Skuds’ Sister’s Brother

I lived in Basildon for the first 18 years of my life. It looks like the place has taken a turn for the worse since then, judging by this website (as found by Mike Ion). I’ve got issues with some of our local Tories, but almost without exception they are better than this one.

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Today we either had an early Christmas dinner or a day-late Thanksgiving dinner. We went up to Essex to visit my sister for lunch and she was kind enough to cook turkey.
I like turkey, but we never have it at home. For Christmas we usually have beef and pork.
The afternoon was a bit […]

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As an Essex boy, from deepest South-East Essex, I was quite pleased to start reading a book called Starter for 10 and find that the main protagonist’s home town was Southend-on-Sea. The book is set in the early 80’s - around the same sort of time I used to spend a lot of time […]

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How good of Jams to point out yet another claim to fame for the county of my birth… it deserves a round of applause. Or at least a dose of the clap.

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With all the to-ing and fro-ing to visit poorly relatives recently it made a change to go down to visit all the healthy ones tonight. My mother and sister both belong to a painting club and tonight they were having an exhibition in Southend to which we were invited.
The place was even more packed […]

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We went up to Essex today - not actually to my old home in Basildon but to Southend, a little way down the road.
(Southend. Home of the famous Kursaal, where Dr. Feelgood were filmed playing live in 1975, available on a superb DVD called Going Back Home.)
We were there for my niece’s birthday party, which […]

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Not in Crawley, but in the place I grew up - Basildon.  The UAF are out leafletting on Saturday and Sunday this weekend.
There are, apparently, three or four wards where the BNP had 20% of the vote in previous elections so they need all the help they can get.  Even though I left the place […]

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Today was the day we paid our visit to my family in Essex. We may have picked the worst day of the year to do this: the most direct route is via the M25 and the Dartford Crossing, which means we caught the queues for the A2 (people going to Bluewater) and the queues for […]

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Jayne and I both took this week off work to spend some time with the children, and as Charlie goes back to school tomorrow, today was our last trip out.
Having visited places in West Sussex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire, today I decided to show the family the sights of Essex.
They have […]

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Today we all went off to Essex to visit my family.
Well I say “we all”, but Chrystal is away all weekend at an army cadet camp shooting at targets and going for 6:00am runs. And Charlie was spending the day with his real dad, so actually it was just three of us […]

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