Lessons in running a seaside town

Want to jazz up your neglected seaside town? Try Folkestone, Kent, UK, and get them to give you some of their fantastic seaside attractions for nothing like we did. We got a historic water lift, a nice big harbour railway bridge and station complete with platforms, and loads of funfair rides for a fiver. Oh, and the bloke who makes the barrier go up and down in the car park. All we need is a bit of monkey magic and our island will be the Number One Attraction in Kent, UK. Watch this space.





Greetings monkey lovers!

We’ve just returned from a very interesting, albeit faintly disturbing, fact finding mission to Folkestone, Kent, UK.

We were invited across after some Folkestone local dignitaries contacted Sharlene on Facebook about running boat trips to the island and in turn we thought it’d be a great opportunity to get some top tips about running a successful seaside town.

We'll be happy to comply but will have to move our celebrity visitors and cash onto the dark side of the island when the boats full of tourists arrive. Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when it comes – especially as we now have our own historic railway bridge to cross our own harbour. But more of that later!

Along with the railway bridge, we came back with a fantastic Victorian lift operated by water that the town council no longer wanted. It’s fabulous and one of just two working models in the world. Schmichael suggested we use it on the light side mountain running down to our fabulous white sandy beach. I think we could be onto a winner.

Sharlene quizzed them about the lift but they were adamant that they didn’t want to pay £300,000 on the upkeep of it, when there were more important things to spend taxpayers money on.

‘And what can be more important than a unique water lift that is a tourist attraction in its own right, let alone one that allows old people and people with disabilities to get from the top of a very high cliff to the seafront, in a town that’s supposed to be undergoing regeneration and that will soon have a fast link to London?’

They all went a bit quiet but one of them piped up something about the price of yellow paint rocketing in recent months and money being lost in a high interest savings account in Iceland.

After taking a leisurely stroll along the Leas, looking out at the beautiful sight of Quake Island in the distance, we took the lift down to the seafront. All of us were pretty excited about getting there because we’d seen the signs to the Pleasure Beach and Ramon had read about the fairground rides.

‘WHAT IS THAT?’ I said. (Reader, I had been pretty quiet before this outburst but before us lay what can only be described as a massive concrete floor littered with glass and dog shit and few desperate weeds leading onto the beach.)

‘Who’s stolen the fairground? Where’s the flippin’ rollercoaster and paddling pool?’ shouted Ramon, who had been going on and on about a special funfair treat all the way here, driving us all flippin’ mad.

The local dignitaries grew rather quiet again.

‘It’s a long story...’ one of them mumbled.

‘It’s being redeveloped...er...one day,’ said another.

‘Into airstrip!’ said Ramon excitedly. ‘You going get aliens and planes and helicopters and flying machines to land there. Where are they?’ Ramon screamed, searching the sky manically.

Sharlene had to handcuff Ramon after he bit a lady dignitary on her arm. Once Dr Ricardo's sleepy sleepy juice kicked in and the lady dignitary stopped bleeding, they explained that they got rid of the fairground two years ago and are still waiting for the redevelopment but guess what? We’ve bought the whole funfair for a fiver, so at least Ramon can play to his heart’s content once we get it set up on the island.

Anyway, we continued with our tour, growing a bit sadder with each step of glass crushing underneath our callused feet, along the concrete promenade towards the harbour (as Sharlene is most interested in recreating a traditional fishing village on the light side of the island.)

Suddenly a huge white building that vaguely resembled a ship suddenly cast its dark shadow over us. The massive monstrosity had blocked any view we may have had of the harbour from the beach, or indeed from any area west of the town. Me, Sharlene and Ramon reasoned it must be pretty hideous if they allowed a building like this to be built.

Imagine our surprise then when we rounded the corner and finally saw behind the white beast of a building – a charming old-fashioned harbour with colourful fishing boats bobbing in the beautiful turquoise water and the white cliffs of Dover hazily floating in the background. It even had its own station complete with harbour bridge.

However, our joy was taken away quickly as a sudden chill came over us though – the building which we understand to be a hotel, had now blocked out any sunlight and we were suddenly stumbling along the road in the semi-darkness.

Me, Sharlene and Ramon were pretty freaked out by this point, and couldn’t wait to return to the unspoilt beauty of Quake Island. Seems like we got a few bargains though including the railway bridge, tracks and station buildings. We even got the man who makes the car park barrier go up and down thrown in for nothing though he wasn't too pleased about it.

We have much work to do monkey lovers - lucky we have so much money and cheap labour!

PS: You may be interested in the story below I found in Shipping Today.

Rich fleeing tax hike feared drowned
Mystery surrounds the identifes of up to a dozen people feared drowned in the Channel last week.
The remains of a luxury yacht, registered in Jersey, were washed up in Ramsgate, Kent, last week, after gale force 10 winds were reported in the middle of the channel, near Quake Island.
John Henry, Dover Coastguard, said: “We had a signal that someone was in trouble but we couldn’t get to them in time. The boat capsized and we assume that all its occupants are drowned.
‘We have no idea who was on board the yacht. It seems the owner has taken a lot of trouble to hide his or her identity by registering its ownership under a fictional company based in Switzerland.
Detective Inspector Robert Nash refused to be drawn into recent speculation about the identiies of those on board, thought to be celebrities and rich businessmen fleeing the UK after recent tax rises.
‘Until people come forward to tell us their loved ones are missing, their identities will remain a mystery.’
www.shippingtoday/richbastardsfleeuktaxhike/newsstory/may2009

Fishing for celebs

Squealer, Dr Ricardo's favourite monkey, presumed drowned. He used to ride on Dr Ricardo's big hands in the evening when they were free from giving us special medicines. He was quite nice though he could be a bit of a snitch on occasions.
(Sharlene has just read this and wants me to point out, for identification purposes if his body washes up, that he's wearing a fawn-coloured fake fur short-sleeved jacket in this photo and that's not his tail. It belonged to Mr Fluffy Chops, Dr Ricardo's cat. He just got in the way as I took the photo. Also, that black thing around his head is a headscarf that Dr Ricardo tied around our heads when we had really bad headaches.)







Greetings monkey fans!

I bring you exciting celebrity news from Quake Island.

We have our first visitors! And not just any old run of the mill cross-channel vomit overboard the ferry visitors (more of them later) but bonafide celebrities. You’re probably thinking, ‘what do a bunch of monkeys know about celebs?’. Good question, indeed. But, you see, Dr Ricardo used to bring in his old copies of Ola! magazine and occasionally when he disappeared for weeks on end for his cycling holidays, he brought back the US and UK versions. So, my friends, we know all about your beautiful celebs and their home furnishings. And now we have our own!

My favourite is Shmichael Shmaine. He’s fun-loving like me too and thinks I’m 110 per cent better looking in real life. I know all his films and we had such fun restaging my personal fave, The Italian Job using Dr Ricardo’s battered old Volkswagen beetle which got washed up on the shore this week. We pushed it up the steepest rock here and we eventually got Shmichael in the back. He wasn’t keen. But between me and you I think he was just being modest. It was such fun! We’ve kept it up there, just so we can do reinactments whenever the fancy takes us.


We have a couple of footballers with big fat hairy thighs and not much else. Mind you their bags stuffed with loads of £50 notes will come in handy, big time. So thanks fellas, even if you didn’t seem that pleased that we fished them out. But they don’t talk that much after we shut them up with some of Dr Ricardo’s sleepy sleepy magic juice.

We picked up some old fat bloke from the other side of the island. Naughty Mr was trying to bury his suitcase stuffed full of notes in a cave. We caught him red handed. Jonathan managed to corner him in the cave and knock his glasses off, so he was a bit confused.

He kept shouting: ‘This isn’t Jersey! Where am I? Am I in Hell?’

‘No, Mr! You are on our special monkey love island. We are just off the coast of Folkestone, England, UK!’

He then sank to his knees and started sobbing. Sharlene managed to shut him up eventually with, you guessed it, Dr Ricardo’s special sleepy sleepy juice.

Finally, we’ve got this eyebrow bloke who is pretty grumpy to be honest. He has a very bad attitude considering we are his monkey hosts. Sharlene recognised him from the pages of Ola! and apparently he’s something big in musical theatre. A big fat eyebrow, if you ask me. She kept singing ‘Consider yourself at home!’ from that Charles Dickens musical extravaganza Oliver! when we fished him out of the sea. He seemed quite pleased that we rescued him but told her to shut the f*** up after he’d got his breath back. Mr Touchy, he better be careful. We have big musical loving monkeys here and now he’s feeling better, they’ve been trying to persuade him to put on a production of Oliver!. Sharlene wants to play Nancy of course. Shmichael Shmaine says he’d love to play Bill Sykes as he missed out on the part to Oliver which I don’t really understand if Oliver was playing Oliver. Flipping heck! All this confusion over a West End musical. I didn’t realise they were so complicated.

Oh and by the way, we are extremely rich now. We're up to £30 million and still counting.

Laters, monkey lovers!

The beginning

This is me. I'm 110 per cent better looking in real life. I was actually suffering a really bad headache when Dr Ricardo took the photo. He was trying to get me to say 'cheese'. I don't like cheese.


Greetings monkey friends!

It's been pointed out by some of my comrades that readers won't realise how we arrived at Quake Island. In turn, I pointed out that we don't actually have any monkey-loving readers so it's pretty futile. But as I have been voted island correspondent, I will do my best to relay facts to my imaginary readers. (Happy now Sharlene? Let's have no more complaining. If you can do better, go ahead. I didn't want to do this anyway.)

It's been two months since we arrived on the island. It's amazing none of us drowned as we swam ashore. Our fur is pretty thick and it was dragging us down big time. Some of the monkeys say it was Dr Ricardo's special medicine that helped us, though I have my doubts. I'm not so sure about Dr Ricardo anymore. He told us we were coming to Dover, England, UK, for a special holiday in a brand new hotel, all mod cons. No more shitty Brasilian living arrangements. That we deserved a big all expenses holiday for all those injections and headaches we suffer. Dr Ricardo said he was our tour guide. Shipping Today says otherwise. The last I saw of him was pitifully clinging to the side of the ship as it floundered. Shame he didn't take his own special medicine or use his big, fat hands to paddle to land.


Anyway, here's the Shipping Today story.

Capsized cargo ship full of monkeys colonise island


A cargo ship bound for a university research lab carrying two hundred monkeys floundered in the Channel last night.


Coastguards reported seeing the ship, registered in Venezuela, rocking dangerously from side to side.


As they got closer, they were stunned to see that hundreds of monkeys had escaped from their cages and were running riot on the ship.


Captain Black, said: “The monkeys were just going crazy, they were ripping stuff up and destroying the ship. The crew looked absolutely terrified. The monkeys managed to force a couple of them into the cages and threw bananas at them. They then threw the other members overboard.


“We picked them up straight away and the monkeys began hurling lifeboats at us. It was terrifying. The crew are in a bad way. They don’t speak English so we don’t really know what happened."


Captain Black said that the monkeys managed to swim to the newly created island in the Channel, Quake Island.

Folkestone District Councillor, Ben Hardy, said: "Talk about coincidences. We were in discussion with Boulogne Council about creating an island of monkeys there to bring in more tourists to the area since we lost the ferry and got that tunnel. It's going to save us a small fortune. Let's hope the monkeys like visitors."

The exact destination of the cargo ship of monkeys is shrouded in mystery. Crew members said that a silent scientist with large hands and a strange accent had been travelling with the monkeys but had gone overboard. He is feared drowned.

Speculation is growing that the monkeys were on their way to a brand new laboratory just outside London.

However, Cuntingdon Life Sciences who run the lab, were remaining tight-lipped about the ship load of monkeys as we went to press last night.


www.shippingtoday/capsizedcargoshipfullofmonkeyscoloniseisland

Welcome to Quake Island

A photo of a barbary ape. We look a little like them but are better looking and have bigger brains thanks to Dr Ricardo, who gave us special medicine every day.

Greetings monkey lovers from sunny Quake Island, the world's newest island.

For those who haven't heard of Quake Island please see the news story published in Shipping Today this year. They were the only newspaper to have picked up on the fact that a new island has been created in the English/French Channel.

We've decided to set up our own website to give visitors more information about our special community without the interference of British and French governments.

France and Britain are still quarelling about who owns the island as it's slap bang in the middle of the Channel. They planted their flags. We cut them up and ate them. We await their return with interest.

Quake’s ‘secret’ island creates diplomatic storm
An island created by Folkestone’s recent earthquakes has caused a diplomatic storm between UK and France.
The four mile by ten mile ‘secret’ island was created during the 2007 earthquake in the Dover Straits and erupted to the surface during the earthquake in March this year.
The UK and French governments had tried to keep the island secret by cordoning off a ten mile exclusion area around the island with giant sea-coloured screens with ‘keep away’ written on them in different languages.
Coastguards, fishermen and ferry operators on both sides of the channel, the busiest shipping lane in the world, were told that the area was out of bounds because it was the scene of a valuable sunken Roman vessel.
But last week a Folkestone fisherman’s vessel lost power near the no-go zone and found himself floating towards the island.
Frank Rogers, a fisherman for twenty years, said: “I managed to catch a glimpse under a damaged screen. It looked like a bunch of giant rocks sticking out of the sea but it’s pretty weird to see it after all these years of being just sea.
“I’d heard rumours about what was behind the screens but I never imagined anything like this. It’s mad. As soon as I came up close, the French navy pulled alongside in a speedboat and arrested me.”
Mr Rogers, 35, was held overnight in Calais and released the next day after signing a secrecy clause.
But he decided to speak out after news leaked that France and the UK are now both laying claim to the quake island after initially agreeing to share it, hoping it may have valuable resources.
Cllr Ronald Bloom, of Folkestone District Council, said the council were fully aware of the island’s existence back in 2007 when it rose two metres out of the ground, causing a Chinese registered freighter to flounder.
Its cargo of wood washed up along the Kent coastline days after. At the time officials blamed a storm for the spill.
He said: “It’s slap bang in the middle of the Channel so we had planned to share the island. We’ve been in talks with Boulogne councillors and had drawn up plans to create Monkey Island because everyone loves monkeys.
“Both Folkestone and Boulogne are desperate for tourists since the ferry link disappeared, and Folkestone lost the Rotunda, and soon the Leas Cliff Lift.
“Monkey Island would bring in bucket loads of tourists into both towns. We’d even been in consultation with the world’s leading monkeyologists to find out how we can rebuild monkey habitats on the island .It’ll be a sad day for the people of Folkestone if we can’t resolve it.”
Prime Minister Gordon Brown this morning accused French president Nicolas Sarkosy of going back on his word to share the island after boasting on live TV about the ‘French’ find.
On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said: “We will be measuring the length from each side of the island to see who is nearest. We understand that it is two feet nearer to UK soil.”
The 2007earthquake measured 4.2 on the Richter scale while the most recent measured 2.8. Previous earthquakes in 1382 and 1580 were two of the largest earthquakes to have affected Britain, both measuring 6.
Prof Janet Popkiss, senior seismologist, of the British Geographical Society, said she was extremely excited about the island’s appearance.
“There are probably lots of mini-islands along the Dover Straits fault line but none have ever come up this far. Who knows, maybe in a few hundred years, we may have dozens of island erupting through the waves all the way to France.”

www.shippingtoday/shhhh...newchannelislandsecret/2009