Week 292: Pier review

I spent Monday doing nothing, watching TV series, taking a nap, and by the evening I felt mostly recovered from the previous weekend’s exertions.

Tuesday was wasted waiting in for a delivery that was postponed, and a Royal Mail collection that I’d arranged for the same day to kill two birds with one stone, but which didn’t happen until after three o’clock. The evening was better, though, as an old friend from Belgium was in town with her family, and we all met for dinner.

My parents, also in London for a few days, came for dinner on Wednesday.

When I saw that c2c were offering £15 return tickets to Southend-on-Sea this summer, I thought that I should take a day trip to a place I’ve never been. As it happens, I have a Network Railcard, which means that an off-peak day return is more flexible and cheaper still, but the seed was planted, and Friday seemed like an ideal day for it.

This is Southend

At first, I thought I’d catch the train from Stratford, but there’s no direct route from there. The train to Southend runs from London Fenchurch Street, which isn’t all that convenient for me, but it stops at West Ham, which is on the Jubilee Line and therefore an ideal station to catch it from, in theory.

I used contactless payment to get to West Ham, tapped out, and went to buy a ticket like some kind of complete rube. Because this is Britain, and nothing can ever be that straightforward. West Ham station is run by TfL, which means it doesn’t work like a real railway station.

First of all, the ticket machine tries to dissuade you from buying a ticket, and directs you to use contactless instead. If you persist – in my case, because I wanted to get the Network Railcard discount that isn’t available with contactless – it then tells you that this machine will not issue tickets with a Railcard discount on weekdays. That’s an oddly specific “fuck you” to the traveller, and to me in particular. It suggests instead that you should just board the train and buy a ticket from a member of staff, which is putting far too much reliance on the kindness of revenue protection staff for my risk appetite.

After some time spent faffing on my phone, typing in my address and credit card details, missing the train I’d hoped to take, I bought a ticket. I expected an eTicket, but this was delivered in the form of a code which, it turns out, I couldn’t redeem at the TfL-operated ticket machine. And, of course, there’s no booking office any more. The member of staff who let me through the gate advised me to speak to the staff on board the train to issue a ticket.

I took the next train, fifteen minutes after the one I’d intended. There were no staff to be seen on board, so I spent the journey nervous about whether I was going to end up being fined for breaching the esoteric rules of the not-at-all-joined-up British railway system.

In the end it was fine. At Southend Central, instead of drawing attention to my lack of a ticket, I appealed to the staff’s helpfulness by asking where I could collect my ticket from the code. They dutifully let me through the gate and pointed me at a machine that printed my tickets, so that getting back, at least, was no trouble.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried:

In cases where the Ticket Vending Machine (TVM) is not working and a customer has their CTR reference number and/or appropriate proof of purchase and appropriate identification, the customer will be instructed to board their train and be allowed to travel and advised to collect their tickets at the first available opportunity

The first thing I did on arrival was to walk down the High Street (with not one, not two, but three branches of Greggs!), past the fairground, to the pier.

Big wheel and bigger wheel

The fairground, and indeed Southend as a whole, seemed very quiet for a seaside town on a hot Friday in the summer holidays, and many small retail booths were shut. My impression is that it’s a place that receives most of its visitors at the weekend.

Southend pier has had a hard life: it suffered fires in 1959, 1976, 1995, and 2005, and was hit by ships twice, in 1908 and 1986. It was at one point the longest pier in the world; now, it’s still the longest pleasure pier in the world. And it is long: 1⅓ miles or 2.1 km, most of which is a long walkway under the unremitting sun across the vast mudflats. It was almost exactly low tide as I walked out: peak mud.

A boat, alone on the mud

You can take a train to the end and back, on a smelly, diesel-fueled contraption, but the service is infrequent, it’s expensive, and as has previously been established, I’m perfectly happy walking quite far.

The pier railway

At the end of the pier, I bought a pilsner from the café and drank it in the shade while enjoying the relatively cool breeze. Then, inevitably, I retraced my steps back to shore.

Southend isn’t all seaside tackiness and a very long pier, however. There’s a delightful garden around Southchurch Hall, a 14th century manor house with a largely-intact Great Hall plus some later additions, of which I received a personal guided tour from a friendly volunteer.

At the Central Museum, there’s an impressive set of artefacts – including a gold decorative buckle that looks as good as the day it was made – excavated from an Anglo-Saxon burial at Prittlewell. The Beecroft Gallery hosts exhibitions (I saw Heidi Wigmore State of Her) and the Jazz Centre UK, “the UK’s national cultural centre for jazz” and a great place to buy second-hand jazz CDs. (I found a copy of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s classic album Time Out for £3.)

I think I’ll be back to see some of the things I missed: the permanent collection at the Beecroft Gallery; the rest of the museum; Prittlewell Priory; the curious Cliff Lift. At £13.05 return it’s a cheap day out.

All these photos were taken with my 22-year-old 6 megapixel Lumix point-and-shoot, recently resuscitated with a new battery. It works well for candid photography because it’s so tiny and unthreatening. I like the 28 mm equivalent lens, and there’s not much to do in the way of control apart from frame the shot (as best as you can in a screen that isn’t all that visible in daylight) and hope. It was a fun exercise.

After some research, I think I have found an actual workable way to travel from West Ham to Southend with a Railcard that doesn’t rely on travelling to pick the ticket up or hoping that the inspector has a good day. First, in advance, you have to order a (free) smartcard from c2c. Because, as mentioned earlier, nothing is properly joined up, this is not the same as the (also free) Key smartcard that works on Southern, Thameslink, and Great Northern in London and the Home Counties. Why not order one of those as well while you’re at it? There’s a South Western Railway smartcard too! And Greater Anglia! And half the operators have their own card. Are they interoperable? Maybe!

In theory, and as far as I can test the process without having yet received a card, you can then buy a ticket on c2c’s website and associate it with your smartcard, and it should be loaded onto the card when tapping in. If you don’t leave the station, you have to remember to tap in and out with both cards at the foot of the staircase when changing to and from the Underground.

That’s the idea, anyway. I’ll let you know how it works.

We spent Sunday afternoon in Bedford with L—’s family for a significant birthday. We made up several jugs of non-alcoholic not-actually-Pimm’s with ANON English Garden. At a 1:3 ratio with lemonade, fruit, cucumber, and mint, it’s delicious and I really couldn’t tell the difference in taste. Recommended.

There’s still no end to the oppressive heat. The media report an “unprecedented” fifth heatwave of the year but I’m not sure when the four intervening non-heatwave periods are meant to have occurred. It doesn’t seem good, does it?

Links for the week. Don’t have nightmares.

• The moral hazard of large language models. “Do it [engage in ‘conversation’ with the LLM] often enough, and you will start thinking about the model in terms of human interaction, which is a category error with serious implications.”
• Degeneracy is a Symptom. “Your grandparents lived in a hedge-financed world. They could afford to be virtuous, in the conventional sense, because virtue paid. The young live in a Ponzi-financed world. They cannot afford to be virtuous in the conventional sense, because virtue does not pay, and the only strategies that have any chance of clearing the threshold their grandparents took for granted are strategies their grandparents would not recognise as strategies at all.” A brutal discussion of how unchecked rentier capitalism has immiserated the young.
• American farmers slid solar panels over 62,000 acres of farmland, and the biggest payoff had almost nothing to do with electricity. Partial shade from the panels results in less water use and greater yields.
• The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate. “The other scenario, which scientists now say ‘recent data aligns more closely with,’ is 3C of warming. At that level, the Exeter authors warn of up to 4 billion deaths. Four billion. That is half the planet. In 26 years or less.”