Chatham for fun

You went to Chatham for FUN! I don’t believe it…

‘Other John’, the guitarist in Rhine River Three, bought himself a house there in 1982 – because it cost £11,000! One-up, one-down… He did concrete floors with his dad in the Kent area, so it MADE SENSE (sort of…). He was the first person I knew who bought a house! It was on an exaggeratedly sloping road, so that each house started on a different level to the last one. (Last I heard – when our record was re-released in 2007 – John was in Northampton…)

I went to stay in Chatham with him – just the one time! Christ! There was a huge Tesco’s with a ‘restaurant’ – which (privileged upbringing that I’d had) I’d never experienced before. Fish and chips wasn’t very good at all… We went to that naval memorial on the hill – and I saw it again in Last Orders (2001). I used to think the guys in that film were OLD, but I’m much worse than them…

I’ve seen that quarter-mile-long building on (I seem to remember), um, Michael Portillo’s railway-journey thingie…