THE 52nd barge match takes places off Southend on Sunday, starting at 11am. I mention this for a start to this column to make clear that I do sometimes look ahead, while mostly in these offerings I am looking back.

A recent writer to this paper’s letters pages – which I always read and enjoy whether or not I agree with the content – mentioned that I seem to live much in the past. Correct. I am ancient, so there’s far, far more to look back on than what may lie ahead.

This is notamorbid explanation. Far from it.

Changes and advances and improvements in my lifetime, as one born in Southend, and resident here, apart from a few brief breaks away as an evacuee or with work commitment elsewhere, have been extensive.

Some, of course, have been very much for the better. Not many of them in my own view, though.

What has movedme to write this day is something that has survived changing times and tastes – the upcoming Southend barge match.

It’s bank holiday weekend, so in the Pierhead’s Royal Pavilion, from ten in the morning until six in the evening – and free of charge – there will be sailing barge exhibits.

I might convince myself to go along the Pier, though each time I call on the Old Lady I am saddened, angry – no, absolutely furious – at the way she has been left to deteriorate and the utterly appalling state she is in now.

So I will probably watch the barges from the shore, as I did last weekend. Half a dozen or so appeared in the Thames and I found myself drifting back inmy memories to a time long-ago.

Anyone remember the old seafront gasworks, where now there is a new hotel and restaurant? Anyone recall there was a high bridge from the vast works yard, crossing the seafront road and reaching out quite a distance across the foreshore?

In my childhood, with lots of pals from our homes close to those works, we would sit on the sands watching convoys of little coal or coke-laden trucks crossing that bridge, their contents lifted by crane, then lowered into the yawning holds of Thames barges.

Those grand old vessels, so low in the water, carried their cargoes to distant destinations.

They were crewed, usually, by just one man and one boy. The barges and those aboard braved heavy and challenging seas and uncertain weather conditions.

For years, they regularly came and went, and I and my pals watched them and tried to guess where theymight be heading as they sailed into the distance.

All so long ago,of course. The gasworks and its road-spanning bridge long ago disappeared.

Thankfully, belowwhere that structure used to be, high above the roadway, there remain two solid – well, reinforced concrete – reminders.

One bears a worn plaque which fewmay recall or, now, never knew to be there. It has this inscription: “County Borough of Southend-on-Sea. On the threat of invasion by the German forces in 1940, 1,804 of these concrete blocks were constructed on this sea front as part of the coastal defences.”

Some nowmay not care in the least. All in the past. Some of us ancients do care, though. And still remember.