Postcard from Norfolk – Holme-Next-The-Sea

An entire day spent in the cottage. That's right, given that we have endless beaches, shopping opportunities and not one but two enthusiast run steam railways within easy reach, we decide to spend the day in the cottage.

This is, in part, due to a new mania for jigsaw puzzles, or rather, one particular jigsaw puzzle that we took on holiday. I've never really seen the point of jigsaw puzzles, if one likes a picture, I can't see why having to assemble it from a thousand different components adds to the enjoyment. As an act of creation for an artwork, it seems to have all of the frustrations of actually painting something, without the benefit of that past time being a legitimate excuse to study naked women (although one can stretch this too far I guess, as having a pad and pencil is no defence after being discovered wedged into a locker in a woman's changing room at the gym).

Of course, after clicking the second piece into place and confidently predicting 'I can do this in an hour', the competitive juices start to flow and that gaming see-saw of frustration/accomplishment/frustration/accomplishment that has made Nintendo and others an awful lot of money takes over.

I have learned to greatly admire the elegance of the jigsaw. This one is of a painting of London, looking along the Thames. There are famous bridges and famous buildings and flags and cabs and red busses. It's rather marvellous to place the Union flag in the right place, and oddly satisfying to fit together four pieces of uniform blue sky.

So the day was spent gently clicking. And listening to albums. It's been years since I have listened to an album. Back in the days before the iTunes Store allowed you to cherry pick good tracks off of albums, iTunes let you build playlists. Before that one could use the track select on CDs to play the same track over and over - 'Low' by REM about 147 times if you had just broken up with somebody was I think the standard against which all other 'just one more time' plays were judged. But before that to select a track that was not track one, side one or two, meant carefully lifting and placing the stylus on the record, and who had the patience for that?

Tape counters? Yea, right, who had the energy and skill to whizz the tape back and forth looking at a counter? No, it was lift and play or nothing.

So it was really refreshing to listen to entire albums, a real luxury.

Finished the jiggy at half one in the morning.

During the day there was activity. The cottage is reached by a gravel road that runs on to a bird watching point, and there was a steady scrunch of bird watchers going back and forth, that intensified around six and at dusk (dawn and seek being the best time to watch birds as they are at their most active, six being a time everyone is out of work and doing a bit of birding before heading home).

We, meanwhile, we're busy watching the birds in the back garden, when we were not making tea, puzzling or bickering about who's choice it was to select the next album. The main residents seemed to be a pheasant and his harem, who spent the day lazily wandering around, waiting for the next pear to fall from the tree in the back garden, and some sort of sea bird that was so large that when it perched on top of the shed, I was simultaneously worried about whether the thing would keep standing, and excited about cornering the market in kindling.

There was also much excitement at the arrival of the post man, who dropped off letters at the house next door, racing along the gravel road in a manner that suggested he had a crash helmet, sponsorship ('Royal Mail' was written on the side if his van) and a bloke next to him bellowing 'left, right, easy left, hard right, fuuuuuuuuuucccccccck-tree! in Norwegian.

Postcard from Norfolk - Wells-Next-The-Sea

Wells-Next-The-Sea is experiencing an emposhment. It's the reverse of the process where high street shops close, or turn into charity shops, or fried chicken places that claim to be from southern states other than Kentucky. If a shop closes down in Wells, it is quickly replaced by one selling something lovely. The place has a (appropriately) tiny wee shop that sells doll house furniture, it's been there for years. What kind of a model business model works that well? Actually the shop is charming, as well as all the period stuff that people imagine in a dolls house, it's got little model plasma wide screen tellies and so on. I love the idea of a modern dolls house.

It's got everything a small town needs. It's got a grocery that sells everything, it's got a butcher, it's got two delis and loads of pubs, it's even got a shop that sells fishing tackle, crab lines, and guns! Fantastic, frustrated at not having caught anything? Pick up a pistol and unload that bad boy into the harbour like some piscine gangland drive-by.

It's home to French's, which is the best fish and chip shop in the world, and the Crown, which has seen off some pretty stiff competition to become my go-to pub of choice when in the area. It's big which means it doesn't get crowded, it's posh which means there is champagne by the glass and it has a huge sofa where one can stretch out and relax, all that's missing is a remote and a telly.

And because it's Norfolk, everyone has dogs, meaning that all of the pubs and the shops have dog bowls outside them so that when the dog owners are inside, the dogs tethered up outside an have a drink. The only place that doesn't have a dog bowl outside it is the pet shop, which has two dog bowls. In addition, the pet shop had the usual pet stuff for sale lined up outside the shop, which is what the merchants do with their wares in Wells. Placing a bird feeder along with the stock had probably seemed like a natural thing to do, sending a firm 'bird feeders for sale, more inside' message. To the local bird population however, the message was 'free food!'. Maybe the pet shop owner was counting on the crowds in the high street deterring the timid wildlife, in which case she had miscalculated just how bold the local avian population can get if there's the chance of a free meal, and then a bathe in a handy dog bowl.

The high street was busy though, everybody doing a sort of slow wander up one side, then down the other, or zig zagging from shop to shop, drawn to the displays depending on whether their interest is in art, books, meat or really large wheels of cheese. The high street is a jolly place to wander in generally, stretching as it does from the quay up a hill to the buttlands, that small square of green where folk used to practice their archery and home to three excellent pubs. Obviously feathering beer barrels gave you a thirst. The high street was festooned with bunting when I visited, no special occasion that I could work out, just bunting for the hell of it. Bunting does make a street look jolly and it makes you wonder why you don't see more?

Wells is also home to a fabulous beach and a string of beach huts. These come in a variety of shapes, sizes and ages and many, many different colours but all conform to the 'shed on stilts' school of architecture. A new feature this year is a 'to be raised' sign adorning the sheds that are apparently not on stilts. Obviously there are stilts under there somewhere, but the beach has risen and the sand now creeps around the doorway. New huts are put up to replace those that have finally fallen victim to the elements and one wonders how long it is before these will have to be raised too, the alternative is to mount them on stilts at some nosebleed inducing altitude, not really an option as nobody wants to spend their day at the beach in a beach watchtower, knackered from the climb up the steps.

Still, keeps the local beach hut specialist restorer and builder busy.

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.

Norfolk notes - the Golden Cludgie

A posh pub toilet. Note serious portraits of mildly disapproving chaps, to make sure you don't get up to any funny business.

Seaside toilets are usually pretty basic. Let's face it, they have to be. Not only are they designed to resist all the normal perils of public convinces, such as regular use by members of the public, many on whom have a diet that is best described as 'harrowing' and of course serving as meeting places for those who are slaves to forbidden love (actually there's not much that's actually forbidden these days so it's actually quite romantic to think of homosexualists taking the time and effort to bum each other in an uncomfortable location rather than meet in some lovely boutique B&B somewhere), but in addition they have to resist the winds and elements that assail them from the outside.

When you think about it it's a wonder that seaside loos exist at all, a council would be quite justified in just providing a shovel and a sign pointing to a location on the beach below the high tide line.

The loos at Brancaster beach could be described as either 'basic', 'grim' or 'an affront' depending on what your expectations of a loo are. Suffice to say there are no little chaps ready with a towel and a squirt of cologne lurking here. There is a sign that advises wind surfers not to get changed in the loos but frankly they appear to have come to the decision themselves that peeling off a wetsuit in the car park in full view of everyone is less traumatic than walking into the gloomy loos with bare feet. It's the sort of place one visits with elbows in, trying not to make contact with anything.

The loos at Old Hunstanton are somewhat better.


Clean, light and airy they still preserve a seaside charm by having small mounds of sand from the beach piled up in the corners.

Away from the public eye, the loo in the Crown in Wells has soap so posh that I can't afford it at home. Another Flying Kiwi inn, the Ship at Brancaster, has a hand basin that is essentially a horse trough.



This is an attempt to capture a rustic, ancient feel; something effortlessly achieved at the public loos on the beach at Brancaster through the simple application of use, abuse and a total absence of bleach and fresh paint.

But the award for this year's Golden Cludgie, that is, the most outstanding loo visited this trip, goes to the ladies' loo at the Hoste Arms. Despite access being via a flight of stairs so steep that you expect the provision of a funicular or at least a guide to rope on to, and despite the lavish provision of the ladies being at the expense of sacrifices of space in the gents, this triumph of marble and alabaster has it all - a huge vase of lilies on a free standing table in the centre of the room, stools in front of a huge, well lit mirror and counter for adjusting hair and make up and a collection of toiletries that would put a clean freak to shame. It certainly had the wow factor, as in: 'wow! I can't believe that anyone I know would actually make a point of hissing 'take a look at this!' and then holding the door to a ladies' loo ajar for me to gawp'. This is the sort of situation that leads to either farcical hilarity when performed by a touring rep company on the stage of a provincial theatre, or a court appearance and having your name top of the list of the sex offenders register.