This photo taken by Tigger through the train window shows the strange sky with a rainbow.

This is the entrance hall of Ramsgate Station. We left our train to pursue its way to its final stop at Margate while we walked on into town.

On the way, we called in at a newsagent’s shop to check Tigger’s Euromillions ticket. And guess what: yes, it didn’t win anything.

Ramsgate is a strange town which gives off an aura of faded glory, at least, that’s the effect it has on me, though what this glory might have been or why it faded, I have no idea. Its heyday as a seaside town is a hundred years in the past and the Channel ferry service which brought it a temporary importance is long gone, a victim of the Channel Tunnel.

Today, I believe it lives mainly on tourism and its large port now turned into a marina.

The name of this town probably does derive from an animal but not from a ram. In 1275 the name is recorded as Remmesgate and this suggests that it combines two Anglo-Saxon words: firstly, hrem (genitive hremmes), meaning ‘raven’ (the bird) and, secondly, geat meaning a gap in the cliffs allowing access to the sea. There is, however, an outside chance that Rams derives from a personal name, that of the owner of the land or that of a notable inhabitant.

On the way we saw this old shop front with period glasswork advertising leather goods and “grindery”, which would probably have been tools for working leather and perhaps even a blade sharpening service.

We spent the afternoon with Tigger’s people then caught a bus back to the port where we had dinner in a restaurant before taking another bus – to the station this time.

Happily, we did not have long to wait for a train to St Pancras. We prepared our tickets for inspection and settled down for the ride home.

Tigger has an extended family most of whose members live in or around Ramsgate in the county of Kent.

We have started on our way there and have paused at St Pancras International to await the next train thither, in the meantime consuming our usual breakfast of coffee and croissants.

We have found seats on this so far deserted platform 15. This area of the station is for the HS1 trains serving the south-east. “HS”, as you either know or have guessed, stands for “High Speed”, a name justified by the fact that these trains use the fast railway tracks built for the Eurostar, cutting journey times by an hour or so, compared with ordinary trains.

The first stop after St Pancras is Stratford International. Sadly for the Borough of Newham that gave this station the “International” label in the expectation that the Eurostar would stop here, that expectation never in fact materialised. The label thus remains as an ironic reminder of dashed hopes. (Photo by Tigger.)

I grabbed this snapshot as we crossed the river Medway, one of Kent’s main rivers and a tributary of the Thames.

Shortly after crossing the river, we arrive at Ashford International. This station is a changeover point for services to many parts of Kent not directly reached by HS1. As the name suggests, the Eurostar stops here but may not continue to do so, leaving the station’s international status in doubt.

Incidentally, HS1 was so named in the belief that there be an HS2, a fast service linking London to the North. That plan has always attracted opposition from a number of quarters and it is now quite on the cards that, despite the work already done and money already spent, the project will be cancelled, a fiasco of the kind in which the UK has come to excel.

Kent landscape from the train – contributed by Tigger.

We are about to arrive at Ramsgate. I will perhaps take up the story later.

I have written before about how the coots in the east basin of St Katharine Docks have discovered that the rudder of the boat in the photo below makes a convenient perch for grooming and that I am used to seeing them there. Today, though I was given a surprise.

Occupying the perch today was not a coot but a female Mallard duck. While I was watching her, I had another surprise.

She hopped off the rudder and started swimming away and as she did so, three ducklings popped out from the shadow of the pontoon and took after her!

The coloured speckles are light reflected off the ripples caused by the movement of the ducks and the camera has not managed to deal with them very well.

After moving a short distance, the group stopped swimming and remained floating quietly in the sunshine.

Mallards don’t seem to frequent this basin so it will be interesting to see whether they stay or whether this was just a visit.

Until my nineteenth year, I lived in the seaside town (now city) of Brighton. My mother was a widow living on sparse means, my father having died when I was 18 months old. We lived in a quiet but pleasant street, occupying a terrace house which my mother rented. I do not know when that street of houses was built but would guess that they were late Victorian or early Edwardian. The houses had been built without a bathroom and with an outside toilet. In our house, as in many others in the neighbourhood, a bathroom and indoor toilet had been created by partitioning off parts of rooms on the upper storey. Needless to say, there was no hot running water. An ancient gas “geyser” provided hot water for the bath until it finally gave up the ghost and was replaced by a water tank with a tap, heated by means of a gas ring beneath it. Hot water for all other purposes was obtained by boiling a kettle.

We spent most of our time in the room we called “the kitchen” even though it wasn’t a kitchen. It adjoined what my mother called “the scullery” and which anybody else would have called “the kitchen” because it was in that space that the sink, the gas cooker and a built-in cupboard we called “the larder” were installed.

At the front of the house was a room that we called, appropriately enough, “the front room”. We used this only for special occasions, such as when entertaining guests or when my sister and her husband came to spend Christmas with us. Room heating was by means of a fireplace in each room and by a portable paraffin heater. For economy, we usually lit only one fire during the winter, that in “the kitchen”.

On the upper floor, as well as the bathroom and toilet (which we called “the lavatory”, as was usual in those days), were three bedrooms. My mother occupied the best, front bedroom and I had a room at the back, overlooking the garden. The third bedroom was often occupied by a paying guest until my teen years when my mother turned it over to me as a “playroom”. This floor was accessed from the lower by a staircase on whose 16 steps I first learnt to count. Even now, when I go up or down a staircase, I tend to count the steps and if they number exactly 16 this gives me a thrill of recognition.

My mother kept up the back garden as best she could. On three sides it was limited by a brick wall about four feet high separating it from the properties on either side and opposite. In the centre was a rectangle of rough grass on which we could sit in deckchairs in summer and on which I sometimes pitched my small tent, bought for me as a present for “passing” the 11-plus exam. (Theoretically, you did not “pass” or “fail” this landmark exam; your result determined which kind of secondary school you were assigned to. Naturally enough, parents tended to consider that being selected for the grammar school, as I was lucky to be, was equivalent to “passing”.)

I loved that house and, many decades and many dwelling later, still retain fond memories of it. I visited it twice in latter years, once, when all I could do was to look at it from outside, and a second time, when with Tigger I went there and the workmen who were converting it into two flats allowed me to go inside briefly. It is no doubt purely in my imagination that on both occasions I felt that the house recognized and remembered me.

When I was nineteen, my mother having inherited a sum of money, we moved to the then village of Bishops Cleeve, near Cheltenham, and took up residence in a newly built bunglow, my sister and her husband occupying the bungalow next door.

Curiously, despite loving the old house in Brighton, I left it without a qualm. I now put this down partly to the excitement of moving permanently to a place where we had previously spent our holidays and partly to the dreadful insouciance of youth. Many times in later years I have thought of that terrace house in Brighton and imagined returning there to find it awaiting me exactly as it was when it was my home.