Our industrial heritage

Think of industry, and what do you think of?  It probably depends upon your age, your education and your nationality.  And possibly your politics.

Those lucky enough to have studied the industrial revolution to the level requiring a day trip to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum will not only have learned about steam engines and the incline plane, but also, if their school trip was anything like mine, learned the point at which warm fish-paste sandwiches cause the ice-cream container you use as a sandwich box to pop!, the number of Skips that you can dissolve on your tongue at any one time and that the energy given off by a coach-load of Skip-crazed adolescents in close confinement could, if used for good, power a small city for months, but will also know that long before apps were invented, children were playing games that tested their skills and reflexes.  Games like ‘dodge the spinning Jenny’ and ‘untangle the loom’.

This is big industry.  The industrial revolution put paid to cottage industry, which was a stupid idea that involved skilled craftsmen turning out bespoke products for individuals.  In the twenty first century we laugh at such an idea, unless you can afford it, in which case you pay two grand for a chair that’s really comfy, and even if we can’t we watch television programmes about those that can.

Cake.  Suit.  Furniture.  Just three things that are better made by a craftsman to your requirements than in a factory to the design of a committee.

Industry means production lines.  It used to be, back in the days when History was in black and white, that production lines were men with facial hair making cars that looked like prams with steam engines attached to them.  Then came the seventies, when black and white bypassed sepia altogether and moved on to shades of brown, mostly nylon overalls, and mostly worn by men standing in car parks voting not to make cars.  Fast forward a few years and the production lines still feature cars, but the brown clad workers have now been replaced by yellow-armed robots.  Bolted to the floor in case of an uprising, or strike.

Coming right up to date, industry involves a person in a production line, this time dressed in white, making an iPhone.

For me, industry looks like a workshop.  Alexi Sayle rightly said that “Anyone who uses the word workshop outside of light engineering is a twat”.  He is, of course, right.  I don’t care how ‘hard’ ‘work’ your ‘theatre’ is, unless you are operating a lathe, then you are not ‘workshopping’ your ‘bold’ all-male dramatisation of The Diary of Anne Frank, you are faffing around in a room over a pub.

Workshops are where things get done.  I am sure NASA needed all those big buildings and an assembly line to get the Space Shuttle flying, but if it had been made by a small company based on Solihull employing seven blokes who smelled of Swarfega and fried eggs from Monday to Thurdsay and Swarfega and beer on Friday, the USA would still have a space programme, and they would have made a Space Shuttle Bi-Plane by now.

Practical engineering is, or was, the heart and soul of this country.  I think nothing epitomises the seriousness of the British quite like the ability to take a problem, any problem, and find a solution that involves punching and twisting metal.

I love small engineering companies.  The ones that make bolts, but the best bolts in the world.  The best bolts in the world can be the bolts that hold together your baby’s cot, or your bookcases, or your birdtable.

Or they can be extremis bolts.  Bolts that go on helicopter winches designed to dangle over stormy seas, bolts that attach weapons to RAF jets, that attach aid to parachutes being slung out of the back of RAF jets.

My view of British industry?

British industry doesn’t wear a face mask and a CSI white overall and work in a clean room.  It wears an overall that probably bears a Swarfega stain or two, and makes products that may be ‘simple’ but which never, ever, ever, let you down.

Que the music...and the inevitable pop-up radio station

It used to be that if you wanted to set up your own radio station, far from the corrosive influence of The Man, so that you could play the records that you wanted to play, you needed a ship floating in international waters and a bloody big transmitter mast.  This got you beyond the reach of broadcast licensing (and, some might say, the reach of any law enforcement agencies that might want to take a close look at the activities of the crew of ‘The Singing Nonce’).  Obviously, when the BBC was looking to crew its, appropriately as we now know, youth orientated radio, it took DJs from the pirate stations, a sort of reverse press-ganging.

Radio 1 torpedoed Caroline and others, and the next shift in pirate radio was when even commercial radio refused to play endless twelve inch acid house mixes.  Pirate stations popped up, playing music and telling people what fields they may want to gather in that weekend to either dance in, or make crop circles in, or both.  This still required you to tune in to the crackly end of the dial.

Then came the podcast and the true meaning of pirate radio was revealed.  It certainly wasn’t to allow you to listen to music that nobody else was listening to, that had been happening for years thanks to C30, C60 and C90 (Go!) cassette tapes circulated in schools, you know, the things that were supposed to kill the music industry instead of, as they actually did, generate interest in bands and allow people to share there enthusiams.

This, and the fanzine, was analogue social media.

What the podcast does is allow a radio show to be produced without any of that tedious music to prevent the presenter stoking their ego by talking about their favourite subject for thirty minutes.  Podcasts are now like the magazine shelves of WH Smiths, there is a podcast for every hobby and pastime, no matter how obscure.  There are probably podcasts about how to knit presentational jackets for wine bottles.  If there isn’t there bloody well should be.

And that should have been it for the pirate radio station.  Killed off by being legalised and available everywhere.

However.

Small, temporary stations are starting to become something of a vogue once again.  In the village every Easter, the local Christians run a radio station for a couple of weeks, and jolly good fun it is too.  Who gives a flying frick what the traffic is like over some bridge many miles away, I want an update on what the queue is like a) at the crossroads and b) at the check-out at Threshers, both of which are visible from the front of the café the Christians broadcast from.

But, say the hipsters, how can we make this even cooler?  I know, let’s appropriate the idea, put the word ‘pop-up’ in front of it, and pass off the idea as our own.

Hence, festivals now come with their own pop-up radio stations.  Nothing new there, but the twist is that these ones are being run by national broadcasters.  For instance, Radio 2 and their recent ‘Eurovision’ pop-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think pop-ups are a great idea.  Pop-ups make things more fun, ‘book’ and ‘penis’ are just two of the tings that can be improved by having the words ‘pop-up’ in front of them.  But radio station?

Having said that, there’s a great deal of charm in something that is only in existence for a short time and is dedicated to one particular subject, and if it’s the only way we get to hear what is, essentially, the Eurovision B side, then it’s probably of some cultural significance.  Probably.

But is it as good as being slipped a cassette in the playground, or as thrilling as happening upon a new tune emerging from crackly static at the top of the dial?

All about ocd...no, that should be OCD, get it RIGHT!

A lot of work is taking place to de-stigmatise mental illness.

This work is taking place on two fronts.

The first is to get people to recognise that mental illness is a real thing and just because the person suffering from this sort of illness doesn’t require one of those fucking mobility scooters to terrorise people with in shopping malls because their Greggs-related-condition makes walking difficult, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

The second front is to educate people about mental illness, essentially, not all people with mental illness are nutters, some are escapologists who wear straightjackets as part of their acts, but most people who suffer from mental illness genuinely need help.  Of course, there are a few people who are just fucking nutters.  Symptoms include reading the Daily Mail and being able to hold forthright views on immigration.  There is no cure.

Alistair Campbell tweets a lot about mental health.  Of course, as a megalomaniac who helped start a war he’s probably an expert and is part of a support network for people who, in another age, would have had an undersea volcano base and a taste for world domination, instead of just a Twitter account, so probably knows whereof he speaks.

There are many flavours of mental illness but by far my favourite is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  Or should that be Obsessive, Compulsive Disorder?  Damn!  I would Google it but have had my allocated five minutes of internet time today before the Voices started.

The thing about OCD is this, it’s bollocks.

It is.

It really is.

It really, really is.

OCD is such bollocks that the cure for ODC should be a bloke who grabs the person suffering from OCD by the lapels of their no doubt meticulously ironed shirt and bellows ‘FUCKING PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!’.  I reckon even the bastards at NICE would fund that.

Oh, and please don’t start in about the benefits of OCD.  So, you have a potential flatmate who tells you that they are so clean that they are practically OCD?  Best case scenario, they quietly run a vacuum cleaner over you while you sleep.  Worst case – they are suddenly sole tenant in a flat that is forensically clean.

In my five minutes of Googling, I learned that OCD is all about control and ritual.  Apparently, people who suffer from OCD do things (rituals) to prevent terrible things from happening.

So here’s my question…why is it only preventative?  Why not positive?  Why doesn’t a ritual result in a lottery win?

And here’s the litmus test.  OK.  You have mild OCD.  So does your pilot.  Before boarding a flight, one of you doesn’t do your ritual.  Does the ‘plane crash?

NO!  Of course it fucking doesn’t!  A 747 is not going to be kept aloft because you sang ‘fly me to the moon’ under your breath whilst checking your baggage.

Obviously, we need to take mental health seriously.  Even OCD.  And I do.  Hence…the app!

Because ODC is fucking ridiculous.  Rituals which are, essentially, a profoundly exaggerated sense of self importance, are (serious face) tragic when they affect and afflict the lives of others but are (more serious face) bloody debilitating on a day-to-day basis.

So here’s my idea for an app.

OCD swap.

(Ooh, genius idea, we could get it fronted by Noel, the last 70’s DJ standing!)

OCD sufferers swap rituals with each other.  So, have to say ‘monkey’ 500 times whilst spinning counter clockwise otherwise that reactor you’re responsible for will go tits up…but it’s your daughter’s wedding and you don’t have the fucking time?  No problem, GingerMum1974 has to have her first sip of tea of the day from a mug with the handle turned left.

OCD swap puts NukeDad and GingerMum in touch with one another, he does her ritual, presses ‘done’, she does his, presses ‘done’ and they are both good to go for the day.

And the best bit…neither actually does the other’s ritual!

Why?  Because people with OCD know it’s fucking mental.  But can’t stop it.  But are buggered if they will let it blight other’s lives.

Oh, and checking Facebook every 30 minutes doesn’t make you OCD.  It makes you needy.

Postcard from Norfolk - Llama drama

Ever wondered why there were so many churches on the North Norfolk Coast?  Apparently, it’s all to do with an ostentatious display of wealth.  Before expensive divorces and second wives, wealthy businessmen used to spend their money endowing churches.  This achieved the triple whammy of showing everyone how successful you were, ensuring your name is remembered for posterity by having a family pew (remembered for posterior?) or a stained glass window and, of course, getting on the Fast track to heaven.

Wool, it would appear, used to be big business and the North Norfolk coast is ideally suited to tourism, and stupid white things who basically just stand around all day chewing, well, anything.  It was also easier to get your goods to Europe than it was London, thanks to conveniently located sea.

Apparently, people also got rich by piracy, smuggling and subjugating the agricultural workforce, but sheep make for a better subject for a picture in a window.

Today if you want to get rich on North Norfolk you, as far as I can determine, paint your food stall or café that blue/green sedge colour that everyone round here is nuts for, write the word ‘jus’ after every dish on your menu, and charge a fortune.  By the way, ‘locally sourced’ does not, as far as I am aware, mean obtained at the big Tesco in Hunstanton.

But there is still wool here.  Not so much for the sheep, who are pastured in the salt marshes with a view to becoming essentially self-seasoning main courses, but from the llamas.  OK, so there are only half a dozen of them in a field in Wells, but they do make a sight.

Christ alone knows what they make of Wells.  You don’t get much more sea-level than North Norfolk and for an animal used to living at altitude, like athletes in training or chalet maids, it must be something of a surprise to breath the fragrant air of the coast.  Not that they seem to mind.  In fact they don’t seem to mind anything.  Not even people taking pictures of them.

I’m not a huge fan of wildlife photography.  I can barely get friends or family to sit still long enough to take a photograph, and have no patience, so my snapshots of wildlife essentially consists of animals wandering away disinterestedly (although, oddly, one of my photographs was once used in a book about animals, so it just goes to show there’s a market for everything, even pictures of shy pigs).

That said, I enjoy the llamas of Wells-next-the-Sea.  Watching their owner (or a really, really confident looking rustler) walking them along the pavement is a joy to behold.  And it’s lovely to see an elegant creature up close, and downwind.

Postcard from Norfolk - Daffy and Dickie

  

An association is rather a good thing for a public house.  Fame and infamy can equally add character to a pub and, pubs being pubs and human nature being human nature, any pub of a decent age will be more likely to be infamous than famous.  Pubs, you see, even respectable ones with coffee machines and a breakfast menu, are less likely to be the place where a National Treasure hung her bonnet when writing the sort of fiction that is adapted for Sunday night viewing, and more likely to be the place where a laudanum soaked poet wrote his last before drinking himself into an early grave.  Alternatively, they were frequented by a bloke with the charming name of ‘Mad’, ‘Chopper’, or ‘The Lathe’, once to be avoided and now on a Gangland Walks trail.  Many pubs have Blue Plaques, more still have stained carpets.

Indeed, companies exist that can create character in a pub for you.  They scavenge skips (or to give them their full title rural action houses) and can transform a former car showroom into Ye Olde Something Or Other with the addition of only a few antique agricultural implements and a pine-effect condom dispenser.

However, it takes more than a few antique cigerette or Fry’s chocolate machines converted to dispense vape-sticks and pistachios to give a pub atmosphere, especially since the smoking ban came in.  What a pub really needs to do is a holistic historic makeover, setting up web-sites that will convince you that your local boozer has that most attractive of qualities, a pool table (just kidding, I mean A Past).

I used to drink in a pub that was featured on Crimewatch.  Everyone suspected that the landlord had done his wife in because a) she disappeared and b) the cellar acquired a new concrete floor.  The thing is, he kept a good pint.

Tricky moral decision, but when asked if one wanted a quick one ‘up the murderer’s?’, the answer was usually ‘yes’.  In his defence, I don’t think he served Stella, so he was obviously anti-violence to women.

Many pubs have, of course, been around since pilgrims needed somewhere to stop off for a quick drink before visiting Jerusalem.  Given the state of the Middle East today, that remains a good idea.  The older the pub the ‘richer’ the history, usually featuring, appropriately, claret.  But stabbings, gangland slayings and poetry is the least of it, given the amount of former entertainers, a trade that traditionally like a beer, now being locked up, it’s a wonder the police don’t just visit every pub called ‘The Yew Tree’ and throw a net over the regulars.

Of course, the best a Bristish boozer can boast is a resident highwayman.  Bierkellers are an efficient, mechanised, German pub and, if grainy black and white newsreel footage is to be believed (and why not) most of them were frequented by Hitler.  Not so much a Blue Plaque, more a brown shirt moment.

Britain’s pubs are richly decorated, and not just at chucking out time.  The walls of pubs in Britain are adorned not just with Sky Sport posters but with everything from hunting prints, to tabloid front pages, to wanted posters.  Look closer still and you will see why, in Britain at least, pubs remain haunts of gentlemen; photographs of regulars who may have stepped out, but who remain in spirit.

The Hoste Arms in Norfolk remains one of the best pubs in Burnham Market.  It remains so in rthe face of significant challenges, such as having a spa on site, and being frequented by very wealthy people.  It remains a good pub because the staff are quite, quite lovely and the place is at the same time the last word in excellence and not remotely pretentious.  I have had some great times there and sitting in the October sunshine with a glass of champagne and a springer smelling faintly of beach is one of life’s great joys.

The walls of the bar are adorned with original cartoons by Annie Tempest of her weekly strip (ooh er!) in Country Life magazine, ‘Tottering by Gently’, featuring Lord Tottering (‘Dicky’) and his wife, Daffy.  The strip concerns itself, as far as I can determine, with the upkeep of Tottering Towers, their stately home, red wine, dogs and, bizarrely, social media.  The strip is very ‘Country Life’, a magazine slightly up its own arse, more usually up a fox’s arse, but amusing.

All very lovely and slightly more original than a Space Invaders cabinet converted into a wifi booth or whatever.  A recent addition though are busts of Dicky and Daffy.

It’s always tricky to pull off a likeness of a cartoon character.  The last person to do it successfully was Michael Keaton.  However, one you get over the initial shock, they are actually quite fun.  Daffy is just as you would imagine her, although worryingly close to the red wine.

Dicky is fantastic.  That he does not resemble the cartoon character so well is fortunate, because the bust is an incredible likeness of the late, much missed, Professor Brigadier Richard Holmes.

Possibly the sculptor captures the likeness of the wrong Dicky.  Probably he captured the right one.

And if you were playing pub heritage top trumps, military history beats everything else.  From faded photographs of local lads in kaki, through oil paintings of Spitfires, through to bright photographs of local lads in desert gear, and never forgetting the gentleman in the red jacket, every pub should have a military connection.

Finally, the Hoste has it all.

Postcard from Norfolk - Guns 'n' Bras at Holt

Ah, Holt.  Unlike some towns, usually the sort of town that has butchers that have offerings still in fur and feathers in their front windows, Holt has never crossed the line from Posh to smug.  This may because it’s ‘Holt’, simply ‘Holt’, and lacks the ‘by-the-Sea’ of nearby villages such as the delightful Cley.  It’s not by-the-Sea and ‘by-the-arable-farm’ does not have the same appeal.  For all that the residents of Holt may wish their town to be regarded as posh, and for all that it is undoubtedly monied, a few things keep it firmly rooted in unpretentious.

The first is the art galleries.  Not a natural choice.  If one is grading on the Cotswolds scale of poshness of village as a result of the simple formula of art galleries per head of population (unlike the rural scale of depravation, which is number of pubs per head of population – a healthy ratio being 1:1, in case you are interested), then Holt is very posh indeed.  Luckily, the art galleries perform a public service of selling stuff that is either too expensive, or whacky, to actually buy.

Take for instance the bras carved out of driftwood.  Well, I presume they are carved.  It may be that somebody spends a lot of time beachcombing in order to find naturally occurring double dee cup driftwood.  Never seen any yourself?  Just proves my point, the Coastal Creeper probably got there ahead of you.  Even if you did, you would at most try and get the damn thing out of your dog’s mouth before it charged into the pub with it, or take a picture for the amusement of your more puerile friends.  What you wouldn’t do is fish it out of the surf, dry it, sand it, varnish it, masturbate feverishly over it and then sell it.

So hats off to the galleries of Holt for making visitors smile and move quickly on to the pub.

The other feature of Holt that keeps it thoroughly grounded is the local field sports store.  Now, this used to be in a tiny shop and was crammed with stuff.  It relocated a few years ago to a much larger store that allows them to cram even more stuff into it.  It’s a delight to browse there, if a challenge, because trying to find a camouflage hat in the camouflage section is something of a challenge.  My advice is to buy a duck lure furst, startle the hat and then make a grab for it as it takes flight.  Never seen a flying hat?  Might I suggest a stroll on Brancaster beach in October with insufficiently secured headgear.

Downstairs though, oh, it’s a delight.  That’s where they keep the Guns!  And these are real Guns for men.  These are not the sort of guns that feature in the news, they are not guns for small minded psychopaths, these are guns that are designed to be taken out of the house hours before dawn and held by their owners in darkness, in a hole, in a marsh, waiting for first light.

Because who the fuck needs an alarm clock in Norfolk, it’s rosy red dawn followed by enthusiastic goose calls, then a fusillade, then some likely shouting.

Honk Honk!

Bang!  Bang!  BangBangBang!

Fuck!

Sorry Nigel.  Shit, that looks nasty.

Later that day:

“What did you get darling?”

“Oh, one for the pot, one for A&E”.

That’s why fowl hunters crouch in holes.  It’s not for cover, it’s because some idiot thirty yards away is tracking at zero elevation and doesn’t see you because a) he’s concentrating on a low flying duck and b) you are wearing a camouflage hat, remember?

In short, Holt is lovely, but unglamorous.  Solidly Georgian, with good parking facilities, it remains the sort of Norfolk town that is much more suited to the Defender than the Range Rover Sport.  Leave that to the posh places.

Postcard from Norfolk - behind the scenes at Wells-Next-The-Sea

Obviously, I’ve always known that Wells-next-the-Sea is a working port.  The clue is all the fishing boats in the harbour, occasionally one putt-puttering along the channel and out to sea.  Then again, most of the time I see the boats I’m looking down on them as they lay beached, thanks to a vertigo-inducing low tide taking them far, far below the harbour wall.

The tide, it would appear, is anti-social, and usually puts in an appearance in the early morning, meaning that fishermen have to get up very early to get their floating boats out there, catch some fish, then back in time for market, breakfast and bed.  No wonder they are all such grumpy bastards when they are interviewed on telly, and it can’t all be the fault of the EU.

More than the boats, it is the crab and lobster pots stacked up in the harbour that reveal the port of Wells to be working.  Downwind, you can tell that a few hours ago, these were immersed in the sea and probably home to a clacky, annoyed and ultimately and unfortunately for the resident, delicious crustacean.

Today though, we walked past the harbour and instead of taking a left at the chandlery and looping up past llamas to the pub, walked on.

Wells has a sailing club!  I mean, of course it does, why wouldn’t it? but they have boats, all varnished and shiny and everything.  And a club house, with a little marquee attached to it which simultaneously announces to the world ‘barbeques are a frequent occurrence here’ and ‘our members like to smoke’.

The racing dinghy’s of the club, uniform in colour, were an incongruous bookend to the fish crates stacked along the harbour, looking for all the world like somebody who was playing Tetris as art.

Yet somehow both were Wells, and epitomised the very picture that everyone has of Wells, the beach huts.  No two exactly alike, but all the same basic design, a shed on stilts, the sort of thing an Englishman exiled to Indonesia or some other flood-prone country would have in his back garden to ensure his mower and trowel stayed dry, yet all different colours.

Past the club house, you come to the real working area of Wells, far (well, twenty steps but metaphorically far) from the whelk stands and rock shops, here are the sheds and warehouses of the fishermen.

I love industry.  Proper industry.  The sort of industry that is all about a proper workshop, home to about seven or eight chaps, who are simply superb at what they do, and smell of swarfega.  You can stick your robot assembly lines right up your arse, if you want something done right, you get a craftsman with a regional accent.

I got the same feeling here.  This was a place of serious toil.  There are some who would say that this sort of thing is unglamorous, and maybe that’s why you have to peek behind the curtain, or at least walk past the pub, to see it.

I wouldn’t agree.  I think there’s a sort of beauty to be found in places like this, where people work hard at difficult jobs, especially when they are not around, when the buildings themselves seem to be resting.  The sheds may be weatherbeaten, but there’s not a stray rope or a scrap of litter to be seen; untidiness and fishing, or industry, do not mix.

Well’s beach huts line up in the sand like sentinels.  Red, white, blue, sometimes red white and blue, they are colourful and characterful.  No less colourful and characterful are the boats bobbing at anchor or, more accurately, by the time I get down the harbour, the boats resting at anchor.  But how good, how reassuring, to know that behind the colour and the character is the substance.

Postcard from Norfolk - Holkham Hall

What do you mean, ‘try something different’?

Here’s what happens when we visit Holkham Hall.  We rock up, we say it used to be better when you could park anywhere, we have a picnic lunch, we walk up to see the Duke, we take a photograph, we visit the gift shop, we decide we don’t need a tweed tea towel that costs thirty quid, we walk back to the car, we admire the deer on the drive out of the estate, we go for a drink at the Hoste.  What’s not to love?

This visit, though, heralded Change.  The kitchen garden is now open to the public.

Thanks to ‘Downton Abbey’, we now know that, prior to the existence of Ocado, feeding a household of a stately home required quite a lot of work.  The extent of the vegetable portion of the meals taken at the Hall, the vegetables in question presumably performing the vital function of soaking up the gravy covering the swan, badger, fox or whether it is that aristocrats eat, was revealed by the size of the gardens.  Picture an allotment the size of a footie pitch.  Of course, because the gardens were tended by members of the working class, it meant that they could also be neat and require a great deal of attention.

The gardens themselves were, actually, something of a delight.  Obviously pretty neglected for many years, they are now being restored, presumably prior to the launch of ‘Holkham Organics’.  They are also impressive.

When the aristocracy build a garden, they don’t start with a trip to B&Q, they start with a team of masons working for about a year on the walls around the place.  Whether this is to deter deer, rabbits or vegetarian poachers is not quite clear.  What is clear is that unless rabbits develop siege-warfare any time soon, they are not going to be getting in at the sprouts.

The next thing that is put in place are greenhouses.  Country folk these days bleat over polytunnels and solar farms, but a quick look over the wall would reveal that the Victorians knew a thing or two about vast glazed areas, and what they knew was that they liked wine, and to make wine you needed vine, so you needed a lot of greenhouse.

Between the icehouse and the greenhouse, no wonder so many great explorers of the age thought visits to the poles or the interiors was such a great idea, they could spend the morning acclimatising, the afternoon playing croquet and the evening having a seventy seven course banquet washed down with home-made plonk and then a bunk up with the maid or, if your tastes ran to rough, the under-gardener.  Shame with all their foresight nobody thought to get inoculate, but maybe a simpler age.

Obviously, having now seen the gardens and, perhaps more importantly, ridden on the little shuttle that takes you back to the Hall (like an oversized golf buggy for eight persons, or like a normal American golf buggy), any future trip will require a return visit there.

Because visiting the kitchen garden, that’s what you do when you visit Holkham Hall.

Postcard from Norfolk - Fish and Chips

One of the holiday party has announced that they are on a mission to have fish and chips every day of the holiday.

Given the enthusiastic rapture that I was in yesterday as a result of the seafood platter at the White Horse (a dish that deserves capitalisation and so will henceforth be known as the Seafood Platter), and the secret ambition I am nurturing not just to have the Seafood Platter every day but, if at all possible, every meal, I am in no position to criticise what I now consider a sound and admirable moral choice.

Because if you are going to choose to have fish and chips every day, this is the place to do it.

Fish and chips on the Norfolk coast is a single meal option with a multitude of options and varieties.  Obviously, you have your sauces, but you also have side dishes.  Well, one side dish, mushy peas.  Simply remembering there are more fish than cod in the sea that taste astonishing when battered for your pleasure makes the possibilities if not limitless, then certainly enough to fill a week.

Me?  I go for cod and chips from French’s, the best fish and chipper in the world.

This, it appears, is hardly a secret.  The queue was, literally, out the door when I arrived.  However, thanks to the experienced team working the friars, it was a moving queue and, because we were all only ten minutes away from golden battered goodness, it was a good humoured one.

It’s not just the tourists who turn up to take away here, it’s the locals too.  What I love about the take away service is that fish and chips is, more than any other food, ideally suited to being a take-away product.

Most importantly, French’s serve their fish and chips in a cardboard container.  No polystyrene here, just good, honest paper-based flatware.  What’s more, they warp them in sheets of paper to keep them warm.  What’s even more, they bag them in paper bags or, more precisely given the amount of fish and chips I was picking up, sacks.  French’s must have a paper bill just below that of a mass-market tabloid.

The benefit of all this is twofold.  Firstly, it keeps everything toasty for the journey back to the caravan, without everything going soggy in the way that using unnatural, godless packaging makes it.  Secondly, it allows the aroma to drift gently up and around the interior of the car.  This is especially wonderful of a wet winter night when, with a warm bag of fish and chips in your lap, the interior of the car slowly becomes a vinegary fug, a different variety of the atmosphere that is normally only found under duvets; warm, welcoming, comforting.

Finally, of course, one has the sauce sachets and condiment packets.  One is treated like a grown up and trusted to sauce and season one’s own whips.  The question is, one sachet of red sauce, or ten?  The supposed answer may be found in the pages of the better guides to etiquette, the actual answer is; as many as one thinks is appropriate.  We don’t judge.

Postcard from Norfolk - Seeseafood

 The Ship, at Brancaster, is one of my favourite pubs.  The staff are friendly, the parking ample, the beer good and the food great.  They make a great flat white coffee, they have conversations with one another about how to make a great flat white coffee, and at the end of the evening the bar staff get up on the bar.  They aren’t doing a dance or anything, they are holding the credit car machine aloft, trying to get a signal.  Maybe in a county as flat as Norfolk, a couple of feet makes all the difference.

Getting a signal was clearly a problem the day when their ‘phone wasn’t being answered, this resulted in taking a punt on getting lunch.  Bad call, no room at the inn.

No problem, onward to the White Horse at Brancaster, which is reliable, spacious, has a great bar menu and more than ample parking.

The White Horse also has something new on the menu.  The seafood platter.

Oh.  My.  God.

This is what bliss tastes like.  This is the desert island meal.  This is the Death Row meal.  This is so very, very good that you want to accost everyone else in the bar and ask them why they are not eating it, while simultaneously resenting anyone else ordering this because they might tell others about it, and reduce the number of seafood platters in future.

It was better than beer.

That’s right.

It should have been no surprise.  The White Horse does exceptional food.  This is a pub that is on the salt marsh and, when the tide is in, is so close to the water you can just about row up to the bar.  This is a pub that has pools full of mussels just outside its back door.  This is a pub, in short, that does seafood.

Presumably they know a chap who does platters and the chef thought, ‘hey ho!  I’ve got an idea!’.

Let’s be quite clear, I was ready to enjoy lunch at the White Horse as only a man who has been disappointed not finding a table and then found an excellent alternative can be.  I was simply not prepared for just how great that alternative was.

The Ship is still one of my favourite pubs in Norfolk, the reasons now extend to that time they were full and we went to the White Horse instead, and discovered the seafood platter.

Now we don’t need to worry about where to go for lunch for the rest of the holiday.  The only conundrum is how many times during the remainder of the holiday it is seemly to go to the White Horse and order the seafood platter.  I’m thinking ‘as often as possible and far more than is decent’.

Postcard from Norfolk - Caravans

Caravans, it would appear, have come a long way since the holidays of my childhood, when, if I recollect correctly, they were essentially overheated (perfect British holiday weather exists in fading Polaroid’s and childhood memories) Tupperware boxes filled with happy holidaymakers and a miasma of feet and drying beach-towels.

We are holidaying in Norfolk, and we are in a caravan.  This is not a social experiment.  This is real.  It’s also an attempt to ‘try something different”.  Why we have to ‘try something different’, I have no idea, as ‘sticking with the familiar’ is my favourite strategy when on holiday in Norfolk; rise late, walk on beach, lunch, shop at local shops for evening meal, visit the pub, cook dinner, teevee, bed, repeat.

But different it is, and the caravan is certainly that.  A lot of thought has gone into the modern caravan.  For a start, room in the bedrooms has been sacrificed to create more room in the communal areas, including a large kitchen and living area.  Obviously the designers consider that a family going on holiday together will actually want to spend time with each other, which is a charming ideal (it is good to know that there is still a place in the world for wild optimism), or be able to watch the telly in comfort, which is pragmatism.  The seating area is a large el shaped ‘bonkette’, traditionally used by teens for pouty slouches in very much the same boneless way that lemurs drape themselves over tree branches.  As well as a kitchen you can actually cook in, there is a dining table that you can sit at without having to fold away either another piece of furniture, or a teen.  All of this occupies the same space at the front of the caravan, the shared family living space.

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

In terms of pecking order, residents look down on renters, renters look down on motor-homes and everyone looks down on campers.  Scum.

The caravan has two loos.

That’s right.

Two toilets.  Fuck the iPod, two toilets in a caravan is real design genius.  Two toilets in a caravan is probably the single greatest contribution to family, if not world, peace since the invention of alcohol.

I remember the facilities of my youth.  Even in the long hot summer, where the crispy crinkly grass’s colour had faded like that of an old Polaroid picture first to dull green then to brown, the toilet block had a fringe of lush green grass around it, kept fresh by the eternally damp concrete that was in turn moistened by the Timotei-scented showerings of endless adolescents and the occasional Imperial Leather lathered middle class refugee.

This then, is luxury caravanning.  Luxury because of the space, luxury because there’s a little rack to hang your towels up to dry on the outside of the caravan, luxury because the telly is colour and large (although not as interesting as watching the goings-on of your fellow caravanners through the enormous picture window) and luxury because, most importantly of all, you don’t have to lead a torchlight parade to shared facilities last thing at night, in flip flops.

#‎R.I.P.

Rik Mayall is dead, and I can’t quite believe it.  How could somebody with that amount of energy, somewhere between a dynamo and a typhoon, expire at so young an age.  If he had lived out his life and wound down naturally, he would probably have lived to be 472, but to go so young is wrong.  Of course, there was the whole quad bike accident, but still.

He was, I think it’s fair to say, formative.  It’s normal playground behaviour to discuss last nights telly the morning after, I think the episode of ‘The Young Ones’ where they go on University Challenge is actually still being discussed among those who saw it when broadcast.  Certainly, whenever I happen to turn on the telly and UC is on, my first thought is ‘Achtung!’.  More than that though…Lord Flasheart, in Blackadder II and Blackadder goes Forth.  ‘Always treat your kite, like you treat your woman’.  In my experience, if you heed that advice you won’t go far wrong.

Reaction to Mayall’s death has proved something of a litmus test for reaction to celebrity mortality.  In short, Twitter.

There are various expressions of public grief

The most affecting are those public memorials, garage fourcourt bouquets of flowers gaffa taped to a lamppost at the site of another roadside tragedy.  If you want to spare yourself some grief you can pretend that they are actually a traffic calming measure put at busy junctions by the council.  If you like.  In America, they’ve even got a word for them, ‘descanso’.

Away from the roadside, there’s the equally affecting doorstep memorial.  Usually set against a backdrop of fluttering scene of crime ‘Police stop’ tape and a single bobby standing watch.  Simple messages and stuffed animals tell you all you need to know about that.  Want to know more?  Read the novel ‘Fullalove’.

Moving into social media, Facebook has proved a popular site to post messages and share photographs of the departed.  It’s fitting that Facebook should serve some purpose in mourning the dead, as it’s often the source of images for the news media breaking tragic news of the passing of somebody who isn’t a celebrity and so is not the subject of thousands of stock photographs.  That’s why a newsreader with a serious face and a low voice occasionally breaks the news of the unfortunate death of an individual in front of a background showing the only picture available to the news media of that individual, usually grinning like a loon and giving a cheery thumbs up or, quite possibly, a pixillated hand gesture.

Then there’s Twitter.

If a news item starts ‘Tributes have today been paid to…’ get ready for some quotes that are no longer than 140 characters and which may read how much somebody will be missed, or how important they were, but really mean that the person sending the tweet couldn’t even be arsed to send an e mail.

Always looks for lengthy, sincere and long statement.  That is the celebrity with the good agent who has taken the time and trouble to craft something genuine for their client and it is a lot, lot better than tweeting a tribute which can say anything you like, but only ever means ‘Read of the tragic passing of X while on the loo reading Twitter.  Immediately tweeted in response, as am feckless media whore’.

It’s a measure of Mr Mayall’s standing that his tributes were substantial.  Mind you, comedians all do like to bloody talk, don’t they.

Iain Banks - ‘Troubled teens, turbulent atheists and really, really big guns’

It's been a year since Ian Banks passed.

Did he not get the memo?  His job was to turn out two books a year, one science fiction, the other of a genre of his choosing, until further notice.  Unfortunately it would appear that the universe had other ideas.

I bloody loved his books.  How does one judge what one’s favourite book is?  How about the number of times tou have re-read it?  Or how much you identify with it?  Or maybe you just happened to read it at a special or important moment in your life?  Or maybe reading the book was the special or important moment in your life.  Certainly, my copy of ‘Espedair Street’ looks well loved, as does my copy of ‘The Crow Road’.  Knowing that there are not going to be any new novels published, I’m going to have to slow down on the re-reading.

And god how I loved the sci-fi stuff.  Science fiction as it should be, with spaceships the size of, well, huge space ships, sardonic robots with loads of ordinance packed away in them, and proper aliens, and cool weapons and robots too.  There was probably some stuff in there about using the art form to examine the human condition but fuck that, I’ll save the introspection for the re-read.

I even loved ‘Raw Spirit’, where Banks essentially drives around distilleries, takes the tour, loads up his boot with scotch and, as far as I can work out, bills the lot to his publisher and writes it off against tax as ‘research’.  Cheers!  There’s probably more to it than that  but I’ll save it for the re-read.

I’ll miss Iain Banks.  I met him a couple of times at book signings and, despite the fact he was hugely popular and had probably been signing books for sweating fanboys like myself for days if not weeks, he had great charm and always seemed flattered that somebody was interested in his writing, and wanted a book signed.  And a hardback at that!

Book Clubs

How ironic that what is for most a solitary occupation should give rise to social occasions in the form of the book club.

For most people, reading is a solitary occupation.  There are exceptions.  The bed time story between parent and child, the story time in school or library between CRB checked adult and children, or the public reading between author and crowd he wishes were younger, hipper and more attractive or she wishes were not so bloody condescending to women writers.

Of course there is always that moment when you see somebody else reading the same book as you on public transport and share either a nod, a knowing glance, or bodily fluids, depending on just how racy the book in question is., another delightful social convention the Kindle is killing off until they come up with one with a back screen that shows the cover of whatever you’re reading.

Certain books are exempt from the ‘Oh, you’re reading that too?’ moment.  These are Harry Potter books and anything by John Grisham.  The same goes for any book duplicated poolside or on the beach.  Any book from the Song of Ice and Fire cycle is actually fair game, especially if the other person is behind you in their reading, allowing you to sharply draw breath when they mention their favourite character.

There are, of course, certain books that essentially are a public service announcement.  Don’t strike up a conversation with any woman reading ’50 shades of grey’ unless you really enjoy hearing about unhappy relationships.  If you see anyone reading ‘Catcher in the Rye’ they may not be a psycho, but can you really take that chance?  Oddly, anyone reading ‘American Psycho’ is probably normal, but would rather read than talk to you so is best left alone.

Where we read is in our own space, in our own head.  If we want company, we do the voices of the characters in our head while we read.  Mostly, we don’t.

On the one hand then, the very existence of book clubs is surprising.  Everyone actually getting organised enough to read the same book at the same time?  Amazing.  What’s more, that this should happen in England?  A place where usually nobody ventures a critical opinion about anything, unless it’s a tut!  Newspaper review supplements should change their star ratings to a tut/star rating system.  If a book is OK, it gets a star, if it’s amazing, it gets five stars.  But if it’s awful, it gets a tut, and if it’s really awful, it gets five tuts.

On the other hand, anyone who finishes a book immediately wants to tell people about it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a travelogue or ‘Amazing Buns In Just Five Weeks’, give somebody a glass of white wine and a voulevont and they will spit damp crumbs at you in their enthusiasm to communicate just how good the latest Patricia Cornwall is.

Haven’t read it?

Doesn’t matter, it’s like a fucking abridged audiobook, you’ll get the potted plot in three minutes, followed by thirty minutes of just how relevant the book was to the reader.  Bonus material can include, but is not limited to, who should play what roles in any movie adaptation.

The book club formalises this process.  If it’s a crap club, then everyone talks books for five minutes before talking about soft furnishings.  If it’s a good one, then everyone maintains a veneer of respectability for about five minutes before acrimony occurs.

Because the English, when forced to read the same book, can have wildly different opinions, and that’s what makes book club so much fun.  That and alcohol (my book club meets in a pub).

And it is a great social occasion.  You get to try out new skills, like back-pedalling from the brink of social mortification after you open with ‘it was shit and anyone who liked it is a peado’, only to find yourself in a minority and secretly starting to wonder if the rest of the group are just a little bit thick, or peados.

No book club in your area?  Start one.  You get to choose the first book!  I recommend ‘American Psycho’.

State opening of Parliament

Pageantry.

The difference between pageantry and mere tradition is pomp.  Morris dancers, in a pub car park, a group of bearded men enjoying themselves, temporarily free from their traditional artesian morris-men occupations of cooper, smith, chartered accountancy and number two at the bank gathering to annoy the public, that’s traditional.  Add pomp, and you have pageantry.

The state opening of Parliament is pageantry.

The Queen takes the short ride from Buckingham Palace to the Palace of Westminster in a horse drawn coach so ornate that the animators at Disney would, if it had been on their drawing pads might have asked ‘too much’?  The footmen, servants, flunkies and, of course, troops of double-hard soldiers, sailors and airmen accompanying her are out of their now-traditional sand and blood-of-the-enemy field wear and in smart dress uniforms.  Even the Parliament flunkies wear tights.  There’s nothing like seeing a monarch hold Parliament in the palm of her hand to assure you that democracy is safe for another year.

There are other traditions too.  The traditional closing-of-the-roads.  Taxi drivers are now a central feature of this, picking up passengers and explaining that because the Mall is closed to traffic, they will have to go on and on and on about this for the duration on the journey.  The traditional overtime-of-the-Met.  Do you know why coppers always look so bloody happy during these occasions?  Because they are on double-time due to having to come in on their holidays.  And of course the traditional putting-out-of-the-crowd-barriers, leaving crossing points manned by smiling policemen who are there to ensure that the public can get across the traffic-free roads in safety without being hit by a passing Cinderella lookie-likie coach.

The public, usually in a rush to get somewhere, put up with this with tremendous patience.  They will wait at crossing points for seemingly no reason because they know that five minutes later, there may well be the clip clop of a monarch swooshing by in guilded glory.

Alternatively, they are held back because their path will soon be crossed by a troop of troops returning to barracks.  The public wait patiently for two reasons.  The first is out of proper respect for the troops in question and because it’s always a bit of a thrill to see the boys and girls in uniform striding briskly.  The second and less widely discussed reason is that British troops have been fighting in bloody conflicts for over a decade now and there is every chance that last week, these smartly turned out young men and women were being shot at by nasty men in beards.  This means that if you kick up a fuss about having to get across now dammit and lunge through the barrier, the natural reaction from the column is going to be to identify a potential threat, shoot you in both legs and then call in a drone strike to ‘make safe’ any explosive vest you may have been wearing.

All in all, better to stand back and enjoy the show.