isleone

In the five years I’ve been anonymously chronicling the sordid comings and goings on our septic isle, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked ‘Who is Eastcliff Richard?’ In fact it happened to me again last night.

It’s an interesting existential question, and one that my celeb psychoanalyst Dr Fraudstein has spent a large amount of my money trying to answer for the best part of a decade.

When I first started my now infamous blog in 2006, the Thanet Times ran the headline ‘Cyber nerd has pop at isle in posion (sic) blog entry’, and urged its readers to grass me up by publishing a, er, ‘grass ‘im up’ hotline number. It’s not surprising that I’m a little shy. I’ve had the entire gamut of Fannit insults hurled at me from ‘see you next Tuesday” to ‘paedo’ for expressing crazy, DFL political views (such as a dislike of homophobia and xenophobia) that didn’t tally with what passes for mainstream thinking in these parts. One Tory councillor even went to the extraordinary lengths of descrambling my disguised voice from a BBC Radio Kent interview and circulating pictures he’d culled from the internet asking ‘Is this him?’

Latterly, though, I’ve become a pillock of the local community, and enjoy moaning about ‘chav scum’, ‘scroats’, ‘morons’ and ‘the Labour Party’ like all good Thanetians. Why, only last week I received an email from a very senior Tory councillor saying he ‘enjoys’ reading my blog. Leaving me to ponder where it had all gone wrong.

So I suppose it’s only natural that I’ve now been approached by those excellent chaps who are erecting blue plaques to Ramsgate celebrities like John Le Measurier with a view to having one put on the facade of my cliff top mansion.

Although, on second thoughts, assuming they’re not planning to plonk it there posthumously, I’m not sure if I’m quite ready to advertise ‘Eastcliff Richard lives here’ on the front of my seaside pile!