Postcard from Norfolk - Hunstanton

Saturday saw Wells crowded with folk enjoying one last weekend of summer sunshine (in October!) before the onset of winter, heralded by the first appearance in supermarkets of Christmas advent calendars. I have no issue with Christmas stuff going on sale early, it helps families spread the cost of an expensive season but, if you are going to sell advent calendars in October, have ones with three months worth of countdown doors on them, let’s start building the excitement and winter-weight early.

So, hoping to dodge if not the crowds then at least the traffic, I headed west for a few minutes into Hunstanton. ‘Sunny Hunny’ is famed on the coast because through a quirk of geography, it faces West, meaning it’s the only resort on the coast you can enjoy the sunset from without having to turn around or something. Certainly, the sunset last night was spectacular, I enjoyed it through the bottom of a wine glass in a desperate attempt to keep cool through constant application of cold white wine from the fridge. It worked. I think. Consulting the notes of my experiment my handwriting deteriorates sharply after a few glasses for some reason.

Hunstanton was, to use a tourist board term ‘busy’. The seafront was lined with cars and the sunbathers were lined with tattoos. In part, the cars were parked on the seafront because parking there is free, but also because all the car parks were full. In the end, we parked up at Tesco (as it was free, I was expecting the parking bays to be marked out with blue and white stripes; every little helps!) and walked into town.

The grassy parks, normally picturesque triangles of green in the centre of town, were now a modernist mix of green and pinky red as those who did not have enough energy to get to the beach, or who decided they wanted to be close to the attractions of the town (chips!) chose to relax in the parks and gardens along the seafront.

In Norfolk, everyone has a dog. This is because walking is the regional pastime and its best enjoyed with a dog, not because a good walk is made better if you have to carry a small bag of dog poo with you to the nearest red bin, but because walking on your own makes you look like a serial killer, a rambler, or a rambling serial killer.

Gundogs and hounds are favourites, they come when they are called and lope in an attractive, relaxed way when on the beach. Before depositing half of it in the back of their owner’s car. I know some dog owners who have to empty the sand and seaweed out of their cars with a trowel after a week of walking their dog on the beaches here. Terriers, too, find favour and not just with women but with men who are not afraid to be seen with them, because while a terrier in an urban environment is basically a yap on a lead, out here they fly across the beach like wind-up toys, bark with alarm at something (such as a wave, a seashell or a washed up bottle) and then bolt back to their master before doing it all again. They are also excellent for sorting out anything nasty in the woodpile.

In Hunstanton though, the locals and visitors seemed to favour breeds more muscle than brains, the sort of thing that one normally sees guarding a crack den, or fighting in a gypsy encampment.

Like Wells, Hunstanton has a little train. Unlike Wells, theirs does not run on rails but rather is some sort of converted milk float affair, painted a jolly, and very bright, yellow, pulling a train of carriages that also resemble milk floats, but with passengers rattling round in the back nested of bottles. Like Wells, the owners could have benefited from adding a couple of carriages. Hunstanton has a long sea front and it's a pleasant walk but an even more pleasant ride.

The bright yellow road train is something of a local landmark, even featuring on postcards. Obviously, when something is that striking (and that yellow) the only reaction is to embrace it. Hunstanton used to have a proper railway station, it's how the hoards of tourists used to get here for their holidays before the car became the popular mode of transport and unpopular clutterer of villages that it is today and so any link to that heritage, no matter how tangential, remains popular, this explains the little train and the signal in the town car park where the station used to be.

So popular is the train that I think for the next season the should think about developing it, nothing creates a profit on a train quite like first class accommodation, although a sleeper service along the coast to Cromer might be pushing it a bit.

It was good to see the town so busy, with the traders making the most of this unexpected end of season trade. As the tourists made the most of the late sunshine, the traders made the most of the late rush and anywhere that sold coffee or chips was doing very well. The little corner bakery that I stopped in at had a coffee shop tacked onto the side, and onto the pavement, and had discovered that core requirement of all good coffee shops, the twenty first century equivalent of a teenage girl in an awkwardly formal waitress uniform (although it had those too); free wifi. The password to the network for customers was, charmingly, not handed out like some secret code or printed on a till receipt (a hangover from the bad old days of having to buy your Internet by the half hour) but chalked on the blackboard along with the specials of the day. Casual passers-by who were not customers were deterred from using it by the simple feature of it being about fourteen characters long. Genius! By the time I had entered it correctly on my third attempt, I was more than ready for my coffee.

Hunstanton caters for the bucket and spade brigade, there’s plenty of shops selling beach essentials (windbreaks and so on), and the fun-fair was in full swing, the thrill rides being enjoyed by those unaware or uncaring about the effects that salt corrosion can have on the load bearing metal struts of a roller coaster. The odd thing is that there’s no tat end and posh end, rather the two co-exist in the town with a seasidy atmosphere that is the result of more than a receding tide and vinegar splashing on hot chips. The rest of the coast may be painted a soft sedge green, but Hunstanton is pink lit by neon and funfair bulbs, and gloriously so.