A VIVID MEMORY...

Here`s a picture I took from the end of Hythe pier, looking back to towards the village where I spent my boyhood.   

The building with the pointy windows is my old primary school, which I attended for about six years before being shunted off to the secondary school at Hardley.   That was all of 70 years ago but I still bear the scars of what passed for my `formal education.`

I suppose my most vivid memory of Hythe Pier was from 2003. In those days I had a season ticket to watch Southampton Football Club and I always parked the car in Hythe, took the ferry across to Southampton Town Quay, met up with friends and walked to St. Mary`s Stadium.  On 1st November, 2003, we watched the Saints lose 2-0 to Manchester City. That was depressing enough but just after I had walked back along the pier on my way home, a 700-tonne dredger ploughed into the pier causing £300,000 worth of damage and putting the pier out of action for some weeks.  Mercifully, no-one had been injured as a result although the railway tracks still look a bit wonky.

The dredger captain, who was found to have been two and a half times over the drink-drive limit, was jailed for eight months, but in 2011 he was found dead having fallen into a pond near his Portsmouth home, all of which made the 2-0 home defeat pale into insignificance,