Postcard from Norfolk – Postcards and bookshops

Writing a postcard, by which I mean a real postcard rather than a self indulgent and self referential blog entry about how I such the salt off my chips before eating them, if something of an art. You have a small space in which to convey much, so there's a quandary; does one go for wit, or brevity, or both? Or does one attempt to condense a best selling travel book into the space allowed? Should one confine oneself to a weather report and, if so, how truthful should one be? Or should one simply go for something the postman will enjoy reading?

Longer than a tweet, shorter than a letter, the postcard is, along with the Christmas card, the analog version of Internet communication. Essentially, the modern craze for forwarding pictures of kittens in hats with captions heavy on the use of the letter zed is just a cheap and lazy modern incarnation of sending relatives a saucy seaside postcard.

Given the utter dominance of texting and the ability to send e mails and pictures from your smartphone,it's good that postcards continue to thrive as a edits of communication. This is, I think, because that are considered to be the same as Christmas or birthday cards, something that are sent as well as a text rather than instead of. Nothing conveys the message 'we are on holiday and you are not' like a card depicting a handful of picturesque cottages on the front and a message on the back about drinking lots of tea. I always make sure that I leave a red wine ring stain on the back of the card, I am actually thinking about having a special stamp made.

There are two approaches to postcard sending. The first is to buy a shedload on day one, go to the pub and get it all over with in one mail shot. This is environmentally sound, as it allows you to recycle the same remarks over and over to different people. The alternative is to go for the episodic approach, which means sending a postcard a day and developing a theme, such as a beer forecast, reviewing a different beach every day or, my favourite, explaining how you are developing a relationship with the pretty girl in the post card shop by buying one every day.

As much fun as sitting in the pub writing is, sitting in the pub reading is even more fun, which is why, despite it lacking a fish and chip shop, Burnham Market is fast becoming one of my favourite places to visit; one spends half an hour in the Brazen Head book shop, then repairs to the Hoste to flick through ones purchases, while drinking beer.

The second hand book shop is the home of the unexpected treat. Visiting today I picked up a Tom Wolfe book that I've never even heard of, and a NEL edition of 'Assignment in eternity'. I really do hope that you can tell a book by its cover because this one is a corker, showing a rocket blasting off from a city, in a bubble, on the moon! It is the perfect science fiction book cover. Who could resist?

It also prompted something of a revelation - I like books more than I like reading. Peering over the shoulders of people on the train I have been very impressed by the kindle e book reader. The screen can be read in direct sunlight and it is pleasingly small and looks comfortable to hold. If I liked readying, I would have one and download books to it at a reasonable price. But I like books. A book is an artefact, not a stream of electrons. Maybe I am a showing my age but surely anyone who has written a book dreams of it one day appearing in print rather than on screen.

More than that though, will there be a second hand market for e books? Even if there is, even if we end up with an on line store curated by some caring individual who groups the books in a manner conducive to e browsing that leads one to unexpected treasures, it's unlikely that inside the front cover will be somebody's name and age, or, my favourite, a slip of paper explaining that this copy of 'A Pilgrim's Progress' was awarded to somebody as a prize for growing the largest marrow in the school garden.

Kindle readers lack charm (the device, not the people). Worst of all, they lack covers - I like rockets, science fiction and cities in bubbles and I don't want to be deprived of looking at a dramatic depiction of same before opening up the book to continue the adventure.

Postcard from Norfolk - Burnham Market

Just driving over the parish boundary into Burnham Market increases your social class by several tiaras*. It is home to quite a lot of weekend people, but during the week the bustle is provided by shoppers drawn to its lovely shops, selling lovely things, at lovely and occasionally eye-watering prices. Make no mistake though, the shops are also catering for the locals. While you can buy lovely shiny twinkly things in Norfolk Living you can also buy a lovely shiny washing tub in the local hardware shop. It has to be said though, the opportunity to blow a load of cash quickly exists here.

Take Wellington boots. Wellington boots should be purchased from a tub out front of a shop. They should be plastic and be good for standard Wellington boot use until one of two things happen, either they spring a leak or, as a result of an over-ambitious or incautious paddle, they are swamped and they never quite dry out or smell the same afterwards. They should not cost a hundred quid, not even if they have little straps on the side to aid pulling up. The only time a pair of Wellington boots should cost a hundred quid is when they are attached to the hooker you are playing out your Jilly Cooper fantasies with.

It's a lovely village with lovely shops, many of which still have the lovely habit of closing for lunch. It is interesting to wander over to the door of a shop that looks like a likely place to pick up a twinkly trinket or panoramic postcard and be confronted by a locked door and a small cardboard sign explaining 'closed for lunch, back at two'.

The quality of the cardboard signs vary. The one in the stationary shop was, as one might expect, on lovely white card, while the one in the window of the counter of the post office situated in the newsagents was a classic of its kind, a flap ripped from a brown cardboard box, with the corrugation showing along the edge and the message written in biro, with each line of each letter stroked a few times for emphasis and legibility. Both signs share one characteristic, one corner so slightly discoloured from daily handling as, at twelve fifty nine, they are fetched from their resting position and popped up against the glass.

In such circumstances the only sane response is to repair to The Hoste Arms for a pint or two of lunch yourself.

When the shops are open, the shopping is good. There's a good fishmonger, a great butcher, a fabulous second hand book shop and the opportunity to buy some great clothing. One of the shops persisted in selling cashmere shorts, but my interest was in shop selling hats, appropriately, upstairs. While I was distracted for a moment with a fur lined flying helmet/deerstalker combination, the greatest temptation came in the form of a Stetson brand hat, more or less like the one Indiana Jones wears. Not sure if my eventual decision to put the hat back and back away slowly was the right one, but it was informed by the fact that I have an almost identical one at home.

Of course I should have bought it. One cannot have too many Indiana Jones style hats.

The village is the home of the Brazen Head book shop. If one were to picture a second hand book shop, this would be the image called to mind. At the front of the shop are the old childrens' books, Rupert the bear annuals and Enid Blyton, then through to penguins and on to genres, upstairs for non-fiction. Books stacked up higgildy-piggledy, newish, oldish, antique. Careful browsing yielded a really rather nice Pan edition of an M. R. James book, and a book by Tom Woolf that I'd never heard of. The 1970s cover of the Tom Wolf book is of a pair of ladies legs, crossed. Nothing quite like a cover like that to suggest to everyone on the train that you are reading vintage porn.

Books in one hand, laptop in the other, it was time to sit outside the Hoste and have a refreshing pint of lunch. It was another very mild day, though not so crowded as everyone was now back at work. It used to be that one sat outside the pub to enjoy the fresh air but now, of course, one has anti-smoking laws and the tables outside are where all the puffers come to indulge their filthy little habit, secure in the knowledge that anyone drinking at lunchtime is unlikely to look down on anyone indulging a craving.

The tables were thankfully free of smokers, who were presumably in the pub getting their fix from the secondary smoke of the wood fire, and I sat there reading and poncing off the pubs wi-fi in the traditional manner before a few spots of rain drove me inside.

As per usual, there was a dog owner in the bar, unusually the dog in question was a pug. Is there any dog as ridiculous as the pug? This example was one of those with a one-dimensional face. Eyes, nose, mouth, all occupied a totally flat plane. Even its tongue did not poke out or loll, but curled backwards like an unblown party streamer, it had that asthmatic pug breathing that leads one to believe that the breed actually breath through their arses.

Burnham Market is lovely. It's so lovely that it makes Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds look like a sink estate. It's true that it's full of cars, and tourists and people who only occupy their second homes at the weekend, but the are real people here too, real shops and real shopkeepers with a real need to eat lunch. I think as long as it retains that, and the pub, all is not lost.

* The tiara is the unit social class is measured by. Can’t be cars or property or, god forbid, money. Comes down to this, can you wear a tiara and carry it off? Yes, congratulations, your social class is measured at one tiara and you probably have a title, some land and pretty firm views on immigration. The tiara scale is different to most units of measurement in that the vast majority of it is firmly at the minus end of the scale.

Norfolk notes - Burnham Market

Burnham Market, home of the Hoste Arms and, I hope, at least one outstanding Christmas light bulb, is also home to lovely shops selling lovely things (including, and I can't understand why I didn't buy this, a picnic decanter! That's right, a decanter made of plastic that you take on your picnic, when you simply can't bear the thought of pouring port from the bottle yet you want to save on weight. Actually I know why I didn't buy it - I refuse to compromise on these sort of things. If one decants, one decants from crystal, or on a picnic glass is acceptable.) at great expense.

There are also a couple of book shops. One selling new books, the other, much more interesting, selling second hand books. Second hand books are a treat. Not only are can you stimulate your mind with their contents, but with certain books you can speculate about the previous owner, like did they die of an exceptionally contagious disease that incubates in Agatha Christie novels?

Unlike charity bookshops which, although excellent, rely on donations, the owner of this shop obviously spends a lot of time at everything from car boot sales to book fairs, which is why the shop sells everything from a crisp new looking Dan Brown to a foxed-to-the-point-of-hounded innocuous looking wee hardback that turns out to be a first printing of a classic that contains a rare misprint - like the entire chapter in 'The Pickwick Papers' when the Pickwickians visit a whorehouse, complete with illustrations. Quite a misprint, quite a curiosity.

Instead of a coffee shop, the space has instead been devoted to cramming in yet another book.
Or map, because the shop sells old maps also. And if you are wondering who the hell would want to buy an out of date map, can I point you towards the Ordinance Survey vintage series, or any bloke (and it's usually blokes) that have old maps of some forgotten rural shire that smelled predominantly of dung and onions hanging proudly on their walls.

The Brazen Head sells everything from the Sex and the City 2 novelisation (which surely must be worth flicking through just to see if it's annotated - wouldn't that be excellent, to see comments in the margins along the lines of 'stopped reading here, too much like self harming') to penguin classics. This is a home of curiosities, delights and the occasional surprise.

Like a paperback first edition copy of 'The Wicker Man', which I didn't even know was a novel!

Obviously I know the film. This is the movie that set my expectations of both the mentality of islanders (which I think has been proven. There's just something about living on a small island that makes the folks suspicious of outsiders, modern life and any religion that does not involve crop worship of some kind. To be fair, this sort of mentality exists in isolated rural communities too and, with bus and rail links being what they are, we shouldn't look for improvement any time soon.) and small hotels (which has not. While small hotels may finally have embraced the idea of the mini-bar, none that I know of offer a complimentary writhing naked witch in the next bedroom. Not even the self styled 'boutique' hotels. Don't get me wrong, I think the advent of the boutique hotel is a fine thing; essentially the establishment of a boutique hotel involves taking a small B&B, redecorating with a theme (taking care to avoid 'run down 70's kitch'), going to half-board, realising that a glass of fruit juice is not a starter option and beefing up the soundproofing so that the sounds of passionate lovemaking, anguished sobs or that perennial hotel favourite, the single gunshot and scream, do not disturb the other guests).

But I never realised it was a novel first. It was in very good condition and priced at a tenner, exactly the price point to make certain folk blink at anyone having the chops to ask that for a second hand paperback but for any passing cult horror film fan to be consumed with that 'I must own it' sensation.

One purchase later, it was best speed to the Hoste Arms, home of fine wines and wi fi, to ponce off of their internet connection and see if I had got a bargain or been ripped off. Fired up Abebooks and, ah, that warm glow of satisfaction. I had nabbed a rarity and paid a reasonable price. Not that any of that mattered of course. But fans of cult horror films set in remote Scottish islands and staring Christopher Lee are rather a niche market and notoriously east to exploit.

It was, I suspect, a never to be repeated moment of paperback madness but I reckon I actually did rather better than others who indulge themselves on holiday and bring back something impractical, like an STD.