Postcard from Norfolk – Holme-Next-The-Sea - night of the otter

Lying in bed, in the dark, sensations, and fears, are somewhat magnified. As once wisely stated by Bill Watterson, night time is dark to allow you to worry without distraction. My particular concern last night was that the cottage was going to blow over. While the wind did not quite howl and shriek like a banshee (I understand Irish cottages have the monopoly on that) it did moan like a sulky teen, and there was the occasional high pitch whine as a gust picked at the vents in the double glazing.

I was wondering for a few moments if this was the Norfolk version of the end of the world. This is an area famous for flooding and a stiff onshore breeze combined with a high tide can be trouble. Luckily, despite the darkness and the holiday quantities of wine I had taken on board, I was able to make the connection between the view directly out to sea, the exposed position and all of the bloody wind farms dotted around the horizon and realise that this was, in fact, situation normal.

The only excitement came when, from the bathroom, came a noise exactly like little mouse claws scrabbling on the sides of the bath. Oh no! Scrabble scrabble! Upgrade from mouse to rat. Scrabble SCRABBLE! Crikey, sounds like an otter. SCRABBLE SCRABBLE! Badger, there's a badger in the bath! I sprang into action, ready to set to with a brush, mop or TB, whatever it is that badgers are intimidated by.

Putting on the light convinced that something was in the bath, I was surprised to see it empty. Oh no! The badger is out! Then rain-pitter pattering against the velux window with, in my defence, exactly the sound of a scrabbling rodent, solved the mystery. All that remained was to head back to bed and wait for my heart rate to return to normal. This took until dawn.

The next day was ideal for a stroll round the village. Holme qualifies as a village because it has the trinity of village requirements, pub, post box and telephone box. Oh, and a church.

The church was in fact rather lively, it was reached by walking past the pub's garden, where the winds of last night had redistributed the gaily coloured plastic patio furniture on the green grass in quite an attractive fashion.


We were all set to take a look inside the church when the Wedding March struck up, and then the bells began to peal, and then the bride and groom exited the church! It was a fabulous day for a wedding and everyone looked very pleased and excited, just as wedding parties should.


Wandering along the lane, we heard behind us the distant buzz of a scooter, turning, we were confronted by the vicar astride his moped, crash helmet on and cassocks billowing as he sped past at a mighty twenty miles an hour. From the look of expectant determination on his face one can conclude that nothing gives a priest a thirst quite like a wedding.

Looping back to take a look at the now empty and rather gorgeous church, I hit upon a realisation - if you are going to get married, make sure you do it at Harvest Festival time, because the church looks fabulous. As long as you don't mind the odd vegetable wound into the flower arrangements, you won't have to worry about anything apart from bouquet and buttonholes, and if you make sure your florist knows to weave some barley into the arrangements, you'll co-ordinate beautifully and save yourself a fortune.

If you do need fruit, it's available from many of the roadside stalls that line the roads in the village. Many of them have little roofs to keep the worst of the elements off and remind one a little of those roadside shrines that one sees in Greece, except they lean less to candles and rather more to honesty boxes made of Tupperware and cox's pippins in plastic bags.

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.