Hellingly and the Return of the Wandering Blogger

It's been a while due to a lack of reliable internet connection so here's a little filling in the blanks:

Rob gave me an awesome birthday present, he drove me to Hellingly Hospital in the middle of the night so that we could catch the morning light and photograph the place before they knocked it down. It was pretty trashed, if it weren't for the long corridoors crammed with tiny, identical rooms and a few remaining flipchart notes you could be forgiven for not realising it used to be a psychiatric hospital.

So there was me dressed in a smart silk blouse in case we got caught and Rob dressed in camo with a bandanna keeping his dreads out of his eyes so we didn't. I'm not sure who was taking who on day release. We spent twenty minutes tiptoeing through the woods, running away from our own footsteps and crawling commando-style through bushes before we got in; all part of the fun and what a sight met us when we finally did. The beauty of the decay and the all-encompassing silence inside was awe-inspiring, punctuated only by aching floorboards and cracked paint underfoot.

The novel touches such as the hair salon brought a little gentle humanity to what could have been a bleak experience but to me, just to see such places and document them is enough, to literally bring a little humanity into somewhere that history would rather we forget. Anyway, it is because we are meant to forget that it is imperative that we remember.