“So the bomb ship is over that way, is it?” asks 81-year-old Margate resident Pat Smith, squinting out towards the Dover Strait. All we can see, from the plastic-paned windows of our promenade shelter, is the rain slicing sideways into choppy grey waves. 

But somewhere out there in the squall bobs the Ruby, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship carrying twenty thousand tonnes of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate fertiliser that set off from Russia in July. 

This is seven times the quantity of the same substance, I tell Pat, that wreaked havoc in Beirut in the summer of 2020, when a major explosion in the city’s port caused at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and $15 billion in property damage, as well as leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. 

She just nods. “Thing is, love, we have explosions all the time here in Kent.” She reminds me that “they keep finding bombs from the war in the sea here anyway”. Only two months ago a huge plume of brine was sent skywards when bomb disposal experts detonated an old mine which fishermen found just up the coast at Herne Bay.