how bloggers roll down hills

Anyone reading Dover's leading newspapers right now might be accosted with the sinister headline 'Rolling Crones'. Because that's what happened yesterday at Dover Castle. The grassy slopes tucked behind the Roman Lighthouse and Saxon Church were littered with cellphones, cameras and the occasional flung-off coat as ink.spill, neha.vish and I decided to relive our childhood Nehru Park experiences and tumbled/rolled, screaming like headless chickens, down the steep hills. Needless to say, it was extremely fun, quite ridiculous and completely unexpected. There are pictures and videos, but they are not for public consumption (public ka pet-kharab ho jayega, like us, what with oily Dover food). The incriminating evidence goes to the grave with us.

Speaking of graves, Dover is a bittersweet little place. It resents. Probably because, too often, it gets left out. I mean the town of Dover. A lot of action has been seen by the countryside around it (Biggin Hill Air Base: busiest base in WW2 - courtesy neha's history major; Chalk Cliffs: marker for England and site of very important underground tunnels - courtesy the guide at Dover Castle) and the port (Hellfire Corner: part of the English Channel between Dover and Calais over which most of the WW2 dogfighting took place), but the town of Dover never really gets acknowledged for itself. Which is why in spite of being one of England's chief ports and its gateway to the EU, it still lies quiet and sleepy, almost as an afterthought. Adverstisements, road signs and signages in the town refer to the cross-channel shipping trade, tourist routes and most recently English Heritage, the private (in partnesrhip with government) organisation that's taken over most of the monuments in the country. (They run them well enough, incidentally, but their guides need to be trained better. Ours pretty much said 'I don't know' to every question, and after asking to be asked.) The residents of Dover, gummy old gaffers and gammers, fat kids in 80s clothes (and the occasional fair, black haired cutie on a cycle) seem to live on a different plane. They have their Churches of various denominations, byoootiful houses, row-flats and otherwise, and a couple of local parks and markets. But there's a weird disjoint. It's as if the residents aren't sure if it's their town at certain points, and at other points, they act as the hospitable host to the hordes of passing visitors, but only reluctantly. The restaurants aren't sure if they really want to cater to people who use Dover mainly as an embarkation point for the cross channel ferry, or as a pit stop on their kent coast walk. The pubs are open till 11, but there seems to be an understanding that you'll only want to go there if you're 'local' - and this is over and above the fact that like most English cities/towns, besides superstars like London & Manchester, Dover's population is highly race - pure. They haven't started using catchphrases like Diversity & Community yet.

Dover remains a vague stop-over, feeling like a town, but looking like a city because of it's important Shipping Industry. It has echoes; Admiral Ramsay's window, the pebble beach on the Channel and Priory Road, where the coffee shops are; they were all waiting for something - perhaps for another burst of borrowed glory for the town, like the ones in the Napoleoinic wars, the 1914-18 War and the greatest one of them all in the 40s, when WRENs sat in these places on town visits in off-shift hours, planning campaigns to have trousers allowed as part of their uniforms, since they had to bend over tables to move battleship pieces around.

As a result, in spite of the best intentions and the snootiest self-proclaimed non-guidebook-type tastes when it comes to tourism and travel, we ended up having fun only in the true-blue marketed and packaged tourist spots. And it was fun indeed; even though I had to pay for it with a killer headache all the way back to London (the chicken in kebab shops in Dover is worse than anywhere else in the country, nay world) and am feeling joints and muscles whose existence I had forgotten or overlooked, flare up with pain today (arthritic at 25! eeyaagh). Non-rolling photos will be up shortly.

and now - back to routine - essay! edit! translate! transcribe! (shit!)