Wednesday 21 Feb 1996. We have reached Bournemouth after a day circumnavigating the Isle of Wight yesterday in snow and a howling wind.
Just as a small contrast, this is what Bournemouth looks like once we wake, have breakfast and leave the hotel.
Though it appears sunny and gorgeous, it hides a fierce temperature. I'm not talking about heat!
Bournemouth is a hilly town with an attractive seafront and pier. The shopping centre up the hill nearby awaited us. And, oh yum! - a Wimpy burger bar! Actually the temperature was so horrendously cold that, even after a full breakfast, we found ourselves having a Wimpy burger at 10:00am and only an hour later had hot apple pie with cream to warm up again!
It was so cold in Bournemouth that by lunchtime we had decided we couldn't just spend the day walking about and we returned to the car and drove along the coast to Poole.
After finding somewhere to park we wandered around the pottery. I got into conversation with a glassblower who was so grateful at being spoken to by someone in the large but hitherto silent crowd that he kept bringing his work over to show me at every stage, pointing out bits and pieces and explaining exactly what he was doing. He was making small coloured scent bottles and they were beautiful.
I'm not sure whether it is because of the abundance of sailors wanting to get drunk whilst on dry land, or whether it is just that Devon's seaside harbour towns catered for families gathering to wave off their drunken menfolk being stretchered back onto ships deleriously happy, but these towns always seem to have built their pubs with special care for architectural attractiveness and a unique presentation that pubs from the mid 20th century onwards had almost lost entirely.
At the time these pubs were built they may well have been brewing their own ale I suppose and thus not subject to the standardisation that large breweries were to bring to the publican trade in later years. Anyway, the gable end of the Poole Arms was entirely tiled in green and I couldn't help wondering how many poor souls had staggered out after a night's drinking and thought they were in the Gents...
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