My plan for the Turner Contemporary

I learnt a horrible new word during the holidays: Twixmas. It refers to the 27-30 December period and has its roots in the word ‘betwixt’, although why anyone would refer to those dates as ‘betwixt’ Christmas and New Year rather than ‘between’ is beyond me. Caroline, who now works in travel, introduced me to it and the reason it came up is that she booked an Airbnb in Margate for precisely those dates. This was to be our Twixmas holiday. Not ideal because there were QPR games on the 27th and the 30th, one of them in Bristol, but by criss-crossing the country in our VW seven-seater I made it work.

First the good news. Margate is actually quite nice. I’ve been to quite a few seaside towns in the course of following QPR this season — Scarborough, Blackpool, Whitby — and Margate is up there with the best. Admittedly, that’s a low bar, but you definitely get the impression that this is a resort on the up. Alongside the sleazy amusement arcades on the seafront, there were lots of cute micropubs and enticing cafés and restaurants. Peering through the window of the Laughing Barrel, I initially thought it must be a homeless shelter but then realised these were local artists, of which there are many hereabouts. Our Airbnb had been a guest house called the Happy Dolphin and still bore the sign above the front door, yet in all other respects had been thoroughly gentrified.

What irked me was that the gallery took it upon itself to wag its finger in the face of its visitors

But the institution that often gets the credit for Margate’s regeneration — the Turner Contemporary, which opened in 2011 — was a disappointment. It’s supposedly built on the site of the Georgian boarding house that J.M.W. Turner used to stay at on his many visits to the town and it looks out over the bay where, according to the painter, the sky was ‘the loveliest in all Europe’.