Man alive we've had a lot of press over the past couple of days (we as in Folkestone, rather than me personally), it's been great. The weekend of Triennial events itself was good and there was a real buzz about the town. I'm not entirely sure that it'll last beyond the weekend though, once the street entertainers are gone I don't know how many extra tourists will be drawn in by the new art works, but a few I hope. Plus a lot of people would have seen the town on a good day in a good light and it might make one or two of them think about coming down here and starting something. All of the journalists seem to have had the same idea, and run with the same cliches just like this from the Guardian:
Poor Folkestone. A seaside town with so very few visitors, and a port with no great ships, it is as ghostly a place as I've ever visited, the melancholy only made the more piercing by the fact that it was once the most glorious holiday destination in all England.
Apparently the BBC took this same tack when they featured us on the actual BBC1 Ten O'Clock News on Friday, "oh look how poor and deprived it is". I didn't see it myself but a friend said he didn't even recognise the town they showed, so much had the focused on the run down parts. As I was walking around on Saturday, every part of the town gleaming in the sun I was thinking just how much of an effort someone would have to go to to make the town look bad. Everyone's had a go though. This would be a great hackwatch1 feature in private-eye.co.uk2, if anyone cared.
The Sun says today3 that one of the Tracey Emin pieces was vandalised within hours of being installed, not sure how true this is. Here's one of the pieces:
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Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe in Kent. Married + father to 2, I am a full-stack web engineer, and I do javascript / nodejs, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubbing, running, eating, home-automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, + TIME TRAVEL.
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