23 years gone today

Clare at Herne Bay, September 14th 2003

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Herne Bay is a seaside town on the north coast of Kent, about 7 miles north of Canterbury and roughly 5 miles east of Whitstable. It faces north across the Thames Estuary towards Essex, with Margate farther east along the coast.

I have only the vaguest memory of this visit. Were we looking for something? Margate - which we visited a little later? We had just come back from our two years in America.

I don't remember - Clare's treating it as a holiday. 

Perhaps a T. S. Eliot pilgrimage?

Eliot retreated to Margate in the autumn of 1921. Granted a mandated leave of absence from his desk at Lloyds Bank to recover from a severe nervous collapse, he sat in a seaside shelter and wove his fracturing mental state into the third section of The Waste Land.

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