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 – Cley-Next-The-Sea and Holt

Cley-Next-The-Sea is a small, charming village sitting on salt marshes on the coast. It's home to some locals, a pub, a pottery, a smoke house, an art gallery, a remarkably overpriced deli, a windmill and a bookshop with an owner who is a registered pervert. It's very popular with bird watchers, because the shingle beach and marshes are very popular with birds. Both flock to the village.

It's also the village I normally stay in when I'm in Norfolk, so it was odd to return as a visitor rather than a resident. Parking up at the village hall, it was good to see that the Scottish country dancing was still going. Scottish country dancing is to villages in England what salsa classes are to the cities, something that combines exercise and movement to music and has that exotic touch of foreign glamour and danger.

It was odd to park up at the village hall rather than just continue on to our usual cottage and there was an urge to see what interlopers were staying there (and possibly spend a relaxing few minutes chopping wood. There's nothing like chopping wood to relax you and relieve stress. If ever I get round to opening my man-spa, it will have a wood chopping room), and demand tea...and explain that one builds the fire just so, and pokes it there, there and the for maximum satisfaction.

If one has a lot of money to invest, one can visit the gallery. If one has an awful lot of money, one can visit the deli and discuss the purchase of a loaf of bread or, if your occupation is 'oligarch', open negotiations on a pork pie. But I always head to the pottery shop 'Made in Cley'. Is this the only example of a middle-class shop name pun? Such puns are normally encountered with hair salons, where a stylist running a business on the first floor of a parade of shops might call their store 'a cut above' and consider it Wildeian. I suppose in comparison to somebody called 'Carol' calling their place 'Carol's', it is. And it made me titter. Then again, so does 'a cut above'.

The place sells some pretty stuff, and some pretty ugly stuff. The thing about pottery is that for a lot of people, it mans 'traditional'. And 'traditional' means something looking like it has been dug up on an excavation of a monastery, and currently sitting on a table awaiting cleaning by a student with a toothbrush.

I bought a couple of goblets that did not look as though they had ever been used in a monastery, but might have spent some time in an inn in Middle Earth. They are from the light blue and white school of colouring, rather than ecclesiastical dark brown covered in privvy clay, with the three bands of blue reflecting the sky, sea and landscape that makes up any Norfolk horizon.

All that shopping works up a thirst. Recommended is 'The Feathers' in Holt. This traditional in sprawls across a number of levels and offers that most traditional, and least common, of English pub services - a warm welcome. Folk suck down pints or a coffee with equal pleasure. There is always somebody eating a bowl of hot chips and, most traditional of all, there is free wi-fi. I'm not sure if it's the pub's own wi-fi, because the pub is situated on the high street and backs onto a courtyard with lots of little businesses meaning that when you open your settings function to detect wi-fi options, you are presented with half a dozen options. Just go for the one with no password and away you go. 'Good beer, good food, good connectivity' as they say.

Finished the day with afternoon tea at Morston Hall. One has to book ahead and I was wondering just how much trouble it can be to arrange a pot of tea, an egg sandwich and a scone until afternoon tea was brought to our table and realised there was a little more to it than that. On a triple-decker cake stand the top plate contained the triple-decker sandwiches, the middle plate the tea cakes and scones (separate plate for jam, cream, butter, defribulator and so on) and the bottom plate the tarts and indigestion remedies.


The afternoon tea was something special. Morston Hall was lovely, and very posh - when you turn on the tap in the gent's loo a blue light shines out of the tap illuminating the water and your hand - to think that all these years I have been washing my hands without the benefit of a blue light playing on my fingers. The only issue is that the average age of the clientele can only be determined by carbon dating. There are other places to go with a younger, (i.e. middle aged) customer base, and one can't help but thinking that such places (like the Flying Kiwi chain) are more likely to do adventurous things with oysters...although not in a bad way.

Norfolk notes - Holt

Holt is a pretty Georgian town about ten minutes drive inland. It's got a vet, which was useful if you want to spend eighty quid on eye drops for your dog because the stupid hound decides to stick it's face in muddy puddles. It's got a nice car park where you can wait for the AA man because you have picked up a flat tyre on your rental and changing the tyre on one of these things is a job for the professionals. It's got what is probably the worst coffee shop in the world, and I'm staggered it's still in business. It's got some pretty shops, like the furniture shop with the resident greyhound, Basil, and the Christmas shop open all year round.

Its also got a proper gentleman's outfitter. The small shop is a proper Aladdin's cave of outdoor gear, everything from the sort of traditional tweed jackets that are hedge proof and probably bomb proof, to the latest Gore Tex anorak type thing that would see you safely up and down a Hymalaya, or if necessary to the pub, as occasion demands. Just looking at all that gear makes one want to tog up and go and slaughter wildlife.

Postcard from Norfolk – Potato vodka

In the small, charming, Georgian town of Holt, where there is one posh shop for every 0.7 people, there’s a fabulous grocers. It sells all sorts of stuff. If you do your weekly food shop in a supermarket, then you are probably exposed to a limited range of stuff, because supermarkets buy food in huge, American-sized portion amounts and so are able to offer you a trolly load of crisps for a fiver because they have aisles full of crisps. But if you look closely, you’ll see that there are only three or four varieties of crisp, but a hell of a lot of packets and, hey, they are crisps, so who cares.

Passing the shop window I see a familiar logo on an unfamiliar product. It’s the Tyrrells logo. Tyrrells are a Herefordshire based crisp company that recently became a bit famous because they refused to let Tesco stock their product, reportedly because they did not like the way Tesco treated small farmers and wanted nothing to do with the company, but I suspect in reality because they did not want the sort of loon faced chavs who listlessly chew crisps in an open mouthed, slack-jawed ruminating manner before throwing the packet away onto the street to be eating their product when they do so. And very good crisps they make too.

This time, the logo was on a bottle of clear spirit. Ah ha, either they’ve gone into producing water, of that’s potato vodka.

Running into the shop I accosted the man behind the counter and asked if it was made by the self same sorts that made the crisps. He believed so. What was the vodka like, had he tried it? Indeed he had, it was smooth and creamy. Well, I opined like a true barbarian, if it’s half as good as their crisps, I’d be a happy man.

Doing a good job of trying to conceal his horror that anyone would pollute their palate with crisps when they could be marinating it in vodka, he sold me a bottle.

Like many bottles of spirits bought on holiday, this one went into the cupboard and probably would have stayed there with the other yellow, green and red concoctions bought in a moment of madness abroad that makes you think you can recreate the magic of a foreign place simply through alcohol, when the truth is you need alcohol served from a vastly overpriced mini-bar to really achieve the effect, or when you eventually get drunk enough for a traffic light themed drinking game. However, one evening I remembered it and poured myself a shot-glass full. Hummn, it was indeed smooth, and creamy. But what it was most of all was a glass of transparent spirit made from whatever they have left over when they have finished making the crisps. Gasping and shuddering, I followed up with a glass of water.

Okay, I wonder what it adds to a coke? What it added was alcohol, which is probably not what the people who invented coke had in mind when they innocently blended cocaine, sugar and caffeine, no, they wanted a stimulating drink, 110% global market share and the heads of those bastards at Pepsi on a spike at the factory gates.

All was going well until, bored one evening, I decided to enhance the film I was watching through the simple addition of alcohol. It must have been a very bad film or a very good vodka and coke, or several very good vodkas and cokes because the next morning the bottle was more or less empty and I was convinced that the cultivation of the potatoes, the setting up of the crisp company as some sort of front, the distilling of the vodka, the bottling and the placing of the bottle strategically in the window of the shop I was passing was all simply an elaborate plot to kill me with hangover.

A couple of days and a lot of paracetamol later I resolved to avoid the stuff in future. Some drinks are simply to be avoided and anything that is potato based and probably made in a tin bath has to be near the top of the list, right up there with the lemoncello my mother-in-law makes, from a recipe she has on a tea towel she bought on holiday in Sorrento!

Still, if they bring out a prawn cocktail flavoured liqueur version, I could be tempted.