works outing

[Rochester Cathedral and Castle] 

The thing about being self-employed is that I don't get any offical works dos, so I make sure I organise some myself. We have an office Christmas lunch every year, and now I think we'll have an annual Easter works outing.

All that was missing from our day out yesterday was a charabanc. Instead, we had to make do with a car, but it was still very much in the spirit of the old-fashioned works outings when everyone piled into a charabanc and went off sightseeing or to the seaside. We managed to combine the two, with a visit to Rochester and a visit to Seasalter, and came back full of culture, good food, and even a little salty and windswept.

Having read the book & watched the BBC adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it was wonderful to walk round the cathedral, the cathedral precincts including Minor Canons Row (mentioned in the book), and the town itself (short film here). It's all very atmospheric, especially on a quiet day when you can picture Dickens and his characters in the crypt, the choir stalls, the pubs, and the little alleyways.

The cathedral is very mellow with beautiful stained glass windows and high Victorian/Pugin-style tiles and decorations in the choir. There's a nice little cafe in an C18 listed building, and a huge magnolia outside. The High Street has some wonderful early C20 shopfronts, and some older architectural treasures including the Corn Exchange built by Sir Cloudseley Shovell (no wonder Dickens was so inspired by Rochester, with names like that) which has this huge clock protruding from its front. Further out there are the marshes (think Magwitch and Great Expectations), and we also drove up to Gad's Hill so that I could see the house that once belonged to Dickens.

A works outing must include food - we should really have had whelks and oysters in Kent - and we'd booked lunch at The Sportsman which is in the middle of the salt marshes of Seasalter and somewhere we've been wanting to get to for years. It was brilliant and busy, and the food was delicious, and it's close to the beach huts on the sea wall painted in colours that cleverly match the sky, sea, sand, and marsh.

 

Then on to see a friend in Seasalter and a cup of tea in the sunshine while we admired her blossom and cowslips, then home again, home again, jiggety-jig.