The last thing I expected to see today was a Russian submarine

It’s a short week because of Easter Monday, so everything is getting compressed into four days and we’re all extremely busy.

The sales team is at half strength following re-organisation, redundancies and a round of resignations from people who were left too grumpy to work by the whole process.

I’ve got three or four big projects on the go and one of our major rivals for entertainment listings has ceased trading, so we are very busy talking to their former customers to try to bring them on board.

One of them is the Kent Messenger Group. I had a meeting with them a couple of weeks ago, gave them a proposal and they wanted a follow-up meeting at their offices to discuss further. In the morning, I had a 10am meeting with a new smart-phone app company at the Hilton in Paddington, so after that I took the Circle Line round to St Pancras to catch a train into Kent.

There are now lots of trains down into Kent from St Pancras. The high-speed link they put in for the Eurostar service and the new lines to take people to the Olympics at Stratford have really opened it up. You can get a slow train from Victoria or London Bridge or go from St Pancras and catch one of the high-speed Javelin services which go down to Faversham and Dover.

I had to go to KMG’s Medway office and that’s a part of the England I don’t know very well. Basically there are a number of towns clustered around the Medway estuary - Rochester, Gillingham, Chatham and Strood (I may have missed one out) - and they are known, unimaginatively, as the Medway towns.

The nearest station to the office was Strood and the offices looked to be about a mile away. I got to the station at 1pm for a 1.30pm meeting, so I might have walked, but there was a taxi outside (with no driver), it was blowing a freezing wind and there were flurries of snow.

I asked the chap at the kiosk if you had to call for a taxi and he said no, the one outside would take me; the driver had just popped to the toilet (impressive knowledge!). I bought a Twix from him as a reward as I’d not had time for lunch and waited for the taxi driver. It was clearly a no 2 as he took a good 10 minutes to arrive and he was a bit of an odd bod, nice bloke, very chatty but a bit odd. He told me his taxi would only be a few minutes quicker than walking because I could have cut down a road that was buses-only where he would have to go all the way round. The Kent Messenger office, like so many newspaper offices these days, is not in the centre of town, but on an industrial estate on the edge of Strood and (according to the taxi driver, who was born and inbred in the area) it was on reclaimed land that had been bog when he was a young lad. He told me he liked the cold weather because you didn’t get sweaty when you walked, he didn’t like rain or snow because it got on his glasses, I learned he was a ‘Gills’ fan, I learned about the deregulation of taxis by Gillingham district council, I was offered a critique on the quality of traffic information by local radio stations (BBC was the best, but it kept saying Chatham high street was closed due to roadworks and it wasn’t) and I was promised that when we got to the KM offices I’d be able to see the DJ from KMFM through the window.

That’s a lot to get through in a 10-minute taxi ride and I feared at one stage that he wasn’t going to let me out of the cab, so keen was he to have someone to talk to. I was very disappointed, when we got there, that we couldn’t see the DJ through the window (he’d driven a short distance past the entrance door to pull up alongside the DJ window). The driver was mortified - they hadn’t cleaned the windows, you normally could see the DJ and he tuned in the radio to check that it was on air. When he turned it on, there was a BBC Kent traffic report, so I had to listen to that because that was the one he was telling me about, but they didn’t mention Chatham high street, and then he tuned to KMFM and yes it was on air.

The last part of our conversation was conducted through the open door with snow blowing around as I made a tactical withdrawal from the cab.

My meeting went quite well and one of the people I saw was their IT manager, a chap called David Butler, who worked with me at Northcliffe Electronic Publishing some 15 years ago. He’d been made redundant by Northcliffe, but had got a job with Kent Messenger soon afterwards. He’d not really changed much.

I had time for a brisk walk back to the station and I was staggered to see (as I came across a view of the estuary, that there was a large submarine moored there, possibly beached because it had a distinct list to one side. It was the last thing I’d expected to see that day and I took a couple of pictures on my phone.

This internet site: http://www.medwaylines.com/blackwidowsubmarine.htm tells you all about it and also has some better pictures. It’s a former Russian hunter-killer class sub (diesel powered) that had been moored in the Thames, then in Folkestone and now on the Medway. It had been intended as a tourist attraction, but it was definitely not attractive in its current state.