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 - 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.

G&P Travel Special - Postcard from Edinburgh

There's more to the Edinburgh Festival than 'getting pissed and eating chips'.  Apparently.

Belt failure does not, in this case, result in unexpected tackle in the baggage area but rather long queues at check-in at the airport.  The BA staff scramble man and womanfully to cope, and as a result we are checked in at the First Class check-in desk, opened to cope with the backlog.

'Does this mean we get to fly first class?'

'No.'

Our luggage is now travelling in a better class than we are.

The departure lounge is the haunt of fragrance bandits, who stand ready to spray you with scent should you slow down.  If you are already a melody of malodours, they will spray it onto a little cardboard strip for you to smell at your leisure, or even to keep.  Frequent flyers are known to keep their sock draw smelling of sandalwood for years on end by replenishing their scented strips.

The bookshops of the departure lounge are unashamedly places to obtain holiday reads.  If you want to bulk buy Dan Brown in hardback, then this is the place to come.  My selection was 'World War Z', a novel about a pandemic that originates and spreads from China by, among other means, air transport.  My seat-neighbour on the aeroplane was a well mannered Chinese man and his reluctance to turn off his mobile 'phone meant that he was either not an English speaker or was arming something but was definitely not a zombie.  So that was a relief, eh.

The airport departure lunge remains, in the main, a mall, but with bars where people can start drinking (or 'getting in the holiday mood') at nine in the morning in preparation for drinking on a long flight and then drinking in a different time zone.  As call after final call after last call went out for four passengers to catch their flight to Barcelona NOW, I wondered just what might be more fun than catching your flight.  That said, it was Easyjet, so maybe they're had decided that another lager in the Sky Bar and a taxi ride home in disgrace was a sensible way to go.

The flight itself was brief and pleasant and thee was even time for a cuppa and your choice of biscuit or crisp.  The crisp packets had expanded like balloons in the relatively low pressure of the cabin and looked like those pillows National Express passengers drool into on long journeys.  I imagine that when opened they went up like some sort of snack based IED.  I settled for the biscuit as opening exploding bags and being showered in cheese and onion flakes can be a distressing experience, not least for the poor sod who has to clean up the crisps and nervous reaction afterwards.

On the cobbled, crowded streets of the city, festival visitors mix with people desperate to get you to go to their show and with people who have been in shows and are now on their way to see their mates' shows, or more likely get a drink.  Celebrity spotting is the order of the day but when 'The Shawshank Redemption' emptied out, it was like spotting celebrity fish in a boozy barrel as the actors emptied onto the street and headed straight for the pop up bar on the street right outside the venue.

Of course, 'celebrity' status is debatable and we cannot even begin to assess the damage to teevee careers that the cancellation of 'The Bill' has wrought.

The shows may not turn a profit.  The local printers do.

Rick Wakeman was spotted at The Assembly Rooms.  He has a show there, so it probably was him.  The problem with identifying the real Rick Wakeman is that Rick Wakeman looks a hell of a lot like a hell of a lot of other blokes up here for the Festival, blokes of an age where they think long hair is still a rebellious statement, even though it has been many years since there was ever any danger if them being mistaken for a girl from behind.

Esther Rantzen was in the audience for Marcus Brigstocke’s show (showbiz mates, she guested on his radio show and was, if I recall correctly, rather entertaining).  I hope she liked the joke about Rolf Harris.  It will be interesting to see just how much material the Edinburgh comics can wring out of Yewtree.  Normally of course it’s just puppets that benefit from peadoes.

The Book Festival, neatly corralled in the literature-friendly surroundings of Charlotte Square, is wonderful, with marquees arrayed around the green and a pop up book shop (a shop in a tent selling books, not a shop selling pop p books, although there may have been pop up books in the children’s section).

My god, I thought that young people at the Fringe could drink, they are amateurs compared to the middle classes at a literary festival, hoovering up red wine at ten in the morning.  It would appear that if you’re in a marquee normal rules are suspended and if it comes in a plastic glass, it doesn’t count.

Jonathan Coe was on fine form as the audience (average age = Radio 4 demographic) were confronted with the ugly truth that ‘the News Quiz’ is not satire.  Coe named Stewart Lee as the country’s leading satirist, leading the woman sitting behind me to gasp ‘my God!’ in a scandalised exhalation.  The Book Festival may be sponsored by the Guardian, but the audience know their real parents are Radio 4.

Stewart Lee, arguably the country’s leading satirist, attracted quite a crowd of young people.  Indeed there are many young people in Edinburgh at Festival time, all apparently very keen to hand you a leaflet; and of course they all go to one another’s shows.  Eventually, there will be so many shows that the Festival will consist entirely of drama students doing improv musical comedies, endlessly circulating as the audience for each others shows.

Stewart Lee, arguably the country’s leading satarist, was name-checked by Richard Herring during Herring’s show.  I’ve seen Richard Herring a couple of times at the Festival and he regularly mentions Lee, but Lee never mentions Herring.  It’s getting to be awkward, like when you stay friends with a couple who have separated and one has moved on whilst the other, around about the second glass of wine, asks ‘does he ever mention me?’.  The wrong answer, which is, ironically, the right one, leads to an evening of Lambrini flavoured tears.

The point is reached in the Pleasance Courtyard when you stop celebrity spotting and simply accept that the world you inhabit includes celebrities released into the general population, although it’s got to mean something if there are more celebrities in the audience than there are on stage.  Andrew (shagger) Marr was in the audience for a satire about the BBC news department.  So, no pressure to make it accurate, funny and successful then.  Still recovering from his stroke he looked frail as he leaned on his walking stick in the queue.  That’s the Festival for you, they don’t even fast-track you if you’re a celeb.

Certainly, it’s been the best food of the festival this year, mainly because a little bit of research and planning has resulted in at least one hot meal a day not eaten out of a polystyrene container with a plastic fork whilst standing up.

A ‘Scottish fruit bowl’

The hotel were kind enough to set out a ‘Scottish fruit bowl’ upon arrival – a selection of Tunnock’s delicacies, artfully arranged on a slate and dusted with what looked and tasted like icing sugar.  It looked almost too pretty to eat, almost.

Scottish healthy option – note salad leaf

Showing unprecedented levels of foresight, two restaurant bookings were made this year, instead of the usual tactic of turning up at the Magnum bar and promising to do three courses in 45 minutes.  The first was a fish restaurant off the Grassmarket where, it being Festival time, every table was taken despite booking two weeks in advance and we had to sit up at the bar.  What hardship! 

It was great, dining perched atop a barstool is always a treat, particularly at the horseshoe shaped bar giving great views of other diners, and of course I have the balancing skills of a jolly jack-tar aloft in a nor-easter.  The other reservation was made, on foot, on a smartphone, walking to the restaurant in question. 

The wonders of technology, I got the booking confirmation about the same time as I was opening the door of the restaurant.  The wonders of technology.

Top show – Rich Hall, without a doubt, the perfect mixture of raw seething anger, crowd interaction and comedy all wrapped up in a voice that comes all the way from the Old Testament via the heart of Texas.

G&P Travel Special - Postcard from Centre Parcs

Give yourself over to organised fun, and find your prejudices about swimming in a communal pool with over-excited children crumble in the face of a good flume.

Centre Parcs is essentially what the world would be like if an apocalypse wiped out everyone but the middle classes.  If I say that the sylvanian setting, the cabins arranged so that the view suggests you are alone in the woods, the no cars policy, and the emphasis on good clean outdoor exercise and activities for the family are all suggestive of the sort of holiday destination that certain European right wing parties of the 1930s might have come up with if they had been a little more into tennis and a little less into being shouty, then that should not necessarily be seen as a criticism.

Yes, there is a sense that underground there is some sort of control centre monitoring everything and that people who don’t conform to the Centre Parcs way of life are taken in the night, but not in any sinister way.  Rather, if the rowdy family next door vanished overnight with nothing to mark their passing but some muffled screams, one might be concerned but one would be more likely to enjoy the peace and quiet now available on your patio.

Centre Parcs is essentially a model village of chalets of various degrees of comfort and size arranged around a central hub of shops, places to eat and, of course, the sports centre, featuring the famous slides and outdoor pools heated, probably, by the centre’s very own nuclear reactor or by harnessing the excitement of the children, and adults, who are positively giddy at the thought of riding the slides, flumes and rapids again and again and again.

And of course the cyclone.  The cyclone is essentially a huge water chute, down which you ride along with three others on a jolly yellow inner tube from a tractor tyre.  Thee fun starts half way through, when a vertical drop gives you an unwelcome insight into what it must be like to vanish down a plug hole, followed by whooshing and swooshing before coming to rest in a pool and remembering not to say ‘fucking hell!’ in front of your young nephews.  The young nephews, who were like otters in the water, suddenly realised the importance of having an adult on board their inner tube.  The fatter the adult, the faster the drop and the more exciting the ride.  It was lovely to be in demand.

Other activities involved tennis, recovering tennis balls and paddling on the lake in a sort of catamaran canoe where one either hummed the theme tune to Hawaii-Five-O or bellowed ‘ramming speed’ as one went past other craft.

The bars in a place that sells itself on promoting a healthy lifestyle have a difficult time getting people to consume alcohol, so they put on the cricket on enormous televisions and the grown-ups can watch other people exercise and drink at the same time.  They also serve chips.

Working twin-deck barbeques like a meaty superstar DJ

I cooked on the patio, on twin barbeques.  Cool boxes may famously be the floatation aid of choice for Aussie fishermen, but also keep the tremendous amount of meat and fish I had brought along to barbeque fresh.  It was tremendously satisfying to have everything hot and ready to serve at the same time, while working the twin deck barbeques like some sort of meaty superstar deejay.

Finally, Centre Parcs is a place where you get close to nature, whether you wish to or not.  Barely was the front door of the chalet open when the tap tap tap of beaks at the patio doors announced the arrival of a troupe of inquisitive ducks, here to check out if we were messy eaters who ate a lot of sandwiches.  After correctly assessing that we didn’t look like the sort of people who waste food, but have recipe books on fowl, they waddled off to try their luck elsewhere.

Check out day brings another frenzy as wee electric vehicles shoot about carrying fresh linen and people who clean like their visas depend upon it.  The final activity was ‘find the car in the enormous car park with no zone numbers anywhere’.  Fun fact – standing in a crowded car park and randomly pressing your key fob while listening for a ‘whoop whoop’ and looking for flashing lights to tell you where you car is only works in the movies.

G&P Travel Special - Postcard from Brighton

A weekend enjoying the sights, sounds, smells and sensations of the South Coast's epicentre of gaiety.

If you are visiting Brighton you will need to adjust the settings on your fabulousness meter.  Because in Brighton all - air, architecture, atmosphere and inhabitants - is fabulous.

“the horses seem alive to the organ music of the carousel”

Coming in from the sea, slate grey this February weekend with foamy rollers swishing the shingle, two stubby piers jut out over the water.  One is alive with the sounds and smells of the seaside, the buzz and jingle of the arcades, the organ music of the carousel, the screams and shrieks of those riding the improbably tiny, narrow-gauge roller coaster situated at the very end of the pier (and where better to site a metal structure that has to be perfectly safe and is daily subjected to stresses and strains than in an environment conducive to rust!), and the scent of doughnuts and chips.  The other pier looks like an X Ray of a pier, a pier fossil, a ruin of twisted metal slowly falling into the sea and, above all, a picturesque counterpoint to the colour of its companion.

Coming inland, past the boys on their jet skis who circle and spurt with speed whilst the pierside audience look on and think 'you know what would make that more fun?  Lances!', past the place wherein sunnier days boys leap from the sea wall into the foamy waves, like  a wannabe Acapulco cliff diver, but with better access to chips, to the famous pebbly beach.

Sitting on Brighton beach is the very definition of uncomfortable.  When you go for a day at the beach you don't bring a towel, you bring a mattress.  And yet it has its charms.  You can get sand at the builders' merchant, beaches are a little harder to come by.

“Reaching the water he swings the bucket back”

Crunching towards the waves like a shy and determined Reggie Perrin is a man with a white bucket and an attendant cloud of increasingly excited gulls.  This is the man from the seafood restaurant on the front who has decided to get rid of his fish scraps in a way that does not pollute his bin nor tax the refuse men.  Reaching the water he swings the bucket back and forth and throws a stream of guts and heads and wobbly bits that not even the great British public would eat no matter how fried and none of it hits the water.  Instead, it is engulfed by a dense cloud of gulls who take the fish from the very air.

Inshore from the beach is the boardwalk.  The residents of Brighton are by far the most wheeled population on the planet.  In-line skaters weave in and out of kids and adults on scooters and pensioners riding mobility chariots.  It's rare to be or see a pedestrian although if you do, they will most likely be eating chips or drinking coffee.  Back from the boardwalk a little are the little shops, arches containing galleries selling views of Brighton, or cafes doing the most wondrous whitebait.  I ate mine sat in the winter sunshine listening to the happy (?) shrieks from the pier and unmolested by the satiated gulls.

“it’s a long way down to those pebbles”

There were kids setting up little cones and weaving their way in and out of them on their skates while filming one another in the hope of Youhootube fame and despite the month there were a quartet of hardy homosexualists playing volleyball on a court of presumably imported sand.  Near the ruined pier a tightrope walker who was either a trainee or who had no head for heights was practicing on a cable he had strung up about four inches above the beach.  Even so, it's a long way down to those pebbles.

A seafront road separates the beach from Brighton's seafront hotels.  With a little bit of clever marketing I am sure that Brighton's traffic could become an attraction in itself, unless you are stuck in it.  Actually it's not so much the traffic as the parking, but everyone seems to acknowledge this and accept that any trip to Brighton will involve an hour queuing to get into a car park and an hour to get out.  The benefit is that you can only get in when the is a space, so there is none of that endlessly circling like an increasingly irritated shark looking for a space.  There is a space, you just have to find it.  Unless you wish to start entertaining paranoid fantasies about the whole thing being a conspiracy to put you off your whitebait.

By the way, don't just join any queue thinking the bloke in front knows what he is doing.  I did this initially, waiting behind a car that was parked in front of a closed gate to a car park (the gates rattle up and down to control parking, obviously barriers are not a sufficient disincentive to a determined visitor) and noticed that cars lined up behind me.  Had the bloke in front found a secret car park...no, he'd found a closed car park entrance.  Still, only took me ten minutes to realise.

Lining the seafront are Brighton's hotels.  Grand in the most part and, in the case of one, The Grand.  I stayed in the Thistle and had possibly the best receptionist experience in a chain hotel ever.

God alone knows what the staff are on that allow them to put up with testy English tourists, I suspect the hotel's policy is that they recruit from places with terrifying human rights records, and the staff think that anything short of being shot for sneezing or something is basically a hug.  Certainly the team on the desk were exceptionally charming.  Forgot your toothbrush? Here's one.  Payment?  Er, no, it's a little plastic toothbrush, it's free to guests.  This is not Ryanair.

And the breakfast was magnificent.  What it was, I can't quite recall, but it's taken in a room with a panoramic view of the sea arriving on the beach on a brisk February morning.  Bracing, and so much better enjoyed in the warm with tea and toast and quite possibly a kipper.

Lurking behind the hotels are The Lanes.  In any other city the narrow maze of streets and shops might be slightly off putting.  Here, they are, well, fabulous.  The Lanes are renowned for their antique and jewellery and antique jewellery shops and in the twinkly interiors you can see young couples pondering important rings and things.  Of course, buying an engagement ring is a tricky thing and is, I consider, best done alone.  Certainly it was quite an interesting tableau that featured in the interior of one shop, where a chap was obviously bargaining hard with the proprietor while his girlfriend stood beside him with a look that communicated 'I never knew that Rodney was this cheap.  I hope to leave this shop with a ring and a fiancée, but I love and want that ring and if it comes to a choice of one or the other, adios Rod'.

Other shops sell many things that you did not know you needed until you saw them, mostly colourful and twinkling and priced at the artisan end of the market.  Away from The Lanes are other, grooves shops, including the fabulous 'Vegetarian Shoes' which presumably sells plastic footware but, this being Brighton, is fabulous and not remotely sweatily squeaky.  Other shops sell essentials for the bohemian inhabitants of Fabulous-on-Sea and look not unlike Panto supply stores.

Because Brighton is bohemian.  In Brighton, even the beggars have a certain something.  A handful of my change, after meeting one of them on the pavement.  The poor lady was in such a state trying to explain that she wasn't a drug addict that I wanted to say 'no, no, spend it on crack, who am I to judge'.

Faced with a bewildering array of independent cafes and food places, we settled on Jamie's, because you know where you are with a load of cured meat served on a plank.

“Brighton’s crowning glory is the Pavillion”

In the winter sunshine, Brighton's crowning glory is the Pavilion.  Domes and minarets soar over the streets and the Ottoman vibe is only slightly offset by the ice skating rink in the garden.  It's somehow fitting to see something quite so out of place here, among the Victorian shops and cobbled streets, minutes from candy floss and gulls, standing gleaming in winter sunshine against a flawless blue sky and a musical backdrop of an actually decent busker on a guitar, as if anything less would be unacceptable.

This is a town very much aware of its own status, which works hard at maintaining the facade of fabulousness and where even the faded grandure can pass itself of as antique and shabby chic.  It's also, without a doubt, the place where the dirty weekend has almost attained heritage status and hence respectability.

But mostly, it's just fabulous.