election day

It's election day in Clacton, and I was there.  Not voting, since we are firmly part of Harwich and North Essex, but talking about the woodland charity to a Probus group at the Clacton Golf Club.  I saw three election posters on my way there, all for Douglas Carswell, and the helpful man from the office who showed me the way to where the group was meeting and helped me unload my car through a handy back door short cut told me that on Monday there had been hoards of politicians, and the car park had been full of outside broadcasting vans.

Poor Clacton, it gets a bad rap.  Journalists who would never normally think of visiting Clacton for a day at the seaside have descended on it in recent weeks before returning to London to write their articles on how awful Clacton is.  Old people trying not to die in a place trying not to die, according to Matthew Parris (though at least he conceded they were friendly).  Boris Johnson couldn't remember the name of the Conservative candidate, a sign of how far from the centre of things Clacton is, despite being barely seventy miles from London.  Clacton didn't help its own case when complaints that a Banksy artwork that appeared overnight was racist led to the council cleaning it away.  Shame, it would have been worth a bit and they could have sold it like that enterprising boys' club in the west country did, if they didn't want to keep it, though actually it was not at all racist, more of a satire on racism.  Still, Banksy worshippers are not going to making a pilgrimage to Clacton now.

Yes, the inhabitants of Clacton-on-Sea are on average older than the national average, the workforce participation rate is lower and so is the level of skills.  Yes, Jaywick is poor and with social problems that put it in the top ten deprived areas in the country, if not top.  Incidentally, Jaywick lies to the west of Clacton and not the east, as stated by a blogger in the London Review of Books.  Yes, there are some rough streets behind the sea front, where stabbings happen oftener than they do in most other places.  And yes, the average customer in the Clacton Tesco Extra is fatter than in the Colchester Highwoods branch.

But the rough end of Clacton and Jaywick are only one part of the parliamentary constituency.  It also includes Frinton-on-Sea, a town so proper that the proposed opening of a Wetherspoons was seen as a local emergency, along with a plan to convert one of the tea rooms to a fish and chip shop which met equally fierce opposition, and Saint Osyth, which regularly bobs up in articles on desirable yet relatively affordable places to live, as well as assorted quiet and inoffensive rural villages.  It's not all deprivation, hoodies, and displaced cockneys yearning for a return to the 1950s.

I've done quite a few talks to clubs and societies around the Clacton area over the years, and have never met anything but a kindly and warm response.  Today's group gave me lunch, which was a step up from the usual cup of tea and a biscuit.  The golf club is a links course, and the morning shone brilliant with the reflected light from the sea, while over lunch talk carefully avoided politics, other than that my immediate neighbour was due to do a stint later manning the polls, but included somebody's recent holiday in the Scottish Highlands, and where locally one could buy saffron.  Not exactly a room full of Alf Garnetts.

My garage is in Little Clacton, and I'm perfectly happy with them.  Their charges are very reasonable, and the car they sold to me and now maintain has been reliable.  I use the Clacton Garden Centre, which has friendly staff and stocks a useful range of tools, chemicals and the stuff you need for hands-on, practical gardening.  It is just up the road from the recycling centre, where again the staff are cheerful.  I have been to a perfectly pleasant concert in a church in Frinton, and enjoyed numerous walks along the seafront without mishap.  So don't be too hard on Clacton.  It may well vote in the UK's first elected UKIP MP, and is left standing in the trendy weekend escape from London stakes by north Norfolk and Whitstable, but it's OK.