Margaret's Bay and eat our tea at the Coastguard Free House. This is an extraordinary place, with the house Noel Coward sold to Ian Fleming at one end, and a gunner's station from WW2 set into the cliff at the other. 
And under it, a variety of stones scattered like a map, and rock rippling like waves.
8.30 pm:
I arrive at Andi's 60's bungalow hidden behind cycle route 1. 
It's full of interesting things, sweet juxtapositions, and paintings by his girlfriend, artist Tracie Peisley.
Andi works for the Migrant Helpline in Dover and I find a copy of the Torture Survivor's Manual. It makes me think of journeys and dangers immeasurably greater than my own.
30.7.07: St. Margarets to Dover
11.30 am:
Temperature 24C, Humidity 4%, light west wind. Day's mileage: 4 1/2 miles
Missing the right turn, I trudge across two fields on a footpath a mere foot wide. This farmer never wanted a right of way across his field.
As I pass South Foreland lighthouse, the track is blocked by railway sleepers and as i heft the bike over these, a monster crop sprayer in full action rears up over the brow of the hill spewing out lung-poison. Idyllic sunny ride across the clifftop, until i smash a mudguard passing through a too-small turnstile, before descending a steep path overlooking Dover port.
Researching the route last year I met Volodya who lived in a clearing in the woods alongside this path above the port, his possessions hung for safety in plastic bags from branches overhead. 
This year he's gone, his woodland cave home filled up with dead branches. Volodya had come from Turkey in 1948 and said he had lived in this spot for sixteen years. We discussed photography; he spoke about "cameras without focus" - I think he had meant pinhole cameras but he was hard to understand - and he gave me a book someone had left him, Chicot the Jester by Alexander Dumas. Maybe he has been moved on, found hostel accommodation, or perhaps he's no longer alive. But I know no-one here to ask. My home until Thursday will be at the Longfield Guesthouse on the edge of the town.
30.7.07: Health issues for asylum seekers
2.00 pm:
Asylum Seekers' Health Service
On my way to the guesthouse, I visit Masheeda Downing who works here; the service assesses the health of new arrivals and screens for TB.
She says the health of asylum seekers is usually good when they arrive but deteriorates over the next few years. The men tend to smoke heavily but I imagine this health deterioration is more associated with the anxiety of displacement than with smoking. Masheeda tells me this induction service is closing down as Home Office policy for asylum seekers moves over to a more helpful and efficient case work system.
30.7.07: The guesthouse
3.00 pm:
I am staying at Longfield Guest House half a mile from the centre of Dover. I meet up with Rita who has come bearing gifts from home. Ann and Jane have thoughtfully sent a "SheWee" for those awkward nature moments amidst brambles and stinging nettles. My bike is safely housed in the guesthouse garage til Wednesday.
7.30 pm:
Yet another meal from the fish shop before an episode of EastEnders and an early night.
31.7.07: Delights of Dover
1.00 pm: 
After a hearty b&b breakfast, and a session blogging in Dover library, we are relaxing with coffee in Market Square. A sub-Vera Lynne rendition of "White Cliffs of Dover" suddenly floods the area over a tannoy. Its crude jollity entirely fails to match Vera's embodiment of bitter-sweet longing.
Historically transient, Dover is dominated by its port, both from the cliffs above . . .
. . . and on the beach below.
It's a strange day for news; following film director Ingmar Bergman's death yesterday, news of the passing of another great - Antonioni - has arrived in my email box. Then some comfort in the Guardian; Michele Hanson, who writes of aging with an extraordinary subtle mix of humour and poignancy, reports that the "senior moments" my generation complain of, and which have had me forgetting vital items and phone calls throughout this journey, are in fact "storage failure", the product of the busy, stressful lives of all ages.
In the same paper, cryptic crossword clue 4 down reads: "Constant puffing - evidence of frantic cycling? (5,7)" .... answer: "chain smoking".
5.30 pm
Back to St Margaret's Bay for a meal at the Coastguard Freehouse. 
The end of the day is peaceful and happy.
1.8.07: Last day in Dover
I meet Tim who is busking outside Woolworth's in the High Street. Tim has asthma. He took up the trumpet as an adult to help his breathing. He plans to write a book about busking and I promise to email him this image when I get home.
In St. Mary's Church down the road, there is a stained glass window commemorating the lives of ferry passengers who died in the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster.
After lunch on the beach, I talk to two silver swimmers, hale and hearty in their eighties, who are there with other older friends. They are called Jean and Rita. Rita tells me about her husband, who died at 81 with emphysema, and the hard work he put in to stay well. Rita prefers not be photographed, but this is Jean (and this is my lunch) . .
Rita's husband's condition was partly caused through his inhaling oil when his boat, the Lancastrian, sank in the English Channel during World War II. At the time, the loss of two to three thousand men was considered so serious for morale that Churchill had the incident suppressed.
2.8.07: Dover to Folkestone
9.05 am:
Temp 18C, humidity 41%, wind light westerly. Total mileage: 9 miles.
National Cycle Route 2 runs uphill out of Dover alongside the main dual carriage way to Folkestone, right beside the HGVs and the fumes, and there are a lot of both. To avoid this last year, I hauled my old bike along a vertiginous cliff path, but this new bike is too big and too laden.
After diverting through Aycliff village, then over a footbridge, the track comes out near this tunnel to Samphire Hoe Country Park. It looks dark and sinister but exquisite flowers and spotted red moths carpet the verges right up to its entrance. The fumes inside will make it too hard to ride through.
The track is relentlessly uphill, with that grey gravel on cycle tracks which grabs at the bike types and sucks out their energy. But despite this and the unseen drone from the carriageway, the land is beautiful and the weather good. Eventually the SheWee comes into its own, and partly concealed behind a bush, I wave merrily to an AA man who is parked in the layby beyond the cycle track.
12.20 pm:
As I'm eating an early lunch on some aesthetically rusty farm machinery, Dave and his children Tom and Vicki cycle by. They live in Capel-le-Ferne and promise to wave at me when I pass by their house later.
At Capel-le-Ferne I stop at the Cliff Top Cafe for an icecream. It's very crowded; people stare and don't smile. A little girl contemplates the drop.
4.25 pm:
Arrive at Gillian's in Folkestone, and exhausted I get an early night.
3.8.07: Friday in Folkestone
A former theatrical landlady in Canterbury, Gillian's artwork has the feel of a stage set and props: in Canterbury her house was her canvass. Having only recently moved to Folkestone, this house is still a blank screen.
Gillian recycles her life: this teacup is made from her grandmother's lace tableclothes and embodies memories of tea-time with her great aunt.
Sean from the Eastern and Coastal NHS respiratory team calls in to monitor my lung function. Bizarrely, my lungs appear to taken a dive and seem to be functioning at 33% of what they should be, rather than their usual 40%
2.10 pm:
Gillian takes me out to meet Folkestone artists. We meet sculptor Mark Sunderland whose exhibition "Linked+" has just opened at the new Whole World Cafe. Mark's work plays with boundaries between technology and the body. He has incorporated prostheses and bodily functions within his sculptures and there is one which has a silver 'lung' inflating and deflating wheezily, alarmingly like one of mine.
Mark also has a folding bike with its own sculptural presense and in the context of his work I am again aware of the prosthetic quality of my bike.
3.30 pm:
We visit Ruth Parkinson in her studio. Ruth has ME, and in her teens TB and multiple attacks of pneumonia and pleurisy.
Ruth makes site specific work about memory and history and is planning a residency working with local people about their memories of the Royal Pavilion Hotel, part of which remains joined to the back of the newer iconic ship-shaped Burstin Hotel. 
Ruth shows me round Folkestone Harbour, the Burstin Hotel, and the disused Folkestone Harbour rail station .....
..... and then Gillian takes me back to her house via heavily scaffolded buildings damaged in the recent earthquake.
4.8.07: Folkestone-Hythe-Newchurch
2.40 pm:
Temperature 24C, humidity 41%, west wind. Mileage: 14 1/2 miles
Before setting off to Newchurch, I pay homage to the King at an amusement arcade at the bottom of Tontine Street. It will be the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis's death in a few weeks.
I stop off at the new outdoor amphitheatre at the Leas Undercliff on the way out of town. Entertainment is happening so I chat to friends for a while then take off and later curse at forgetting to photograph the excellent acapello group. Singing is healthy exercise for the lungs, hence the male voice choirs which were a feature of the mining industry.
It's hot on the sea front, there's sticky pink icecream melting on the ground. People are enjoying the sun, making their private temporary homes on the beach. 
At Hythe I meet Joe and Gareth, barstaff at the Hotel Imperial behind the beach. They are queuing for icecreams, sweltering in their work clothes. 
Gareth says the job is easier since the new smoking legislation as it's quieter and there's less clearing up to do. It suits Joe as he's recently given up.
At the Hythe end of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway line, I stop for my own icecream before cycling along the Royal Military Canal, and on through flat, marsh landscape. I get directions from a man with a horse outside the Bottolph Bridge Inn, and along the interminable Lower Wall Road more directions from caravaners, Kathy and Dicky Bird. Jo phones to see where I've got to and four horses raise their heads at the sound of the ringtone.
6.50 pm:
Arrive at Newchurch on Romney Marsh. Jo's home is in the bakehouse of an old mill.
5.8.07: Newchurch-Dymchurch-New Romney
1.50 pm:
Temperature 28C, humidity 41%, west wind, light becoming stronger. Mileage: 9 miles
Hurried ride through more marsh countryside to meet Sandra and Geoff who are driving out from Canterbury. They phone to say Dymchurch is so crowded there is no parking, they are exhausted by the heat and will try to meet up again later in the week.
I stop for icecream, followed by a wobbly ride along the front dodging small children. As the tide comes in people are de-camping from the beach and re-arranging themselves all over the promenade above.
Further along the front David is waiting for me. He is partner to Mollie, my respiratory nurse and I am staying with them in New Romney. I meet their dog Billie; Billie is thirteen and has the lung disease pulmonary fibrosis.
David rings bells at 11th century St. Nicholas's Church round the corner. He takes me up to the top of the church tower to see the view across the marsh.
Dungeness power station is visible on the horizon. I will be staying on the Ness tomorrow and Tuesday.
6.8.07: New Romney to Dungeness
10.15 am :
Temperature 21C, Humidity 41%, light west wind. Day's mileage: 11 miles
Complete with Mollie's generous packed lunch, I set off for Dungeness leaving Billie the Tibetan terrior listening to a Radio 4 programme about Freud and the Oedipus complex. I pass fishing tackle shops and a garden centre specialising in plants which survive by the sea. On Dungeness Derek Jarman's garden looks overgrown.
11.10 am:
Arrive at Susan's house on the Ness. Susan (left) takes me to buy eggs and a marrow from a neighbour who sells produce from her two allotments.
1.45 pm :
Sue (right) and Julia have driven over from Whitstable with their bikes, and we ride against a strong wind to the RSBP sanctuary where we buy stuffed birds with mechanical songs to hang from our handlebars.
Christine, the visitor centre manager, tells me about the campaign to halt the Lydd airport expansion and the high likelihood of bird strikes in this area. I sign the petition and we leave. Passing the power station on the way back I attract the attention of Eddie, the security officer, who drives incessantly around its boundaries. He asks me if I am photographing the perimeter fence, which I deny and divert him by showing him my stuffed birds from the santuary which luckily makes him laugh.
9.00 pm:
The power station from my window in the fading light. 
7.8.07: On the Ness and on the train
7.45 am:
Up early, but Colin has beaten me. He drives from Maidstone up to three times a week to fish here. He tells me how the mackeral drive shoals of whitebait up onto the shingle where they are gathered - and cooked.
The coastguard's lookout has been purchased privately, "refurbished" and a barrier erected, evidence of the gentrification of Dungeness.
Walking towards the little train station, Dungeness power station looks sculptural in the morning sun.
10.10am:
I catch the Dymchurch light railway steam train back to see Jo and use her computer. It passes through miniature sidings and past miniature signal boxes, and through a narrow passage between back gardens. A small boy sitting near the front makes dramatic coughing, choking and dying gestures with much hilarity. He is on holiday at Camber Sands, hopefully in good health.
Back at Jo's house, she shows me Google Earth and zooms in from space to my house in Whitstable, and to hers here. You could monitor this whole journey from space.
I have received an email from Fred Knittle of the U.S. choir Young@Heart, whose programme has been shown several times on Channel 4. This seniors' choir sing contemporary songs. Fred retired from the choir due to health problems but still makes guest appearances and sings Coldplay's "Fix You", his oxygen bottle at his side. I am honoured and overwhelmed that he has replied to my email.
Jo drives me back to Dungeness in the evening and we eat excellent fish and chips at the Brittannia pub near where I'm staying.
