Norfolk notes - Hunstanton

Hunstanton prides itself on being a proper seaside town. It ticks all the boxes; slightly seedy, near the sea, large number of pensioners and seagulls that will engage you in a life and death struggle for your chips. It also has tat shops. Rather, because of the size of Hunstanton, it has tat emporiums. There's a shop on the front that sells everything from post cards to high-vis anoraks and, of course, comes with the requisite surly staff.

Hunstanton's claim to fame is that it faces west. Hence, you can watch the sunset from the cliff tops. Now, you have to admire any town that makes a virtue out of a sunset, something that most of us can appreciate simply by turning ourselves in the right direction.

Hunstanton has tat shops, arcades, amusements and a theatre. It also has a joke an novelty shop with a sign up saying 'no photographs'. This is obviously to discourage the sort of people who can spend hours trying on funny hats, laughing themselves sick, take a photo and then bugger off without buying so much as a fake dog poo. I guess the owner has a point, it must be difficult enough trying to make a living selling novelty faeces without some joker accidentally sneezing inside your best masks and then discreetly replacing them.

Out of season, the place has a particular charm. The bright colours fade to pastels and the whole town is a lot gentler, if somewhat sadder. Luckily the ice-cream place was still open leading me to discover that all I need to lift me from melancholy is a magnum lolly.

Old Hunstanton is the neighbouring town, so close that the two actually run into one another but, thanks to that 'Old', is a world away. Old Hunstanton is so called because, I suspect, the folks there saw what Hunstanton was turning itself into and wanted to make sure that they had quite a different identity thank you very much, like a prim sister who sees her sibling becoming a star by the simple acquisition of bumps and pumped up bits added to nature, who decides to change her name because she feels just that little bit ashamed of her.

The irony is that thanks to its fantastic beach and amazing cliffs, Old Hunstanton is astonishingly hip. This, you see, is where the kite boarders and paragliders come to play. While the kite surfers rule the waves at Brancaster, here at Hunstanton it's their dry land equivalents who carve endless loops, swirls and curves in the pristine sand, or occasionally have a moment of excitement with a close encounter with a sea defence.

The paragliders were indeed out playing. One chap was just taking his first solo steps, launching from a sand dune and floating about a foot off the ground before coming gently to earth before reversing back up the dune and repeating the process.


It looked a little odd to see somebody apparently content to spend upwards of an hour basically suspended a foot off the ground, all that gear must cost a fortune and you can achieve the same effect with a step ladder. But I guess the point is that practice makes perfect and you don't want to be two hundred feet up when your kite wing folds for the first time. That's when knowing how to speed dial an ambulance as you plummet to earth comes in handy.


The other chap, who was floating high and free, was obviously having a great time and was obliging in that when he saw the camera raised he would swoop and soar, essentially strutting his stuff on thin air. It led me to wonder if these people frequent photo social networking sites, scouring and searching for images of themselves in action? I assume that they must pop up in the background of thousands of holiday photographs, the same way that commuters piling out of the train stations in London must feature in a million snapshots that tourists pour over, maybe never noticing that they are the only people in a crowd of thousands smiling.