east wittering by katharine eastman

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solo piano - and I think this is another good one - an opinion clearly not shared by anyone else (so far zero downloads of any album made since my return from Sussex) - but then of course that is the price of being a misunderstood genius - ie most of the misunderstanding is my own - and I admit that the "genius" bit might be a bit of a misunderstanding too.
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One of my favourite places we went to on our Sussex jaunt was East Wittering. When you look at the map of the Manhood Peninsula (that really is its name) there is West Wittering on the left, East Wittering in the middle, and Selsey on the right. Something like that.

And apologies for going a bit Hyacinth Bucket on you, but the "tone" of the places goes downhill from left to right - ie West Wittering is very posh and all private and you actually have to book to drive into the place or something, Selsey is like an army camp on the sea, and in the middle is lovely East Wittering - it's a bit like if Woolston was right on the beach at Weston Shore - and it is my favourite place ever. (One of them.)

West Wittering is where Keith Richards and Nicholas Lyndhurst and Michael Ball and Kate Winslet etc live. It's one of those places where a beach hut costs about a million pounds. On the other hand, East Wittering is where I would have to live - it's the sort of place where Mark E Smith might've chosen to live if he'd ever decided to retire to the south coast. And I think he'd've been very happy there. I'd be too.

As we drove down down thru Chichester (another place where people are delightful in person but incredibly rude behind the wheel while yr trying to work out how their stupid complex roundabouts work) and down the Manhood Peninusla there were signs saying that West Wittering was "closed". It's privately owned, I think, and the owner can do stuff like that apparently.

It was a beautiful hot day. And anyway we were going to East Wittering - honest and messy and the easiest parking of any seaside town in England - basically absolutely anywhere, and for absolutely nothing. Everyone was amazingly friendly - but this isn't the place for yet another predictable sermon about how the less rich people are the nicer they are - though I probably will return to the subject soon when I talk about our amusingly grim experience at the mega-posh Duke Of Cumberland pub/restaurant.

Well they could stop us from driving into West Wittering. But they couldn't stop us walking along the beach from East W to West W, and that is what we did and it was utterly beautiful - and astonishingly quiet - hardly anyone about on a perfect day on such a huge sandy beach - there's pebbles on the beach in East W (ie in photo), but they give way to sand as you head westwards - and it's the sand that Keef and Kate etc are paying for, I guess.

Back at East W we had lunch at the very friendly Shore Inn, sitting outside among the wild dogs and their lovely owners, and then giant banoffee pie in the hilarious and brilliant cafe a bit further from the beach.

East Wittering is only let down by its virtual total lack of charity shops. Two - one of them closed. But that's two more than Keef and Kate have access to, and that makes them the losers.
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(recorded this morning, photo East Wittering, June 2021, by Vanessa Oliver)
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