The Sentinel

Sentinel

Local Matters

Sandgate

a dce2.0 company

August 2022

This magazine is compiled and edited by David Cowell who is totally responsible for content.

If you do not wish to receive these magazines please email UNSUBSCRIBE to him at david@thesentinel.org.uk

Sandgate Farmers Market Saturday, 6th August Catherine Jordan Cakes Delightful treats from a professional patisserie

Usher's fruit and veg are based locally with lots of fruit, veg and salad sourced locally.

For example their potatoes are sourced from O&P Gowers In Acrise.

Anji's Interiors

Hand made clothing and greeting cards

Working for local, national and international clients and companies from her studio based in sunny Sandgate, on the South Kent coast, Anji creates beautiful bespoke quality curtains, blinds, soft furnishings and interior decor to suit your requirements.

Pauline's hand made toys Conventional and wrap style masks, soft toys and so many more wonderful hand made gifts

What better time to chat about your energy and internet supply...and a chance to win £20,000

Gill Thompson Jewellery

Marsh soap is vegan friendly, made from quality organic products. Each soap is made from 90% olive oil, coconut oil,100% natural fragrances, seeds, petals/buds added for decoration.

* Unique gifts - Gill makes only one piece * Commissions accepted * Gill can bring broken jewellery back to life * Gill uses precious, semi precious gems,freshwater pearls, glass and crystal beads

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To advertise in all three of The Sentinels with circa 3000 targetted readers and growing please email me: david@thesentinel.org.uk

Now on the radio too

for a rate card.

From the cutting-edge London design agency Here Design - writer and poet Philip Cowell, and award-winning designer Caz Hildebrand, author of The Herbarium, this playful, original, beautifully designed book brings to life the punctuation marks we use every day, including: The dashing dash So-called "quotation marks" The colon: and on and on.

Kindle edition The shouty exclamation! £9.99 Hardback The three dots of... £12.50 (Not forgetting the brackets) Great gift And even more 3

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https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/thesentinelbooks

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Guided Walks Around Old Hythe Every Thursday, June to September Discover the secrets of this ancient Cinque Port and soak up the atmosphere amongst its historic architecture. See the Royal Military Canal, built to keep Napoleon at bay. Visit St Leonard’s Church (free tour included) and wonder at the bones in the famous ossuary/crypt.

Tours of the church (without a walk) start at midday.

Meet at Hythe Town Hall, High Street CT21 5AJ at 10:30am - no need to book.

Walk £2 per person (Ossuary £2 extra).

Allow 1½ hours for walk plus 45 minutes for church/ossuary

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Our thanks to the Sandgate Parish Council and the Community Gardeners for allowing us to reproduce this diary page. We hope to make this a monthly feature in the magazine but you can read all the diary entries by clicking on this box.

Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 24th July: the absence of water.

So it is that the drought continues here in sunny Sandgate with perhaps a millimetre or two of rain just to tantalise, whilst the north and west of the country are treated to torrential downpours. The grass is more yellow, and any growth is stunted and slow. Having finished the carrots and had a good go at the beetroot, the badgers have turned their attention to the courgettes and probably been eating those as we have seen very few and what is left has teeth marks all over them.

We have left a couple of bowls of water around the garden for any visiting wildlife, as the pond is fast evaporating. On Saturday one of our gardeners noticed there was something lurking in the mud and last remaining water of the deepest section. All we could ascertain is that the creature was quite large and had legs and as our knowledge of the Ukrainian language is worse than our gardeners grasp of English, we had to be satisfied with the information we had been given and just imagine what it could have been.

During the same morning, the kind elderly gentleman who gave us a lemon tree came along armed with a container filled with water and ‘special feed’ for the tree. We have now discovered his name is Abdul, and we hope he will visit again even though we did not manage to find out what the ‘secret’ ingredient was in the container.

The garden honey has literally been selling like ‘hot cakes’, and Ray the beekeeper kindly gave us two jars, so all our names were put into a lottery to win them. Just by coincidence the winners were a volunteer at Fremantle and a volunteer at Enbrook Park. There will be some of the garden’s honey on our stall at the Sandgate Sea Festival on 28th August, so put the date in your diary and come and visit us 8

Golden Arrow planters

there. We are busy sowing seeds and potting up plants in preparation for the Sea festival, which is a great fund raising event for us, so our fingers are crossed that we can manage to keep the plants alive until then, and that the sun still shines on the day.

This week our list of jobs did get completed. The fennel, lettuce and Chinese cabbage seeds got sown, and we spent a great deal of time watering which is unsurprising. Basil, chives and mint got repotted into larger pots to grow them on for the sale. In the meantime the tomatoes are looking Shop planter at Golden pretty good with many of them now reaching six feet, Valley however the object being to grow tomatoes not stems and leaves, we are hoping they will get to produce something bearing in mind that we will soon be approaching the time to be on the lookout for blight. In preparation we have removed all the leaves below the first truss which should help when we are watering. We have now stopped watering the rhubarb as it will have to fend for itself. The time to stop picking rhubarb is the end of June so that the roots can put on plenty of growth ready to produce more stems next year.

On Monday, which was a very warm day, we had an afternoon booked for some volunteers to come out from Napier Barracks to help us with some tasks in the Golden Valley. The weeds all around the planters at the shops, and in the pavement crevices were removed, the beds were thoroughly watered, and a thick mulch of compost was put down. We decided to do this now as we should have added more plants to this area, following on from the spring and early summer flowers, but it being so dry and hot we decided against that idea for now until the weather changes, as new plants would struggle to survive. At the same time, most of us were struggling to survive too in the hot sun, however we were well looked after by the shop staff, being offered drinks. The landlord of the Golden Arrow, Richard, gave us pint glasses of iced water which was most welcome.

Even a passing local took pity and bought us all a soft drink in the grocery store.

Afterwards we moved on to weed at Fremantle Park, clearing the orchard area and park edges where the brambles encroach on the planted areas. It is hard to believe that the planting there is looking good considering, with the plants still alive. We probably have to thank Harmers, the tree watering contractors for that, and the fact that Fremantle Park is usually much wetter 9

continued over

underfoot than Enbrook Park. One of the trees in the orchard is a Pomegranate and it currently has several flowers which with any luck could produce a pomegranate or two this year. It did grow one last year whilst it was living in a pot, but now that it is planted in the ground it might go berserk and make even more! The flowers are very attractive, long waxy trumpet shaped and bright red. The small family plots and the herb planters are really struggling, with most folk deciding not to plant anything just yet and to wait for the rain. In the meantime we all have plants, plants, plants all over the place in pots just sitting and waiting.

What’s next?

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Water, water and more water to keep the smaller plants alive in particular May have to repot the chard as it cannot be planted yet Prick out the lettuce seedlings Watch out for blight and remove plant affected

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Our new Tapas menu served every Friday and Saturday evening from 6:30pm-9:30pm.

Please call 07944924448 to book a table 14

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Support local

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Less than a week to go. Come along and enjoy a free afternoon of art on Saturday 6th August between 1 and 4 pm, with Folkestone Art Society at the Baptist Church, Hill Road, Folkestone CT19 6LY. Bring your own materials and do your own thing. Guidance gladly offered if wanted.

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All now available in paperback and on Kindle Set in Folkestone in the heady days of the late 60s.

They say if you can remember it, you weren't there!

Two plays. One an imaginary meeting between Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan in a Fitzrovia pub. The other is Caitlin Thomas reminiscing after the untimely death of her husband.

This is the tale of Hana, a young girl who moves from where she was born in London, to the Kent coast. They discover a wonderful area called Prince's Parade which is full of amazing animals, has a beautiful canal and is right next to the sea too! By buying this book you will be helping to protect it. All profits from it will be donated to the Save Prince's Parade campaign which aims to halt plans to develop the area into a housing estate.

Very funny, and surreal story about a man and a woman on their first date: Bolton Brady and Veda, set in London, November 2001. Bolton is forty, not into assets, has never lived with a woman and looked into the future and seen loneliness. So he decides to do something about it. He advertises in a lonely-hearts column, and receives six replies, but after experiencing one disaster after another only Veda remains between him and his sanity. As the day unfolds the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred, building to a surreal, yet poignant, conclusion.

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This walk through the history of Sandgate to the present day was first performed at the Chichester Hall a decade ago on Wednesday, 9th June. It is now available on Kindle or in paperback.

Now available on Amazon. Great evocative yarns of worldly travels.

A Loose Cannon tales of a lapsed activist

Ted Parker

The title of the book hints at how, as a ‘loose cannon’, Folkestone born Ted’s risk-taking got him into trouble on a number of occasions whilst being a considerable advantage in his working life.

As a young journalist, Reg Turnill met most of the prewar political personalities and later became the BBC's space correspondent being the only one in the press room when the historic Houston we have a problem message came from Apollo 11.

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All now available in paperback and on Kindle Janet Holben. Paperback. Folkestone Cemetery has around 15,000 graves (27,000 people) there are stories of skulduggery and innocence, murder and bravery, grandeur and squalor – but mostly there are stories of everyday people living their lives.

This account brings some of those stories back to life and will perhaps bring an understanding of how Folkestone was shaped by terrible wars, widespread disease, the unforgiving sea, the new railway and fashionable society – but mostly, by the people who lived, loved, made their livelihood and finally died here.

Westbrook House School Folkestone was a fee-paying preparatory school for boys aged 6 to 13 years. It was situated in three existing adjacent former late Victorian private houses in Shorncliffe Road with a 3-acre playing field to the rear which backed onto the main railway line.

It was the life-time ambition of Kenneth N G Foster (1903-1984) (photo c.1958) who initially bought up the first house in 1946. Under his Headmastership the school started taking both day and boarding pupils in 1947. By the 1950’s the school was thriving requiring a sizable number of characterful teaching and domestic staff.

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U 3 A Swing Band Concert & Cream Tea

Traditional Jazz and Songs by the U3A Swing Band, together with a Cream Tea Saturday 3rd September 3:00pm £10.00 in advance, tickets available from Greta Raja 01303 488091/greta.rajadhyaksha@tiscali.co.uk Mel Wrigley 01303 837146/text only 07543 629444 Raffle Bus Route 17

Friends of St Nicholas Church Newington Restoring and maintaining this historic building and its grounds Charity Number 1122652

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Us he rs no fru w it a on nd -l i n v e eg

You can now order on-line at: https://www.usherswholesale.com/box

or by telephone on: 07515 529425 We deliver to Folkestone, Cheriton, Hawkinge, Capel, Alkham Valley, Saltwood, Sandgate, Seabrook, Hythe

To advertise in three The Sentinels with circa 2300 targetted readers and growing please email me at:

david@thesentinel.org.uk for a rate card.

Thank you.

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Please support your local Farmers' Markets in 2022

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If you would like to submit an article or letter please email it to me.

I will print almost anything as long as it’s not libellous, racist or unkind.

Name must be supplied but can be withheld if requested.

Please put your articles etc in plain text or Word and images should be in .jpg, .tiff or .png.

My contact details are: Address: Clyme House, Hillside Street, Hythe, Kent CT21 5DJ Mobile: 07771 796 446; email: david@thesentinel.org.uk